Electrical health and safety/liability expert

Hey all!

We’re looking for an accredited electronics health and safety expert to review our risk assessment/volunteer training and make sure we have everything we need in place to meet our legal responsibilities when running a public-facing repair hub. We have a budget to pay someone if needed. Can anyone recommend someone?

Sarah

Hi Sarah,
What sort of accreditation are you looking for?

Cheers,
Dave.

I guess you are doing this to satisfy your insurance requirements? Can’t your insurer help you with this?

Thanks Ian - that’s a good suggestion! We will ask them.

Hi Dave - ideally we’d want someone who works in electronics health and safety and has some kind of formal training in this area - particularly around product electrical safety. We’d be open to what that looks like, as we know it’s not a space where lots of standardised accreditations exist.

Would a City & Guilds PAT certificate be a good standard of “accreditation”? It only covers certain things, but if a person is involved with repair cafes and has gone to such an extent to get something on paper, they are probably far more qualified than needed for your risk assessment.

Although ironically, I hold a dim view of the firms that offer contract PAT, as I think they are there as an ass-covering exercise and get away with having low expertise simply because most electrical devices are extremely safe nowadays and the PAT is a snapshot where it could be argued by an insurer that an insurable event x months after a PAT occurred due to subsequent damage that couldn’t have been detected during the PAT.