Health & Safety and ISO Consultants in Altrincham & Trafford
35 minutes from Bury
Why Trafford businesses call us
Trafford Park is the largest employment area in Greater Manchester — around 1,300 businesses and 35,000 people across 4.7 square miles — and the compliance pressure there comes from the top of the supply chain rather than from the regulator. Blue-chip customers with mature procurement functions ask for evidence, and they ask for it in a specific format.
Around Altrincham and Broadheath the picture is different: smaller trade, light industrial and distribution businesses where health and safety sits with whoever has the most patience for it, and where a single incident or an insurance renewal is usually what prompts the call.
Competent person cover
Named Reg 7 appointment, from £200/mo.
Health & safety in Trafford
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 Trafford
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 Trafford
Trafford Park was Europe's first planned industrial estate and it's still the densest concentration of industry in the region — logistics and advanced manufacturing side by side, with a rail freight terminal and motorway access at M60 J9, J10 and J11. Broadheath, out towards Altrincham, is a long-established trade and light industrial area with a genuine manufacturing heritage, now dominated by trade counter, builders' merchant and distribution occupiers.
Large-scale logistics brings workplace transport as the headline risk - vehicle and pedestrian segregation, racking integrity, loading bay design - plus contractor control and high agency turnover, which is where training records tend to fall apart. Advanced manufacturing brings machinery guarding, LOLER, LEV and noise. Trade counter and light industrial brings manual handling, working at height and the everyday risks that get overlooked precisely because they're everyday.
Town FAQs
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On site. Trafford is thirty-five minutes via the M60 and we cover the Park along with Broadheath and Altrincham. Monthly site days from Active upwards, quarterly on Anchor.
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The hazards change, the duties don't. Warehousing shifts the focus to workplace transport, vehicle and pedestrian segregation, racking integrity and loading bay design. It also tends to carry higher turnover, which makes induction quality and training records matter more than they do on a stable production line.
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By deciding up front who owns what, and writing it down. The agency handles general awareness; you handle site-specific induction, task training and supervision - and you retain the duty regardless of what the agency contract says. Most sites we see have the agreement in principle and no evidence of it in practice.
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Yes, and it's a common request in Trafford Park given the size of the customers operating there. Most of what a procurement function asks for already exists inside a working management system - the job is usually presentation rather than creation, which makes it faster than people expect.
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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 multi-site cover. Most single-site operations sit at £500 or £1,050, and a Compliance Health Check is £1,200 to £2,000 fixed.
Nearby Areas
Manchester · Stockport · Bolton · Bury
Tell us what prompted the search - a tender, an audit, an incident, a resignation.