Risk, Health and Safety Information

Here's our top ten tips to organising your event:

1. If you're going for a massive event, you might need to speak to your local council.  Things like charging for entry to your event, employing people by paying them, selling food or alcohol or wanting to completely close roads, these are the types of things that might need a conversation. You can find the contact details of your local council at DirectGov - Connect to your council
2. If people are paying to come to your event, then you have responsibilities to your customers. See HSE's guidance on running events safely
3. There's lots of good advice out there and some particularly helpful web pages include:
1. Communities and Local Government - Your guide to organising a street party or fete
2. DirectGov - Find your local authority
  
4. Whether it's just you or a group of people who are planning an event , it's a good idea to have a chat or have a think yourself about how to make your event run smoothly, deciding on things which might be an issue on the day, like children running about near traffic. If you're a commercial organisation, thinking about risks is important, but if you're not, then often common sense is enough.
5. Early on, it's good to decide where you're going to hold the event and how many people are invited - this helps you think about issues, and whether you need extra permissions from the council.
6. Often these types of events are run or helped by volunteers, so there's some good advice on HSE's Volunteering pages.
7. For some real life examples that might be relevant to you, you might want to have a look at HSE's Myth of the Month, which looks at crazy stories about health and safety being blamed wrongly for things.  Feel free to show the jobsworths our website!
8. Stand up for common sense, and if someone says you can't do something for health and safety reasons, challenge them to find out exactly why.  If there's a genuine risk, see what you can do to minimise that and still go ahead - it can often be done.
9. You can get HSE's help with challenging jobsworths by sending details to the Mythbusters Challenge Panel.
10. There is no need to get tied up in red tape as events have been held before without worrying about things like compensation culture. We're encouraging everyone to be a champion for common sense and challenge jobsworths wherever they can to make sure everyone can come to the party.