Fractional HSEQ Advisor

Most manufacturers between £10m and £100m turnover sit in an awkward gap. Too big for the owner to keep carrying safety and quality in his head. Too small to justify a full-time HSEQ manager on £65,000 plus car, pension and NI.

So the work gets spread around. The ops manager picks up the risk assessments. Someone in the office keeps the training matrix. The quality system belongs to whoever last passed an audit. It holds together until it doesn't. Then a surveillance visit, an HSE inspection, a serious near-miss or a customer audit from a new OEM client shows you exactly where the gaps are.

A fractional HSEQ advisor closes that gap. You get a named, qualified person covering health and safety, quality and environment across your business, for a fixed monthly fee, on an agreed number of days.

Some people search for this as an outsourced health and safety manager, a retained H&S adviser or a part-time HSEQ consultant. Same arrangement, different label.

What a fractional advisor actually does

Not a helpline. Not an annual visit that produces a report nobody reads. Someone who knows your site, your people and your systems, and who turns up.

A typical month covers:

On-site presence. Walking the floor, talking to supervisors, seeing what is actually happening rather than what the paperwork claims.
The management system. Keeping ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001 documentation current, running the internal audit programme, and closing out non-conformances instead of logging them.
Risk assessments and method statements. Reviewed when the process changes, not when the auditor is due. See risk assessment and compliance.
Incident and near-miss handling. Investigation, root cause, and corrective actions that get followed through to closure.
Legal register and compliance monitoring. Legislation moves. Someone has to notice.
Training. Identifying gaps, delivering toolbox talks and short awareness sessions, and keeping the training matrix honest.
Audit support. Preparing for certification bodies and customer audits, and being in the room on the day.
Board-level reporting. A one-page picture of where you stand, in language a finance director can act on.

The value is continuity. The same person, month after month, who already knows why the guarding on line three was changed in March and what it cost you.

Who it's for

This works well for:

Manufacturers, logistics operators and industrial engineering firms with 50 to 500 staff
Businesses maintaining one or more ISO certifications, or working towards the first one
Companies that have lost an HSEQ manager and don't want to rush the replacement
Firms winning larger contracts where the customer's compliance expectations have jumped a level
Sites where the responsible person holds the job title but not the time or the qualification

It doesn't suit everyone. If you already have a competent internal HSEQ team and need an extra pair of hands on a specific project, buy days ad hoc instead. It will cost you less.

The four retainer levels

Four levels. Same advisor, same standards throughout. What changes is how much time you get and how far into the business we go.

Anchor — £250 per month. A compliance safety net. Remote support, document reviews, one quarterly site visit, and a named person who already knows your business when you call. Suited to smaller sites with a competent internal contact who occasionally needs backup.

Active — £500 per month. Monthly site visit plus ongoing remote support. Internal audit programme, risk assessment reviews, incident support and training matrix maintenance. The level most single-site manufacturers settle on.

Embedded — £1,050 per month. Two days a month on site. Full ownership of the management system, internal audits, legal register, contractor management, certification body liaison and quarterly board reporting. This is the genuine alternative to hiring.

Embedded Plus — £1,650 per month. Three to four days a month, or coverage across multiple sites. Everything in Embedded, plus improvement projects, cultural work with supervisors, and support for adding further standards to the system.

Extra days beyond your retainer are £400 to £600 depending on level. Non-retained ad-hoc work is £750 a day, which is one of the reasons the retainers make sense.

Fractional advisor versus hiring in-house

A competent HSEQ manager in the North West costs £45,000 to £60,000 in salary. Add employer's NI, pension, holiday cover, CPD and professional membership, a vehicle or mileage, recruitment fees, and the cost of the role sitting empty while you look. The fully loaded figure lands between £60,000 and £80,000 a year. Per discipline.

Embedded is £12,600 a year, with one advisor covering health and safety, quality and environment.

The comparison isn't only financial. A single in-house manager rarely has real depth across all three disciplines. Most come from a safety background and pick up 9001 on the job, or come from quality and are uncomfortable with occupational health. You also carry the risk of a three-month vacancy, which has a habit of coinciding with your surveillance audit.

What you give up is daily presence. An in-house manager is there every day; a fractional advisor is there on agreed days and reachable in between. For most businesses in this size bracket that trade is worth making. But be honest about whether your site needs someone on it every day. If it does, we will say so, and we would rather help you recruit than sell you a retainer that doesn't fit.

What is not included

Straight answers now, so nothing surprises you in month three.

Certification itself. We prepare you and support the audit. The certificate comes from an accredited body such as BSI, NQA or QMS. We don't certify, and we have no stake in the body that does.
Out-of-hours emergency attendance sits outside the standard retainer. It can be arranged separately.
Accredited training delivery such as IOSH, NEBOSH and first aid is quoted on its own. In-house toolbox talks and short awareness sessions are included from Active upwards.
Occupational health surveillance, air monitoring, LEV testing and noise assessment are specialist services. We scope them, brief the provider and review the results, but the testing is subcontracted.
Legal representation. If you are facing enforcement action you need a solicitor. We work alongside them, not instead of them.

Your legal duties stay with you

Worth saying plainly. Appointing an external advisor does not transfer your duties under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 or the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. Those sit with the employer, and with directors personally. Regulation 7 requires you to appoint one or more competent persons to help you comply, and that is the role being filled here. More on that in our competent person guidance.

How a retainer starts

Every retainer opens with a Compliance Health Check. Three to five days, fixed fee, and it gives both sides a factual baseline: what is in place, what is missing, what is exposed, and what the first ninety days should deal with. Without it we would be guessing at scope and you would be paying for the guess.

Scope and level agreed from the health check findings rather than a template.
Twelve-week plan setting out what gets fixed, in what order, and who owns each item on your side.
Retainer begins. Fixed monthly fee, agreed days, six-month initial term.
Quarterly review against the plan, with scope adjusted up or down as the business changes.

After the first six months the retainer rolls with three months' notice. Long enough to make real progress, short enough that you are not stuck if it isn't working.

Where we work

Greater Manchester and the North West as standard: Manchester, Bolton, Bury, Stockport, Rochdale, Oldham, Preston, Blackburn, Warrington and Altrincham. See all areas we cover. Retainers elsewhere in the UK are available where the travel makes sense for both sides.

If you are certifying to more than one standard, it is usually cheaper to run them as a single integrated management system than three separate ones, and a retainer is how that gets maintained.

Worth a conversation

If you are weighing a hire against a retainer, or you have just lost your HSEQ manager and need cover while you decide, twenty minutes on the phone will tell you whether this fits. No pitch deck.

Book a call · What a Compliance Health Check covers · ISO consultancy