Health & Safety and ISO Consultants in Oldham
35 minutes from Bury
Why Oldham businesses call us
Oldham has the highest share of manufacturing employment of any town we cover - around 12.5% of all jobs. What that means in practice is a lot of small and mid-sized firms doing precise, technical work with no dedicated health and safety resource, because the headcount has never quite justified it.
So the call usually comes when something external forces it. A customer audit. An insurance renewal. An incident. Or a firm winning work with a larger OEM and discovering that the compliance bar in that supply chain sits well above where they've been operating.
Competent person cover
Named Reg 7 appointment, from £200/mo.
Health & safety in Oldham
Risk assessments
Written from what your team actually does.
Audits & inspections
See what an HSE inspector will see, first.
Competent person cover Under Regulation 7 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 you have to appoint someone competent to help you meet your legal duties. That appointment has to be real rather than nominal - someone with the training, the experience, an understanding of your specific hazards, and the time and authority to actually do something about them. We take it formally: our name on your documentation, reasonable access between visits, sign-off on assessments and safe systems of work, and a written annual statement. Worth it when: nobody in-house holds the competence, or the person who did has left.
Risk assessments Most risk assessments fail the same test. Open the folder, read the document, walk onto the floor, and none of it matches. We build them from direct observation - watching the task being done rather than described, writing them at a reading level your operators actually use, and reviewing them with the supervisors who'll own them. Reviews are triggered by change, not by the calendar: a new machine, a new substance, a process modification, an incident. Worth it when: your assessments predate your current process, or nobody can remember who wrote them.
Audits and inspections Internal audits, contractor audits and pre-HSE reviews. The point is to see what an inspector will see before they see it, with findings prioritised by risk rather than listed alphabetically. Where you already hold ISO 45001, this doubles as your internal audit programme rather than being a separate exercise. Worth it when: a customer audit or surveillance visit is coming, or nobody independent has looked at the site in years.
Incident investigation Root cause analysis that goes past "the operator didn't follow the procedure" and finds the system failure underneath it. Corrective actions tracked to closure rather than logged and forgotten. And RIDDOR judgement calls made properly — including the ones where reporting isn't actually required and people assume it is. Worth it when: something has happened, or the same thing keeps happening.
Incident investigation
Root cause, tracked to closure.
ISO in Oldham
ISO 9001 - Quality Management
The most requested of the three, and usually the first one a customer names. It's about consistency: doing the same job the same way, catching problems before they reach the customer, and being able to show why. In practice that means process documentation that matches how the work is actually done, non-conformance handling that closes things out, supplier controls, and internal audits that find real issues rather than confirming everything is fine.
Worth it when: a customer or tender has made it a condition of supply, or you're losing margin to rework and can't pinpoint where.
ISO 14001 - Environmental Management
Environmental management built around your real aspects and impacts — waste streams, emissions, energy, water, and what happens to your product at end of life. The part most templated implementations get wrong is the legal register: a list of regulations that nobody maintains is worse than not having one, because it looks like control when it isn't. Done properly it also does double duty, since most of what an EcoVadis or customer sustainability assessment asks for already lives inside a working 14001 system.
Worth it when: customers are asking about your environmental credentials, you're bidding for public sector work, or waste and energy costs have become visible on the P&L.
ISO 45001 - Occupational Health and Safety
The health and safety standard, and the one that replaced OHSAS 18001 — if you still hold an 18001 certificate, it expired some years ago. Built on genuine hazard identification and risk control, with worker participation as a requirement rather than a nice-to-have, which is the clause most businesses underestimate. It's a certified management system that proves what good H&S practice should already be doing.
Worth it when: an insurer, a tier-one customer or an incident has put your safety arrangements under scrutiny, or you're already doing the work and want it recognised.
All three share the same core structure, so running them as one integrated system means one audit programme and one management review instead of three. More on our ISO consultancy → Here
The industries we know in Oldham
Oldham's current base is electronics and semiconductor manufacturing, food production, and precision instrumentation and industrial measurement, alongside a wide spread of light manufacturing and distribution across Hollinwood, Chadderton, Failsworth and the estates around Derker.
Precision and electronics manufacturing brings COSHH on process chemicals, machinery guarding on equipment that's often bespoke, and a documentation standard set by customers rather than regulators - the sites we see here are frequently already certified to 9001, 14001 or 45001 and need the system maintained rather than built. Food production brings the usual collision of hygiene and machinery. Light industrial and trade brings manual handling, workplace transport and contractor control.
Textiles and mechanical engineering built Oldham, but that's heritage now. The town's manufacturing today is smaller-scale, more technical and more export-facing than the history suggests.
Town FAQs
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On site. Oldham is thirty-five minutes via the M60 and we cover the borough - Hollinwood off J22, Chadderton, Failsworth and the estates around Derker. Monthly site days from Active upwards, quarterly on Anchor.
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No - maintaining a certified system is most of what we do. Internal audits, legal register updates, management review, surveillance preparation and closing out non-conformances properly. Plenty of Oldham manufacturers are already certified and simply need someone to own it rather than rebuild it.
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Yes, and bespoke equipment is where generic assessments fail hardest. PUWER doesn't care whether a machine came from a catalogue - it asks whether it's suitable, maintained, properly guarded and used by competent people. That means assessing the machine in front of us rather than matching it to a template.
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No. Below five employees you don't need your policy in writing, but every other duty applies from day one - including the competent person appointment. Smaller manufacturers are often our best fit, because the Anchor retainer gives them qualified cover at a fraction of the cost of a hire.
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From £200 a month for a named competent person with a quarterly visit, up to £1,650 for three to four days or multiple sites. Most single-site manufacturers sit at £500 or £1,050, and a Compliance Health Check is £1,200 to £2,000 fixed.
Nearby Areas
Rochdale · Manchester · Bury · Stockport
Tell us what prompted the search - a tender, an audit, an incident, a resignation.