No UK law names a specific health and safety course, certificate or training provider that general workers must hold. What the law actually requires is different, and stricter than most course adverts suggest: under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, every employer must provide adequate training at defined trigger points — on recruitment, and whenever risks change — free of charge and during working hours. The employer decides what “adequate” means through risk assessment, and remains responsible for the result.
At a glance: Nexis CPD offers £9 CPD-accredited online awareness courses covering health and safety essentials — from an introduction to health and safety through fire, manual handling, COSHH, DSE and first aid awareness. Each is 100% online with a verifiable e-certificate, and any three courses cost £18. They support the knowledge element of the training your risk assessment identifies; they are not regulated qualifications and practical skills still need workplace delivery.
What does UK law actually require for health and safety training?
The foundation is section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. Section 2(1) sets the general duty: “It shall be the duty of every employer to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all his employees.” Section 2(2)(c) then makes training an explicit part of that duty. It requires:
“the provision of such information, instruction, training and supervision as is necessary to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety at work of his employees” — HSWA 1974, section 2(2)(c).
Notice what that wording does not say. It does not name a syllabus, a duration, a certificate or an awarding body. It ties the duty to what is necessary for health and safety in your particular workplace. A quiet office and a steel fabrication shop both owe their staff training under the same sentence, but what satisfies it looks completely different in each. That is why “what course do I legally need?” is usually the wrong question — the right question is “what has my risk assessment shown my people need to know and be able to do?” We cover the wider Act in our guide to the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.
Breaching these duties is a criminal matter enforced by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and local authorities, not a box-ticking exercise. The Act applies to employers across Great Britain, and the training duty applies however few staff you have.
When must employers provide health and safety training?
The 1974 Act says training must be provided; the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (MHSWR), regulation 13 says when. This is the single most useful provision for employers to read, because it defines the trigger points that make training legally due.
Regulation 13(2) requires: “Every employer shall ensure that his employees are provided with adequate health and safety training — (a) on their being recruited into the employer’s undertaking; and (b) on their being exposed to new or increased risks because of — (i) their being transferred or given a change of responsibilities within the employer’s undertaking, (ii) the introduction of new work equipment into or a change respecting work equipment already in use within the employer’s undertaking, (iii) the introduction of new technology into the employer’s undertaking, or (iv) the introduction of a new system of work into or a change respecting a system of work already in use within the employer’s undertaking.”
In plain terms, training is legally triggered by:
- Recruitment — every new starter needs induction training, whatever the job.
- Transfer or change of responsibilities — a warehouse operative moving to the loading bay, an administrator taking on fire warden duties.
- New or changed work equipment — a new forklift model, a replacement machine with different guarding.
- New technology — new software controlling a process, automation on a line.
- A new or changed system of work — a revised night-shift pattern, a new lone-working procedure.
Regulation 13(3) then adds three conditions that shape how the training is delivered. The training “shall — (a) be repeated periodically where appropriate; (b) be adapted to take account of any new or changed risks to the health and safety of the employees concerned; and (c) take place during working hours.” Regulation 13(1) also requires employers, when entrusting tasks, to “take into account their capabilities as regards health and safety” — you cannot give someone a job their training has not equipped them to do safely.
Who pays for health and safety training — the employer or the worker?
The employer, always, where the training is done to meet a statutory requirement. Section 9 of the 1974 Act is short enough to quote in full: “No employer shall levy or permit to be levied on any employee of his any charge in respect of anything done or provided in pursuance of any specific requirement of the relevant statutory provisions” — HSWA 1974, section 9.
Combine that with regulation 13(3)(c) — training must “take place during working hours” — and the position is clear. An employer cannot deduct the cost of legally required health and safety training from wages, cannot make a worker buy their own course to meet a statutory duty, and cannot require the training to be completed unpaid at home in the evening. HSE’s own guidance leaflet, Health and safety training: A brief guide (INDG345), puts it directly: “You must provide training during working hours and not at the expense of your employees.” It adds that special arrangements may be needed for part-timers and shift workers — the duty flexes around their hours, it does not disappear.
Workers buying a course for their own CV or CPD is a different matter — that is a personal choice, not the employer discharging a legal duty.
Which regulations add specific training duties on top?
The 1974 Act and regulation 13 are the general layer. On top sit topic-specific regulations that attach information, instruction, training or competence duties to particular hazards. Each one below is quoted from or verified on legislation.gov.uk.
Manual handling
The Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992, regulation 4 requires employers, so far as is reasonably practicable, to “avoid the need for his employees to undertake any manual handling operations at work which involve a risk of their being injured”; where avoidance is not reasonably practicable, to make “a suitable and sufficient assessment” and reduce the risk of injury “to the lowest level reasonably practicable”. Employees must be given general indications and, where reasonably practicable, precise information on the weight of each load and the heaviest side of any load whose centre of gravity is off-centre. The assessment must also take account of the worker’s knowledge and training. Training in safe technique is a standard part of reducing the residual risk — but note the legal order of priority: avoid first, assess and reduce second. Training people to lift badly designed loads is not a substitute for redesigning the task. Our Manual Handling Awareness course covers the knowledge side; safe technique needs practice and supervision in your workplace.
Hazardous substances (COSHH)
The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002, regulation 12(1) states: “Every employer who undertakes work which is liable to expose an employee to a substance hazardous to health shall provide that employee with suitable and sufficient information, instruction and training.” That covers cleaners handling concentrated products just as much as laboratory staff. A COSHH Awareness course supports this duty; the site-specific element — your actual substances, your control measures, your safety data sheets — must come from the employer.
Display screen equipment
The Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992, regulation 6 is titled “Provision of training”. It requires employers to ensure that users are “provided with adequate health and safety training in the use of any workstation upon which he may be required to work”, with further training whenever the organisation of a workstation “is substantially modified”. If your staff spend their days at screens — including at home — this applies. See our DSE Awareness course.
Work at height
The Work at Height Regulations 2005, regulation 5 takes a competence approach: “Every employer shall ensure that no person engages in any activity, including organisation, planning and supervision, in relation to work at height or work equipment for use in such work unless he is competent to do so or, if being trained, is being supervised by a competent person.” Note that this covers the people who plan and supervise the work, not only those on the ladder. A Working at Height Awareness course contributes knowledge towards competence; competence itself also requires experience and practical ability.
Fire safety
Article 21 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires the responsible person to ensure employees are “provided with adequate safety training” at the time they are first employed and on exposure to new or increased risks — with the training including suitable and sufficient instruction on the right precautions and actions, repeated periodically where appropriate, adapted to changed risks, and provided during working hours. The Order extends to England and Wales only (article 1); Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own fire safety legislation. Our article on fire safety training and UK law goes deeper, and the Fire Safety Awareness course covers the knowledge element — but fire drills and evacuation practice can only happen in your building.
First aid
The Health and Safety (First-Aid) Regulations 1981, regulation 3 requires every employer to provide “such equipment and facilities as are adequate and appropriate in the circumstances” for first aid, and “such number of suitable persons as is adequate and appropriate” — and a person is not suitable “unless he has undergone such training and has such qualifications as may be appropriate in the circumstances of that case”. Where the needs assessment justifies it, an appointed person to take charge of arrangements may suffice instead of a trained first-aider. HSE’s guide Selecting a first-aid training provider (GEIS3) sets the accepted benchmarks: a First Aid at Work (FAW) course of at least 18 contact hours over three days, or Emergency First Aid at Work (EFAW) of at least six hours over one day, with certificates valid for three years. We explain the detail in first aid training requirements. Be clear-eyed here: an online-only course cannot make someone a workplace first-aider — more on that below.
Work equipment
The Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998 (PUWER), regulation 9(1) requires that “all persons who use work equipment have received adequate training for purposes of health and safety, including training in the methods which may be adopted when using the work equipment, any risks which such use may entail and precautions to be taken.” Regulation 9(2) extends exactly the same duty to anyone who “supervises or manages the use of work equipment” — a point many employers miss. The supervisor who has never been trained on the machine they oversee is a breach in waiting.
Who counts as a “competent person” under the Management Regulations?
MHSWR regulation 7(1) requires every employer to “appoint one or more competent persons to assist him in undertaking the measures he needs to take to comply” with health and safety law. Regulation 7(5) defines competence in refreshingly practical terms: a person is competent “where he has sufficient training and experience or knowledge and other qualities to enable him properly to assist”.
Two things follow. First, competence is not a certificate — it is a combination of training, experience, knowledge and judgement, assessed against the actual risks of the business. Second, in a low-risk small business the competent person can be the owner or a suitably developed employee; you are not legally obliged to hire a consultant. The competent person is also the natural owner of the training plan: they translate your risk assessment into a list of who needs to know what, by when.
Is online health and safety training legally acceptable?
For the knowledge element, yes — with an important honest caveat about practical skills.
HSE’s training guide INDG345 opens by saying training “isn’t just about formal ‘classroom’ courses” and lists acceptable methods including instruction, coaching and on-the-job training, classroom sessions, “open and distance learning” and “computer-based or interactive learning”. The law itself is silent on method: regulation 13 requires training that is adequate, and it is for the employer to show the method chosen achieved that. HSE’s five-step approach ends with “check that the training has worked” — whichever format you use, you need evidence that people understood and are applying it.
For first aid specifically, HSE’s GEIS3 guide addresses e-learning head-on: a mix of e-learning and face-to-face teaching — blended learning — “is an accepted means by which workplace first-aid training can be delivered”, but HSE “strongly recommends that practical elements of the course should be assessed by direct observation”. You cannot demonstrate CPR competently to a webpage.
That is exactly how to think about online CPD awareness courses like ours. A £9 Workplace First Aid awareness course genuinely helps staff understand roles, priorities and procedures — but it does not make anyone a first-aider, and we will never claim it does. The same logic applies to manual handling technique, fire drills and machine-specific training: online learning delivers the knowledge; hands-on practice, site familiarisation and supervision must happen at work. A CPD awareness course is not a regulated qualification and never satisfies a statutory training requirement by itself. HSE’s own guidance, including INDG345 and GEIS3, is free to download — a legitimate zero-cost starting point for any employer.
How often does health and safety training need refreshing?
The law deliberately avoids fixed intervals for general training. Regulation 13(3)(a) says training shall “be repeated periodically where appropriate” — a risk-based test, not a calendar rule. “Appropriate” is judged by the employer against factors such as how serious the consequences of a mistake would be, how often the skill is used, whether incidents or near misses suggest knowledge has faded, and whether anything has changed.
Some fixed points do exist at the level of guidance and specific regimes. HSE’s GEIS3 benchmark is that first-aid certificates are valid for three years, after which requalification training is expected. DSE regulation 6 ties refresher training to substantial modification of the organisation of the workstation rather than to a date. Fire safety training under article 21 must be “repeated periodically where appropriate” and adapted to changed risks. The widely used practice of refreshing general awareness training every one to three years is sensible risk management and easy to defend — but it is convention, not a statutory quota, and we have found no law prescribing a universal refresher interval for general health and safety training.
Do employers have to keep training records?
We have not found a general statutory requirement in the 1974 Act or the Management Regulations to keep records of health and safety training for general workers. But the practical position is more important than the technical one: if HSE investigates an incident and asks how you met regulation 13, records are how you answer. INDG345 advises that “it can help you manage training if you keep records, even if it is in-house training” and that you should monitor records “so that refresher training can be given when needed”. For first aid, GEIS3 advises training organisations to retain assessment records for at least three years, and notes that employers who keep a written record of their provider checks can demonstrate due diligence to an inspector.
Keep it simple: who was trained, on what, when, by whom, how it was assessed, and when it falls due for review. A spreadsheet plus stored certificates — such as the verifiable e-certificates issued with each Nexis CPD course — meets that need for most small businesses.
What should a health and safety induction cover?
Regulation 13(2)(a) makes induction training a legal trigger, and HSE’s guidance says new recruits “need basic induction training into how to work safely, including arrangements for first aid, fire and evacuation”. A defensible induction typically covers:
- the employer’s health and safety policy and who holds which responsibilities;
- fire and emergency procedures — alarms, exits, assembly points, the fire wardens;
- first aid arrangements — who the first-aiders or appointed persons are and where kit is kept;
- accident, incident and near-miss reporting;
- the specific hazards of the job and the control measures that manage them;
- how to raise a health and safety concern.
Young workers and new starters deserve particular attention — HSE’s guidance flags young employees as especially vulnerable and says their training “should be a priority”, with adequate supervision alongside it. Contractors and agency staff need enough of your induction to work safely on your premises, because unfamiliarity with your site is itself a risk.
What are managers’ and directors’ responsibilities for training?
The duties in section 2 and regulation 13 sit with the employer as an organisation, but they are discharged through the people who run it. HSE’s guidance is blunt that managers and supervisors need training too: they “need to know what you expect from them in terms of health and safety, and how you expect them to deliver”, including the specific hazards of the processes they oversee. PUWER regulation 9(2) makes this concrete for equipment: those who supervise or manage its use must be trained to the same standard of adequacy as those who operate it. And under MHSWR regulation 13(1), whoever allocates work must weigh each person’s capabilities before entrusting a task. A manager who cannot recognise unsafe work cannot supervise it — which is why a dedicated managers’ and supervisors’ course is a sensible early investment.
Health and safety training checklist for employers
- Start from the risk assessment. List the significant risks, then the knowledge and skills needed to control each one. Gaps are your training needs.
- Map the trigger points. Build training into your processes for recruitment, role changes, new equipment, new technology and new systems of work — regulation 13 makes each one a legal trigger.
- Check the topic-specific layer. Manual handling, COSHH, DSE, work at height, fire, first aid, work equipment — confirm which apply and what each requires.
- Appoint and develop a competent person under MHSWR regulation 7 to own the plan.
- Cover managers and supervisors, not just frontline staff.
- Deliver in working hours, at no cost to workers — sections 9 and regulation 13(3)(c) leave no room for argument.
- Blend methods honestly. Use online courses for knowledge; deliver practical skills, drills and equipment-specific training in the workplace.
- Check the training worked. Assess understanding, observe practice, gather feedback.
- Record it. Who, what, when, how assessed, next review date.
- Set risk-based refresher dates and diarise fixed ones, such as three-yearly first-aid requalification.
Common misconceptions about health and safety training
“The law says everyone needs a Level 1 health and safety certificate.” It does not. No statute names a level, course title or certificate for general workers. The legal test is whether the training provided was adequate for the risks — a certificate is evidence towards that, never the whole answer.
“An online course ticks the box on its own.” Sometimes the knowledge element is genuinely all that is needed — DSE awareness for office staff, for example. But wherever the risk involves physical skill or site-specific procedure, online learning is one part of a blend. Anyone who tells you a £9 course fully discharges a statutory duty is selling, not advising — and that includes us: our courses support compliance, they do not constitute it.
“Small businesses are exempt.” There is no small-employer exemption from section 2 or regulation 13. What changes with size is proportionality: a five-person office needs far less training than a construction firm, but it still needs induction, fire and first-aid arrangements.
“Training can be deducted from wages or done at home unpaid.” Both breach the framework — section 9 forbids charging employees for what is done under statutory requirements, and regulation 13(3)(c) requires training in working hours.
“Once trained, always trained.” Regulation 13(3) requires training to be repeated where appropriate and adapted to new risks. Skills fade and workplaces change; the duty is continuing.
Which courses suit health and safety training requirements?
Three Nexis CPD courses map directly onto the duties in this article:
- Introduction to Health and Safety — the broad knowledge base for new starters and anyone without prior training: the law, hazards, risk and responsibilities.
- Health, Safety and Welfare for Managers and Supervisors — for the people who allocate tasks and supervise work, where regulation 13(1) and PUWER 9(2) bite.
- Risk Assessment Awareness — because every training decision in this article starts from a suitable and sufficient risk assessment.
Those three together cost £18 rather than £27, because any three courses trigger the pay-for-2-get-3 offer. Add them to the cart and the discount applies automatically.
Frequently asked questions
Is health and safety training a legal requirement in the UK?
Yes. Section 2(2)(c) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires every employer to provide the information, instruction, training and supervision necessary to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, employees' health and safety at work. Regulation 13 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 adds specific trigger points: on recruitment and whenever workers face new or increased risks.
What health and safety training does the law actually specify?
No UK statute names a compulsory course or certificate for general workers. The law requires training that is adequate for the risks identified in your risk assessment, provided at defined trigger points. Topic-specific regulations add duties for particular hazards — manual handling, hazardous substances (COSHH), display screen equipment, work at height, fire safety, first aid and work equipment — but the content is set by the risk, not by a named syllabus.
Do employees have to pay for their own health and safety training?
No, not where the training meets a statutory requirement. Section 9 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 forbids employers charging employees for anything done under the relevant statutory provisions, and regulation 13(3)(c) of the Management Regulations requires training to take place during working hours. HSE guidance states plainly that employers must provide training during working hours and not at employees' expense.
How often should health and safety training be refreshed?
The law sets no universal interval. Regulation 13(3) requires training to be repeated periodically where appropriate and adapted to new or changed risks — a risk-based judgement for the employer. Some benchmarks exist in guidance: HSE's first-aid guidance treats FAW and EFAW certificates as valid for three years, and DSE training must be refreshed when the organisation of a workstation is substantially modified. Many employers refresh general awareness training every one to three years as good practice.
Is online health and safety training legally valid?
For the knowledge element, yes. HSE's training guide INDG345 lists open and distance learning and computer-based or interactive learning among acceptable methods, and its first-aid guidance accepts blended learning. The legal test is adequacy, so employers must check the training worked. Practical skills — first-aid competence, manual handling technique, fire drills, equipment operation — still need hands-on workplace delivery, and a CPD awareness course is not a regulated qualification.
Do employers have to keep health and safety training records?
There is no general statutory duty we have found requiring training records for general workers, but HSE guidance recommends keeping them: records let you monitor when refresher training is due and demonstrate compliance if an inspector or investigator asks how you met regulation 13. A simple log of who was trained, on what, when, how it was assessed and when it is next due — plus stored certificates — is enough for most businesses.
Does a small business still need health and safety training?
Yes. There is no small-employer exemption from section 2 of the 1974 Act or regulation 13 of the Management Regulations. What changes is proportionality: training in a low-risk office is far lighter than on a construction site, but every employer must still provide induction training, fire and emergency procedures, first-aid arrangements and any topic-specific training the risk assessment identifies — free of charge and during working hours.
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This article is general information, not legal advice; for decisions about your specific duties, take advice from a competent health and safety professional or solicitor. A CPD awareness course is not a regulated qualification, and no online course by itself satisfies a statutory training requirement — it supports the knowledge element of training that employers must scope through risk assessment, while practical elements such as first-aid competence, manual handling technique, fire drills and equipment-specific training require workplace delivery. Official HSE guidance referenced here is free to download from hse.gov.uk. Fire safety duties cited are from the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which applies in England and Wales; Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate fire safety legislation.