Lone Working Safety Considerations

Reviewed by Peter Kendall, Technical Support Engineer (January 2025)

Lone working happens in many different industries and roles — increasingly more in recent years due to the rise of working at home. Lone work can be challenging, and it carries unique safety risks. This guide will outline these lone worker risks and give examples of lone worker solutions for ensuring employers provide for the safety of these people.

According to lone worker legislation, a lone worker does their work with no other workers present and with infrequent supervision. Note that this doesn’t just include people who work without in-person contact (though those people are certainly lone workers). It also includes people such as:

• The only employee at a shop, even if it has frequent in-store customers.
• People who drive between locations for their work.
• People doing self-directed work in densely populated areas.

All of these people are the only worker present and they have no (or at least infrequent) in-person supervision. This exposes them to the risks of lone working.

With this lone working meaning defined, what are some specific examples of lone workers?

• Petrol station clerks
• People out of sight and earshot at large facilities
• Heavy goods vehicle (HGV) drivers
• Estate agents
• Postal carriers
• Utility maintenance technicians
• Forest and wildlife rangers
• Overnight cleaning staff
• Social workers doing home visits
• Cab drivers
• People working at home

All these people deserve to be safe in their work, so their employers need to tailor a lone worker policy based on their specific lone working risks.

Lone worker risks include:

Falls: Slipping, tripping, and falling and then being trapped and unable to call for help is a very real, critical hazard in lone worker safety.

Road accidents: Anyone driving between sites can get in a car accident, and HGV drivers can develop driver fatigue. Lone work near roads is particularly dangerous, such as with utility technicians or tow truck drivers.

Violence: Lone workers may appear defenceless, making them vulnerable to physical or verbal abuse from store customers or in-home clients.

Heavy machinery and dropped objects: Forklift operators working on their own in large, spread-out warehouses can be far from help if a fallen payload pins them.

Ergonomic injury: Though anyone can develop poor posture habits, people working at home might experience repetitive strain from simple, laptop-on-kitchen-table workstations.

Each of these is an ‘ordinary’ safety hazard, but lone worker safety systems need to consider how worker isolation makes the hazard more severe.

Lone worker policy should also consider the risks of isolation, which can create a sense of abandonment, reduce morale, and degrade mental health.

Which laws regulate lone working? There aren’t specific HSE lone working regulations, though there are HSE guidelines for it. Lone workers fall under the same overarching safety regulations as any other workers do:

• The Health and Safety at Work Act (1974)
• The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations (1999)

This means that an employer’s obligations to the safety of its employees extend to lone worker safety all the same. It also means, though, that an employee’s usual duties to protect themselves are emphasised when they face the risks of lone working.

So what should you have by law if you lone work? You need your employer to assess the safety risks of your job and provide you with the equipment, training, and policies for ensuring your health and safety while working, as always. This is challenging with the complications of lone working, but no less essential.