Film, TV and broadcasting

What you should know:

• Health and safety legislation applies to all work activities in the UK, whether conducted by UK nationals or foreigners, even if they are not being paid.
• Legal duties under health and safety law cannot be delegated.

What you must do:

• Define responsibilities and duties
• Have a system for managing health and safety
• Assess and manage risks
• Regularly review the process and procedures for managing risk

Define responsibilities and duties

Employers are required to have a management system in place to control the risk to employees and others from their work. The industry uses large numbers of independent companies and freelancers and it is sometimes difficult to decide who the employer is. However, in the majority of cases, the employer will be the producer or production company. Help in deciding individual responsibilities can be found in: Health and safety in audio-visual production: Your legal duties.

System for managing health and safety

The size and complexity of management systems for health and safety depend on the size and complexity of the production. General advice on management systems can be found in: Health and safety basics for your business but – for more complex, hazardous or specialist productions – advice may have to be sourced from a competent outside specialist or consultant. Please note, an employer's legal duty to manage health and safety cannot be delegated to a consultant or to anyone else.

Assess and manage risks

Risk assessment is a fundamental part of managing health and safety and helps you to identify hazards and control the risk they create for those involved in your production. The process requires you to:

• take the time to systematically look at your activities
• decide what hazards they present
• assess the risk of people being exposed to these hazards
• find ways to either eliminate or control them

For more information, see: Risk management.

Review

You must review and update both the risk assessments you have made and the controls you put in place as work progresses to make sure they are still working. After the production, it is good practice to review the whole system to see whether useful lessons could be learned for the future.