Independence
Nobody should assess a risk they sell the cure for.
Most organisations buying a stress risk assessment buy it from a provider who also sells the thing the assessment will recommend. The finding and the remedy come from the same invoice, and everybody involved knows it.
Lighthouse Mentoring sells the assessment and nothing that could follow from it.
01 — What is not sold
The list is the argument.
Every item below is something a wellbeing provider would ordinarily sell alongside an assessment. None of it is available here, at any price, including by referral fee.
- Employee assistance programmes
- The commonest recommendation in this market, sold by the people who most often write the report recommending it.
- Wellbeing platforms and apps
- A per-seat licence gives the recommender a stake in headcount, and a reason to find a problem that software solves.
- Training and workshop series
- Resilience training is what gets recommended when the finding is that the work is the problem and nobody wants to say so.
- Mental health first aid courses
- Useful in themselves. Not a control for psychosocial risk, and frequently sold as one.
- Survey licences
- An annual instrument is recurring revenue. The instrument here is chosen for the assessment, not sold with it.
- Clinical or counselling services
- Outside the scope entirely. Where something needs clinical input, it is referred to somebody qualified to take it.
02 — The one thing sold
The kits, and why they are not on that list.
Lighthouse Mentoring sells assessment kits, from £850, to organisations doing the work themselves. That is a product, and a page listing what is not sold has to deal with it rather than hope you do not notice.
Every item on the list above shares one property: it is a remedy a finding could point at. That is what makes selling it a conflict. A kit is not a remedy. No finding in any assessment can recommend one, because a kit is a substitute for commissioning the assessment in the first place. Nobody who has bought an assessment has any use for it.
The rules the kits observe, so this stays true: bought once, no licence, no renewal, no per-seat fee, nothing recurring. No survey instrument is sold with them — the stress kit points at HSE's own free tool instead, which is why "survey licences" stays on the not-sold list. And the recorded walkthrough is not the training that list rules out: barred training is a remedy findings point at, where this teaches you to run the thing you have bought.
The second kit tests that argument harder, and it is worth saying how. An assessment could reasonably find that an organisation has no agreed position on suicide — that is a real gap and a material finding. The remedy for it is readiness work, and readiness work is now something this practice sells. So the rule is stated rather than assumed: a finding may name the gap, and will never name the kit. No Lighthouse assessment report recommends a Lighthouse product, by name or by description, and if that ever appears in one it is a defect in the report.
The kits also say, in their own copy, the thing that costs money to say: a kit cannot be independent of the people filling it in. It makes you thorough, not independent. If you need a conclusion that survives a sceptical reader, that is the commissioned assessment, and the kit's full price comes off it for twelve months.
02 — Where the independence has limits
Three, stated rather than left to be found.
The organisation pays
The assessment is commissioned and paid for by the organisation being assessed. That is unavoidable and it is a real pressure. What answers it is that the fee is fixed at scoping and does not vary with what the assessment concludes, and that there is no second sale for a serious finding to lead to.
Referrals earn nothing
An assessment often ends in a recommendation to buy something: an EAP, occupational health input, clinical support. Where a specific provider is named, no commission, referral fee or reciprocal arrangement exists, and asking for that in writing is a reasonable thing to do of anybody, here included.
Repeat work exists
Organisations do re-assess, and board advisory work sometimes follows an assessment. That is a mild interest in a continuing relationship, which is worth naming. It is a different order of conflict from writing a report that recommends a product on the writer's own price list.
03 — What it buys you
A finding that survives being read by someone else.
Sign-off on this work usually sits with the board or the health and safety committee rather than with the person who commissioned it. That reader did not choose the provider and has no investment in the answer, and the first thing a sceptical one asks is who produced this and what were they selling.
The same question gets asked again, harder, if the assessment is ever produced in a claim, a tender or an inspection. An assessment written by a supplier of the recommended remedy is worth less in that room, whatever its content, and the discount is applied by people who will never say so out loud.
The most useful thing an independent assessment can conclude is that an organisation does not need to buy anything. That conclusion is available here and is not available from a provider whose revenue depends on it not being reached.
Ask the same question of everyone you shortlist.
What would you sell me if this came back serious? It is a fair question, it takes one line of an email, and the answers will not be the same. The first conversation here costs nothing and does not end in a proposal you did not ask for.