Most people hear "lone working" and think of someone working from home. But a gas engineer visiting a domestic property at 7am, a painter on a scaffold with nobody else on site, a warehouse operative locking up after everyone else has gone — these are all lone workers. So is an account manager doing a solo client visit, or a cleaning operative starting work before the office is staffed.
Lone working is widespread across UK industry, and the legal duty to manage it is clear, even though there is no standalone lone working regulation. Here is what employers need to understand, and what a lone working risk assessment should actually cover.
What Counts as Lone Working?
The Health and Safety Executive defines a lone worker as someone who "works by themselves without close or direct supervision". That definition is broader than most employers realise.
It includes:
- Trades workers visiting customer premises alone (gas engineers, electricians, plumbers, heating engineers, painters)
- Delivery drivers
- Employees working outside normal hours: early mornings, evenings, weekends, bank holidays
- Staff working in isolated or remote locations
- Workers in buildings that are otherwise unoccupied
- Employees on home visits or client-facing site visits where no colleague is present
The common thread is not location. It is the absence of someone nearby who can help if something goes wrong.
The Legal Framework: No Lone Working Law, but the Duty Still Applies
There is no specific lone working regulation in UK law. That does not mean employers have no obligations.
Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (HASAWA): Section 2 places a general duty on every employer to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety, and welfare of all employees. That duty applies fully to workers operating alone. In fact, the risks are often elevated without a colleague nearby.
Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (MHSWR): Regulation 3 requires every employer to make a suitable and sufficient risk assessment of the risks to their employees. Lone workers must be included in that assessment because they face distinct hazards that workers in groups do not.
The HSE is explicit on this point: employers must consider whether lone working is appropriate for a given task and, if it is permitted, put controls in place that are proportionate to the risk. The absence of a specific lone worker law does not create a gap. The general duty fills it, and enforcement follows from HASAWA and the MHSWR.
What a Lone Working Risk Assessment Must Cover
A suitable lone worker risk assessment should work through the following areas:
1. Who Is Lone Working, and When?
Map out every role in your business where lone working occurs, including irregular or occasional instances: out-of-hours callouts, solo travel to client sites, working late on premises that empty out. Many businesses have significantly more lone workers than they initially appreciate when they go through this exercise.
2. The Specific Hazards
For lone workers, the main hazard categories are:
Accidents and injuries. If someone is hurt and no colleague is present, emergency response time is longer. A slip, fall, or injury from tools or equipment becomes significantly more serious when there is nobody to raise the alarm or provide immediate assistance.
Medical emergencies. Pre-existing health conditions — diabetes, epilepsy, cardiac conditions — carry higher risk when the individual is working alone. Lone workers with known health conditions should not routinely be assigned high-risk solo tasks without specific medical assessment and support.
Violence and aggression. Workers who visit members of the public face a different risk profile from those in a supervised workplace. Gas engineers, care workers, inspection staff, and field agents are all potentially exposed. Client-facing lone working requires specific procedures, not just a general policy statement.
Communication failure. Isolated sites, basement plant rooms, rural locations, and some residential properties have unreliable mobile coverage. If the worker cannot be reached and cannot raise help, the absence of communication is itself the hazard.
Mental health and wellbeing. Sustained isolation, the pressure of dealing with problems without peer support, and the stress of being the only person responsible for decisions can affect mental health over time. This is particularly relevant where lone working has become the default rather than the exception.
3. Existing Controls and Whether They Are Sufficient
Review what you already have in place and assess whether it adequately addresses the elevated risks that lone working creates, specifically, not just your general risk controls.
Worked Example: A Gas Engineer on Domestic Callouts
A gas engineer working for a smaller business is a good illustration of how lone working risk plays out in practice.
The situation: A single engineer visiting domestic properties throughout the day, carrying out boiler servicing, installations, and fault finding. Travelling alone between jobs. Working in both occupied and unoccupied properties. Handling gas equipment.
Key hazards identified:
- Injury from gas equipment, tools, or manual handling, with no immediate assistance available
- Medical emergency from either the engineer or an occupant
- Lone entry to unfamiliar properties and potential for customer aggression
- Communication failure in basement plant rooms or rural locations with poor mobile signal
- Carbon monoxide exposure in confined or poorly ventilated spaces
Controls needed:
- A check-in and check-out system: the engineer confirms safe arrival and safe departure at each job
- Central record of job sheets so the engineer's location is always known
- A defined escalation protocol: if a check-in is missed by a set time, specific steps are taken by a named person
- A panic or SOS function on the engineer's device for high-risk properties
- Known customer aggression flagged in the job management system before dispatch, not after arrival
- Lone working procedures included in onboarding documentation and refreshed annually
That last point about customer history is regularly missed. If a customer has previously been difficult or aggressive, that information needs to reach the engineer before the job. The risk management happens before they get there.
Practical Control Measures
Across most lone working scenarios, these are the core controls:
Check-in systems. A consistent process where the worker confirms they have arrived, are safe, and have departed. This can be a phone call, text message, or app-based system. Whatever the method, it must have a defined escalation trigger: what happens, and who acts, if a check-in is missed.
Communication devices. Confirm workers have a working phone or radio, and that the locations they visit have adequate signal. Where signal is unreliable, satellite communication devices are worth considering for high-risk lone working scenarios.
Emergency procedures. Workers must know what to do in an emergency before the emergency happens: who to call, what information to provide, how the response will unfold. This must cover medical emergencies, accidents, and incidents of aggression separately.
Pre-work information. Workers should know what they are going into before they arrive. Known site hazards, access issues, relevant customer history, or environmental conditions should be communicated in advance, not discovered on arrival.
Supervision and contact. Regular scheduled contact, not just reactive contact when something goes wrong, keeps communication habits established and helps identify developing problems before they escalate.
Where Many Businesses Fall Short
The most common failure with lone working is having a check-in procedure that exists on paper but nobody actually follows. A procedure that has never been embedded into daily operations is not a control measure. If a worker does not check in and nobody notices for three hours, the system has failed, regardless of what is written in the document.
The second most common failure is treating all lone and home working as the same risk profile. An employee at home on a video call is not the same situation as an engineer in a basement plant room. The assessment must reflect actual risk, not a blanket policy that equates all non-office working.
Practical Steps for Smaller Businesses
You do not need a complex system to manage lone working safely, but you do need a consistent one:
- Identify every role and scenario in your business where lone working occurs, including irregular instances.
- Carry out a specific lone working risk assessment for each type of lone working, not one generic document.
- Establish a check-in and check-out process, make sure every relevant employee knows it, and make sure someone is designated to act if a check-in is missed.
- Define what happens when a check-in is not received: who acts, what steps they take, and in what timeframe.
- Review the assessment when roles, working patterns, locations, or personnel change.
Need Support?
SafeCompli works with businesses across the UK to build lone working risk assessments that reflect how the business actually operates, not generic documents that gather dust. If you need support putting this in place, visit www.safecompli.co.uk.