Health & Safety and ISO Consultants in Preston & Lancashire
45 minutes from Bury
Why Preston businesses call us
Lancashire's manufacturing base is deep and, in aerospace and defence particularly, held to a standard that leaves no room for an informal approach. Firms in those supply chains call us because their customer's requirements have moved, or because they're bidding for work that demands certification they don't yet hold.
Outside the aerospace cluster the triggers are the familiar ones - an HSE visit, an insurance renewal, an incident, or a competent person who's left. Preston sits at the junction of the M6, M55, M61 and M65, which means a lot of distribution and logistics operations too, with their own well-defined set of problems.
Competent person cover
Named Reg 7 appointment, from £200/mo.
Health & safety in Preston
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 Preston
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 Preston
Lancashire runs one of Europe's largest aerospace clusters, with more than 80,000 people in manufacturing county-wide. Around Preston that means aerospace and defence, commercial vehicle manufacturing, building products, food production and fabricated metal, spread across Red Scar at M6 J31A, Walton Summit and Bamber Bridge at the M6/M61/M65 intersection, and Lancashire Business Park at Leyland.
Aerospace and defence supply chains bring documentation, traceability and competence requirements set by the customer rather than the regulator - and audits that go considerably deeper than a certification body's. Vehicle and heavy manufacturing brings LOLER, machinery guarding, noise and hand-arm vibration. Building products and fabrication bring COSHH, welding fume and manual handling. Distribution brings workplace transport and racking.
We work across Lancashire from Preston, and a good deal of our environmental and quality work sits in exactly these supply chains.
Town FAQs
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On site. Preston is forty-five minutes up the M61 and M6, and we cover central Lancashire - Red Scar at M6 J31A, Walton Summit and Bamber Bridge at the M6/M61/M65 intersection, and Lancashire Business Park at Leyland.
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Yes, and it's some of the most demanding compliance work there is. Aerospace and defence customer audits go well beyond certification requirements - traceability, competence evidence, change control and special processes. We prepare for them and sit in on the day where that helps.
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It's factored into the quote up front rather than added afterwards, so the monthly figure you agree is the figure you pay. For Lancashire clients that usually means slightly fewer, longer site days rather than a travel surcharge - which tends to work better for both sides anyway.
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The county. Preston sits at the junction of the M6, M55, M61 and M65, which makes most of Lancashire reachable from one base - Blackburn, Darwen, Leyland, Chorley and the coast included. Tell us where you are and we'll be straight about whether the travel makes sense.
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Retainers from £200 a month to £1,650 depending on days and number of sites, with most single-site manufacturers at £500 or £1,050. A Compliance Health Check is £1,200 to £2,000 fixed. Ad-hoc work outside a retainer is £450 a day.
Nearby Areas
Blackburn · Bolton · Manchester · Bury
Tell us what prompted the search - a tender, an audit, an incident, a resignation.