Lone working means working without close or direct supervision, and it is far more common than the phrase suggests: a cleaner in an empty building, an engineer at a remote site, a care worker on a home visit, a driver, a shopkeeper on a late shift, and anyone working from home. No regulation prohibits it. The duty is the ordinary one, to assess the risk and control it, with the complication that the usual control of having somebody else nearby has been removed.
What a lone working risk assessment template should ask
Whether the workplace itself creates a special risk for one person. Whether the work involves plant, substances or tasks that need more than one person. Violence from members of the public or from people in a household. Whether the person has a medical condition that makes lone working unsuitable. How the person raises an alarm and how long it would take help to arrive. And what happens if they do not check in.
Where lone working cannot be permitted
Some work is prohibited alone: entry into a confined space needs a top man and rescue arrangements, live electrical work above certain thresholds, and any task where the safe system itself depends on a second person. A risk assessment that permits lone working in those cases has been written round the resourcing rather than round the risk.
Monitoring that is proportionate
The range runs from a scheduled call at the end of a visit, to a buddy system, to an app with timed check-ins and escalation, to a dedicated lone worker device with a duress alarm connected to an alarm receiving centre. The right level follows the assessment. What matters more than the technology is that somebody is actually watching for the missed check-in and knows what to do about it, because an unanswered alert is the same as no system at all.
Violence and aggression, which is usually the real risk
For most lone workers the risk is not machinery, it is people. Controls that work are pre-visit information about the address and the history, a policy that supports withdrawal without the worker having to justify it afterwards, vehicle and parking arrangements that avoid isolation, and reporting of every incident including verbal abuse. The last one is where the data comes from, and it only appears if reporting it is easy and consequence-free.
A lone worker risk assessment template, and the field that matters
The columns are the usual ones and the useful template adds three rows no generic pack has: what the worker cannot deal with alone, how anybody would know something had happened, and what happens when a check in is missed. That last row is the whole control. A template that stops at hazards and personal protective equipment has described the job and not the arrangement, and the arrangement is what the regulations expect where somebody works out of sight: a named person expecting contact at a stated time, and an escalation if it does not come.
Working alone risk assessment template, and the four situations it has to name
Write it around the four that actually recur rather than around the word alone. Working out of hours in a building with nobody else in it. Travelling between sites or visiting a member of the public at home, where the risk is the journey and the door rather than the task. Working in a place where a medical event would go unnoticed, including a plant room, a roof or a confined space, which needs its own permit. And working where aggression is foreseeable, which is a training and a withdrawal question. One template with those four sections covers nearly every lone working case an employer meets.
A lone worker risk assessment example, and what to take from it
Take the structure and not the content, because the controls are specific to the arrangement. A useful example shows: who works alone, when and where; what could go wrong that they could not handle by themselves; the check in arrangement with times and the named person expecting it; what happens when a check in is missed, in steps, with a decision point at which somebody attends or the emergency services are called; the training and the withdrawal rule for aggression; and the review date. If an example has no missed check in procedure, it is a hazard list rather than an assessment of lone working.
Questions people ask about lone worker risk assessment
Is lone working illegal?
No. There is no general prohibition. The employer must assess the risks of working alone and put controls in place, and some specific tasks cannot lawfully be done alone.
What is the definition of lone working?
Working without close or direct supervision. It covers work in isolated places, work away from a fixed base, and working outside normal hours in an otherwise occupied building.
Do lone workers need a device?
Only where the assessment shows that is the proportionate control. For many roles a scheduled check-in with a named person and a clear escalation procedure is sufficient.
Can someone enter a confined space alone?
No. The Confined Spaces Regulations 1997 require suitable and sufficient rescue arrangements before entry, which cannot be satisfied by a person working alone.
What do the confined space regulations require?
Avoid entry where the work can be done another way, and where it cannot, work to a safe system with a written emergency plan and rescue arrangements before anybody goes in. Lone entry is not permitted, which is why a confined space is the clearest case of work that cannot be done alone.
Is a lone working risk assessment example worth copying?
As a prompt list yes, and as a document no, because lone working risk is almost entirely about the specific arrangement: who is alone, where, for how long, what they are doing, what could go wrong that they could not deal with by themselves, and how anybody would know. An example assessment for a care visit, a night security round and an engineer in a plant room share almost no controls. Read one for the hazards you had not thought of, then write your own around the check in arrangement and what happens when somebody does not check in, which is the part that actually saves people.