Every employer has to appoint one or more competent people to help them comply with their health and safety duties. The word competent does a lot of work here and it does not mean qualified: it means having sufficient training, experience or knowledge, and other qualities, to be able to assist properly, and it is judged against the specific work rather than in general. This page is about what that means when you are deciding whether the person you have is the person you need.
Competence is specific, not a certificate
A person can be entirely competent to assess a workshop process and not competent to assess a confined space entry, and a certificate does not settle it either way. What competence means in practice is that the person understands the work, understands the hazards it presents, knows the relevant good practice, and knows the limits of their own knowledge well enough to say when help is needed. That last quality is the one that separates useful advisers from dangerous ones.
The appointment does not move the duty
Appointing a competent person, internal or external, does not transfer the employer's duties to them. The employer remains responsible for compliance; the competent person assists. Firms sometimes engage a consultant and treat the arrangement as outsourcing the obligation, and it is not. It is buying capability, and the decisions and the accountability stay where they were.
Prefer inside the firm, buy in what you cannot hold
The regulator's preference is for competence inside the organisation where it exists, because the person who knows the work is usually better placed than a visitor. The sensible pattern for a small firm is a competent person internally for the day-to-day, with specialist advice bought in for the areas nobody inside understands: occupational hygiene, confined spaces, complex machinery, health surveillance interpretation. Deciding that split explicitly is better than discovering it during an incident.
Write down who it is, because the question arrives suddenly
The name of the competent person, what they are competent for, and what evidence supports it should be recorded, along with what has been bought in and from whom. This is a five-minute record that answers a question inspectors, clients and insurers all ask, and firms that cannot answer it usually have the competence and no way to demonstrate it, which is the worst of both.
Questions people ask about competent person health and safety
What is a competent person in health and safety?
Someone with sufficient training, experience or knowledge and other qualities to assist an employer properly in meeting their health and safety duties. Competence is specific to the work in question and is not established by holding a qualification alone.
Does appointing a health and safety competent person transfer my duties?
No. The employer remains responsible for compliance. The competent person assists, whether they are an employee or an external consultant, and the decisions and accountability stay with the employer.
Can the competent person be an external consultant?
Yes, and for specialist areas that is often the right answer. The regulator's preference is that competence inside the organisation is used where it exists, because the people who know the work are usually better placed to judge it, with external help brought in for what the firm genuinely cannot hold.