A blog for Equestrian (and other) businesses.
If you are a child of the 70s or 80s then you probably think of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) as the government group who takes all the fun out of life. The changing standards to ensure you are wearing the right hat or body protector, to ensuring that you don’t stand on a chair on a table to reach the light bulb, but rather a steady ladder. Health and Safety Executive are there to protect us from dangerous practice.
In the UK, as an employer, you are required to engage with the HSE to ensure that even if employees are family, that measures in place to protect yourself as an equestrian business owner. This includes your staff including but not limited to instructors, grooms, visiting professionals such as farriers, equine dentists and vets. It even includes the people who deliver your feed, bedding, and other sundries. This will also include contactors and self-employed people. You have a legal, and moral, requirement to protect them. Basically, anyone who participates in or visits your property or business needs to be kept safe from any hazards.
What is an Appointed Person?
Every business is required to have an appointed person. This doesn’t need to be the business owner, it could be a yard, or office manager, or senior instructor for example. This person will help you manage the health and safety on your yard. Keep you up to date with First Aid kit content, fire extinguishers, broken fences, cracked pathways etc. They will help you with your risk assessment.
What are Risk Assessments?
A risk assessment is best done with a varied team, as they will perceive dangers differently to you. Age, gender, experience, health will all influence these interpretations. The idea of a risk assessment is to note down (usually in a table form)
- Identify the hazard, (in as much detail as possible);
- Estimate how likely it is to happen;
- Assess the impact on people, horses, and property if it does happen.
Then score each section and that gives you a risk score. Once you have the score you will need to consider what you need to put in place to mitigate or put in procedures or practices to minimise the risk.
A risk assessment will be referred back to, if your insurance company or local authority have concerns. You should share this with new staff in their induction, and remind existing staff by providing the document and putting up notices, of any specific measures that you think is required.
Below is an example of a typical risk assessment:
| Hazard | Likelihood | Impact | Residual risk | Mitigation |
| Slip on Yard | 2 | 4 | 8 | Brief staff of risk. Maintain yard surface. Repairing damage as quickly as possible. Grit yard surface in winter months. Remind staff and visitors not to run on the yard. Remind staff to report slips, trips, and falls for accident book. Apply appropriate First Aid where required. Report to RIDDOR, Local Authority, parents where required. |
What is a Health and Safety Policy?
Having a plan and sticking to it, is possibly the biggest thing you can do to minimise the risk of having to call RIDDOR (a different level of reporting – find out more about this in our blog here. A Health and Safety policy clearly sets out expectations, for both you and your staff leaving everyone aware of their roles and responsibilities.
What about Insurance for my Equestrian business?
Making sure that you have the right insurance for your equine business could save you a considerable amount of money. If you are employing staff, yard and or coaching staff, you will need employer’s liability, this will cover any illness, accident or loss or damage to property. You may also need public liability or private indemnity. A reputable insurance broker will help you identify the right insurance for your business.
The Law
In the UK, both criminal and civil law apply to the workplace health and safety. You must as an equine business owner ensure that you prevent, where is reasonably possible, your staff from harm. If you fail to do this, then the HSE and/or the Local Authority to pursue business owners for criminal action, and the person affected can pursue through civil action. Harm is defined as not only actual injury but also as the potential of harm in the form of either physical or mental health . (Link to blog)
Mainstreaming Health and Safety at Work (Information and Training)
1. Start from the beginning.
It is good practice to have an induction process for new staff. This needs to be backed up with a paper trail to show it has been delivered and understood with your staff. There are lots of assumed knowledge, on yards, especially when staff have worked there for a long time. Take half a day in your ‘off-season’ and refresh this knowledge. Ensure that you are all working from the same plan. This will ensure your staff feel confident of incident proceedure, and take the ‘faff or flap’ element from an incident. You’ll have more content and capable staff as a result!
2. Health and Safety Posters:
These can be the traditional ones ordered from the HSE or perhaps one of your staff have hidden graphic skills and make it more applicable to your team and activities. Sometimes an additional more eye-catching poster can be more powerful than the standard ones. So long as they don’t contradict the information and record all the same data, maybe there’s a different way of displaying the information.
3. Staff Consultations
Staff consultations are best done over a brew! Your team are fantastic, so get them together to talk about health and safety, and why not add in a few treats. Health and Safety has received a bad reputation in the past few decades, but it is there to ensure that you have mitigated as many risks as is reasonable to protect your staff and your business. Your staff might just know your business better than you do, especially if you aren’t on the yard every day. They may also have worries about practices or need a refresher in these.
4. Don’t file it and forget it!
All of your documents associated with managing risk, and Health and Safety are live documents and should be reviewed every six months and updated annually. They should not file it on that dusty shelf in the back office and forgotten about. If you have a serious incident, you will possibly need to show them as evidence to ensure that they are still fit for practice and have been regularly reviewed. Health and Safety is about protecting you, the equine business owner, but also your fantastic staff who keep your business running.
5. First Aid training for Horse Riders
Ensure that all your staff are appropriately trained in First Aid and that your kit is up to date and contains the appropriate first aid materials for your activities and venue. We regularly hold open courses with specific themes (i.e., forestry, paediatric and equestrian) across the UK, ideal when you are a small yard of two or three people. We also run private courses specifically for your yard. Private courses are best run with a mix of your staff. If you don’t quiet have enough staff to fill a course, why not club together with another yard or known riders in your area. For example, we occasionally train a mix of RDA volunteers, with staff from the riding school yard that ponies and arenas are rented from, along with any Liveries that wish to join on the same course.
To find out which first aid course is best for you check out our full range of courses here. (link)
We have also produced an equestrian specific Accident Book for horse riding establishments. You can view and buy it here.
Everyone on our courses receives a FREE digital first aid manual. We have a range of manuals relevant to the courses we teach – Outdoor, Equestrian, First Aid at Work, Paediatric and Sports. They are a great resource that you can download onto your phone or other device and have all that first aid knowledge at your fingertips. You can view them and buy them for less than £4 here.(link)
