RETAINED SUPPORT
Fractional HSEQ Advisor
One named person covering health and safety, quality and environment across your business. Fixed monthly fee, agreed days, six-month initial term.
£800–£1,950
per month, three levels
3
disciplines, one advisor
6 months
initial term, then three months' notice
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 £45,000 to £60,000 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 one hire actually gets you
A competent HSEQ manager costs £45,000 to £60,000 in salary, and closer to £68,000 once you've added employer's NI, pension, a vehicle, CPD and recruitment. That buys you one person.
One person is rarely strong across all three disciplines. Most come from a safety background and pick up ISO 9001 on the job. Some come from quality and are uncomfortable with occupational health. Very few have real environmental depth - aspects and impacts, permitting, waste duty of care - because until recently nobody was asking them to.
So what you actually buy is one specialism and two adequacies. That's fine until the adequacy is the bit that gets audited.
Health & Safety
Risk assessment, machinery and PUWER, COSHH, contractor control, incident investigation, ISO 45001.
Quality
Process control, non-conformance, supplier management, calibration, ISO 9001.
Environmental
Aspects and impacts, legal registers, waste duty of care, ISO 14001, customer sustainability questionnaires.
One advisor. All three. From £800 a month.
A typical month
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.
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.
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 same person, month after month, who already knows why the guarding on line three was changed in March - and what it cost you.”
The three retainer levels
Same advisor, same standards throughout. What changes is how much time you get and how far into the business we go.
Active QHSE
£800/mo
Quarterly site day
Internal audit programme across all three standards, risk assessment reviews, incident support and management review input. Where a certified business needs a competent hand on the system rather than a full-time one.
Embedded QHSE
£1,350/mo
1 day a month
Full ownership of the integrated management system. Three legal registers, corrective action closure, certification body liaison across 9001, 14001 and 45001, and quarterly board reporting. The genuine alternative to hiring.
Embedded Plus QHSE
£1,950/mo
2 days a month
Or coverage across multiple sites. Everything in Embedded, plus improvement projects, cultural work with supervisors, and support for adding further standards.
There is no entry-level tier here. Three management systems cannot be owned on two visits a year, so we do not pretend otherwise — safety-only cover starts at £250 a month on the Outsourced H&S Manager page.
Every level includes an annual Compliance Health Check across all three disciplines. Retained clients add days at £325 a half-day or £500 a day. Ad-hoc work outside a retainer is £750 a day, £850 for ISO audit work. All prices exclude VAT.
What's included at each level
| Active QHSE | Embedded QHSE | Embedded Plus QHSE | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Named advisor, remote support | ● | ● | ● |
| Document review | ● | ● | ● |
| Site days | Quarterly | 1 day a month | 2 days a month |
| Annual Compliance Health Check, all three disciplines | ● | ● | ● |
| Internal audit programme across 9001, 14001 and 45001 | ● | ● | ● |
| Risk assessment reviews | ● | ● | ● |
| Incident support | ● | ● | ● |
| Toolbox talks and awareness sessions | ● | ● | ● |
| Management review input | ● | ● | ● |
| Full management system ownership | – | ● | ● |
| Legal and environmental registers maintained | – | ● | ● |
| Corrective action and NCR closure | – | ● | ● |
| Contractor management | – | ● | ● |
| Certification body liaison, all three standards | – | ● | ● |
| Quarterly board reporting | – | ● | ● |
| Improvement projects | – | – | ● |
| Cultural work with supervisors | – | – | ● |
| Support for adding further standards | – | – | ● |
| Multi-site coverage | – | – | ● |
Who it's for
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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
AND WHERE IT DOESN’T FIT
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.
Versus hiring in-house
A fully loaded in-house HSEQ manager costs around £68,000 a year, against £16,200 for Embedded QHSE. We've set out that comparison properly - including the parts that don't favour us - on the outsourced health and safety manager page.
The financial case matters less here than the depth one. What you give up is daily presence; what you gain is someone genuinely current across all three disciplines rather than one. If your site needs someone on it every day, we'll say so, and we'd 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
IOSH, NEBOSH and first aid are quoted on their own. In-house toolbox talks and short awareness sessions are included from Active upwards.
Occupational health and monitoring
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
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 in our competent person guidance.
How a retainer starts
Every retainer opens with a Compliance Health Check. Without it we would be guessing at scope and you would be paying for the guess.
Compliance Health Check
Fixed fee. A factual baseline: what's in place, what's missing, what's exposed.
Scope agreed
Level set from the health check findings rather than a template.
Twelve-week plan
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.
Common questions.
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Covers health and safety, quality and environment across your business on agreed days each month - walking the floor, running the internal audit programme, keeping the management system and legal register current, handling incidents through to closure, preparing you for certification and customer audits, and reporting to your board in one page. The distinction from a consultant is ownership: nobody hands you a report and leaves.
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Mostly scope. An outsourced H&S manager covers safety. A fractional HSEQ advisor covers safety, quality and environment as one arrangement. If safety is the only gap you have, the H&S manager page is the better fit and usually the cheaper one.
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Active at £800 a month is where most single-site manufacturers settle. Embedded at £1,350 is the level that genuinely replaces a hire, and it's the one to look at if you've lost a manager or you're carrying more than one ISO certification.
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Yes, and it's reviewed quarterly against the plan by default. Scope moves up or down as the business does - a certification push might justify Embedded for six months and Active after it. The retainer runs six months initially, then rolls with three months' notice.
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Yes, and it's deliberate. Without a factual baseline we'd be guessing at scope and you'd be paying for the guess. It also gives you something useful whether or not you go on to a retainer - a scored position and a prioritised action plan you own either way.
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We prepare you for it and support the audit, but 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, which is worth knowing because not every consultancy can say it.
Worth a twenty-minute call
If you're weighing a hire against a retainer, or you've 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.
Where we work. Greater Manchester and the North West as standard: Manchester, Bolton, Bury, Stockport, Rochdale, Oldham, Preston, Blackburn, Warrington and Trafford. Appointments elsewhere in the UK where the travel works for both sides.