How much do health and safety companies cost?
Well when you hear the word consultant, you probably clutch your wallet in panic! However, you may be surprised by what the going rate is for health and safety consultants and in some cases, using consultants may make great financial sense.
We have looked at various different health and safety consultants, to try and bring you some figures on what you can expect to pay for a health and safety consultant.
Larger Health and Safety Consultants Cost, Consultant Daily Rate
There are a number of health and safety companies that provide packages to assist you in meeting your health and safety requirements. They base their pricing on the number of employees that your company has. Clients must recognise that a higher consultant daily rate often reflects the value and quality of the services provided.
We’ve looked at the bigger health and safety companies that publish their pricing and found:
For an organisation that employs 5 people, you are looking at an average monthly cost of AUD $1000.
For an organisation that employs 100 people and around AUD $1800 a month.
For more than 100 employees these companies provide a bespoke quote.
For these prices, these companies will generally help you hit a number of legal requirements such as:
Development and review of health and safety documentation
Assistance with risk assessments
Access to health and safety advice via telephone
Updates of changes in health and safety legislation and guidance through webinars, bulletins and e-learning.
Now, I have very purposefully not referred to these companies as consultancies because they are more like service providers. They provide a package of things that will help you meet a selection of legal duties. It highlights the significance of negotiating the consultant daily rate based on the specific project scope and deliverables.
There is very little face-to-face contact included in these packages and as such, the majority of the policies, documents and assessments they provide will be based on generic templates, with some specific elements added. For example, company names and names of people with health and safety responsibilities.
Some of the more expensive companies do provide annual health and safety audits as part of the package, however, this is unlikely to give enough insight to make your health and safety management system fully specific to the needs of your organisation. Factors such as industry trends, market competition, and unique skill sets can also influence the consultant daily rate.
These packages may provide a basic level of compliance for some lower-risk organisations, which have a pretty standard set of risks and requirements, however for many companies, you will have to edit these documents to make these specific to your organisation or pay someone to do this before you are fully legally compliant.
In addition, this is still pretty expensive for what you get, for example, iCARE provides a support package from just AUD $500 per month which covers all of the specific requirements of your business.
Smaller / Typical Health and Safety Consultancies
Ok, so let’s look at the more typical consultants. These are generally small organisations that employ 1 to 10 consultants. There are a few that use the package model, which we mentioned earlier, however, the majority of these companies will provide a much more personal service, spending time on your site to get to know your business and its specific requirements. Clients seeking consulting services should be aware that the cheapest consultant daily rate may not always offer the most comprehensive solutions.
Most of these types of businesses charge a daily or hourly rate. Companies are a little cagey about publishing their prices, however, of the companies which publish their prices, it seems that the average hourly rate is around AUD $100 per hour and the average daily rate is around AUD $950 per day.
In this case, the team at iCARE are happy to reveal that we are below, those averages!
Obviously, this can vary depending on the region where the consultancy is based and the level of competence of the consultant. On the other hand, some consultants (definitely iCARE) offer reduced rates for continuity of work, locality to our office and other factors such as if the organisation is a charity. So these numbers can vary significantly.
How does all of this compare?
Now all this may sound remarkably expensive, however, employing people to manage safety is expensive too. The average health and safety manager costs around AUD $500 per day to employers and this number excludes company cars, phones, IT equipment, ongoing training costs, professional membership fees and other employee benefits. So although consultants are more expensive, they are not wildly overpriced.
Many businesses do not want or need a full-time health and safety person but still, need access to a competent source of safety advice to meet the requirements of health and safety law. In these cases, consultants are a great option for meeting your legal obligations because consultants aren’t at your business every day and will only charge you for the work you do.
The average iCARE client is allocated between 20 and 30 days per year, depending on their organisations’ individual requirements. During this time we ensure that all specific health and safety needs and requirements are met. As you can imagine this is far cheaper than employing someone, even someone part-time.
Do you need a health and safety partner?
If you are interested in partnering with iCARE Safety, please get in touch and we will arrange a free consultation accompanied by a sensible quotation.
