The stress risk assessment your duty already requires
A psychosocial risk assessment against the six HSE Management Standards and ISO 45003, producing something a board can act on and evidence. Some people call it a wellbeing audit. It is the same piece of work.
Carried out independently. Lighthouse Mentoring does not sell an EAP, a platform or a workshop series, so no finding points conveniently at something to buy. What that means, and where it has limits.
- Assessed against
- The six HSE Management Standards, mapped to ISO 45003
- Rests on
- Records, survey and interviews, not a survey alone
- Carried out by
- Craig Fearn, Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health
- Sells no remedy
- No EAP, no platform, no workshop series, no app
01 — The duty
Already a legal requirement.
“Employers have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it.”
The duty to assess is the law. The Management Standards are the recognised method, not a legal requirement in themselves, and HSE says so directly. Both halves of that matter: an organisation cannot decline to assess, and it is not obliged to certify against anything.
02 — What gets assessed
Six areas, and where the evidence for each comes from.
An assessment that skips one of the six is not an assessment against the standards, whatever it is called. The third column is the part that separates this from a survey: each area is assessed against records that already exist, before anybody is asked to fill anything in.
| No. | Area | What is examined | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Demands | Hours, overtime, rota and shift patterns, task volume by role | Payroll and rostering records, time systems |
| 02 | Control | Decision latitude by grade, scheduling autonomy, how far method is prescribed | Survey instrument, role interviews |
| 03 | Support | Supervision frequency, manager span of control, take-up of what is already provided | HR records, provider usage data, interviews |
| 04 | Relationships | Grievance and conflict records, exit themes, bullying and harassment routes | Case records, exit interviews |
| 05 | Role | Role clarity by team, overlapping accountabilities, how recently roles changed | Structure charts, job descriptions, interviews |
| 06 | Change | Change frequency, consultation records, absence and turnover around change events | Consultation papers, absence and turnover data |
Framework: the six HSE Management Standards, published by HSE. The assessment is mapped to ISO 45003 and, where suicide risk is in scope, to BS 30480.
03 — Method
How the assessment runs.
Four stages. The framework is HSE's; the sequence is what makes the finding defensible afterwards, which is the part that matters when someone asks how it was reached.
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01
Scope and gather
What is in scope, what data already exists, who gets interviewed. Most organisations already hold more of the evidence than they think.
Absence, turnover, grievance and survey data. Structure charts. Policies as written.
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02
Read it together
The sources are analysed against each other rather than in isolation, and mapped onto the six Management Standards.
Interviews with managers and staff. Cross-source comparison. Mapping to ISO 45003.
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03
Rate and evidence
Each of the six areas gets a rating and the evidence behind it, including the areas that need nothing doing.
Findings, ratings and the evidence base for each. Prioritised by exposure.
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04
Put it to the board
The findings are presented in person, and what leaves the room is a document the organisation can act on and point at.
Written report. Board or committee presentation. Roadmap ordered by exposure.
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1
Scoping
Week 1
What the organisation wants to know, which records exist, who needs to be spoken to, and what the assessment will and will not cover. Ends in a written scope before anything is charged for.
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2
Evidence
Weeks 2 to 4
Records gathered and read against each other. Where the records are thin, that gap is itself a finding, and interviews or a survey instrument fill it deliberately rather than by default.
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3
Assessment
Weeks 4 to 6
Each of the six standards assessed against what the evidence shows. Findings are drafted with their sources attached and tested against the alternative explanation before they are written down.
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4
Report and presentation
Weeks 6 to 8
The written assessment, the register and the roadmap, then the presentation to the board or the committee. Implementation is the organisation’s, and Lighthouse sells nothing that would follow from it.
04 — What you actually receive
A page of the report, before you buy it.
Nobody in this market publishes the deliverable. You are asked to choose between descriptions of a document. This is the document.
Specimen — illustrative only
Section 4: Findings against the HSE Management Standards
| No. | Area | Rating | Finding | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Demands | Overtime concentrated in two teams of the eleven surveyed. In one, a fifth of hours worked in the period were outside contracted time, sustained across six months rather than around a peak. | Payroll and rota data, 12 months. Survey, n=340. | |
| 02 | Control | Decision latitude falls sharply below team-leader grade. Consistent with sector, but it is the grade where absence is rising. | Survey by grade. Absence records by grade. | |
| 03 | Support | Average span of control is 14 direct reports against a stated policy maximum of 8. Managers report no capacity for one-to-ones; the provision exists and is not reachable. | Establishment data. Manager interviews, n=9. | |
| 04 | Relationships | No pattern in grievance or exit data. Routes for raising concerns are known and used. Nothing here requires action. | Grievance log, 24 months. Exit interviews, n=61. | |
| 05 | Role | Role clarity is high except in the two functions restructured last year, where accountabilities overlap at the second tier. | Survey by function. Structure charts, current and prior. | |
| 06 | Change | Consultation records are complete and absence does not move around change events. The process is working as described. | Consultation records. Absence around four change events. |
Two of the six areas return no action. An assessment that finds something everywhere is either measuring badly or selling something.
- A written assessment
- Each of the six standards assessed, with the evidence it rests on stated next to it, so a reader can see how the finding was reached rather than being asked to accept it.
- A findings register
- Every finding placed on a scale with a label, not a colour alone. Most areas come back unremarkable, and saying so is part of the work.
- A prioritised roadmap
- Ordered by exposure rather than by ease, and costed by nobody who sells the remedy.
- A board presentation
- Findings put to the board or the health and safety committee in person, including the unwelcome ones.
- The evidence pack
- The underlying material, referenced, so the assessment can be defended in twelve months by someone who was not in the room.
05 — Whether you need one
Commissioned for a reason, not on a cycle.
The usual triggers
A claim or an incident that raises the question of what was known. An ISO 45003 push from a customer or a parent company. Absence or turnover the board has started asking about. A restructure. Or an auditor, insurer or tender asking how psychosocial risk is assessed, and nobody being able to point at anything.
The buyer is usually an HR director or head of people. Sign-off usually is not: it sits with the board or the health and safety committee, which is why the output is written to be read by people who did not commission it.
When it is the wrong purchase
If what is wanted is an engagement survey, many providers sell a better one more cheaply. If a specific problem is already known and the question is what to do about it, that is advisory work rather than an assessment. If the findings will not be acted on, the assessment creates a record of a risk that was identified and left, which is worse than not having asked.
Any of those will be said on the first call, which is free and does not end in a proposal nobody asked for.
And if the honest answer is that you will do this in-house whatever anyone advises, the same method is sold as a kit, from £850, with the full price credited against this assessment for twelve months if you change your mind.
06 — What it costs
From £6,500, and no VAT.
Published because nothing else in this market is. A figure lets you find out whether this is worth a conversation before having one, and lets you take something to the board without having to ask first.
Lighthouse Mentoring is not VAT registered, so the figure quoted is the figure invoiced. Worth checking against any competing quote: at the same headline number, a VAT-registered supplier costs an organisation that cannot recover VAT twenty per cent more, which for charities, and for parts of the NHS, is most of them.
- Size
- Headcount, and how many distinct teams or functions have to be looked at separately.
- Sites
- One location, or several. Multi-site work means the same six standards assessed more than once, because the answers differ by site more often than boards expect.
- Evidence
- Whether the records can be read as they are, or whether the evidence has to be gathered first. This is the largest single variable, and thin records are common.
The figure is fixed at scoping, in writing, before any commitment, and it does not vary with what the assessment concludes. That last part matters more than it sounds: it is the difference between an assessment and a sales visit, and it is why the independence claim on this site is checkable rather than asserted.
07 — Who carries it out
One practitioner, and nothing to sell you afterwards.
Craig Fearn is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health and a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute, and was the Institute of Directors South West Ambassador for Wellbeing from 2021 to 2026. The public health fellowship is the relevant one here: psychosocial risk is a population-level question about how work is organised, not an HR programme. Board-level advisory work since 2021 across NHS trusts, technology, financial services, manufacturing and premium spirits is what makes the findings legible to the people who have to act on them.
Lighthouse Mentoring is a sole trader
Nothing is subcontracted to an associate network, because there is not one. The person who scopes the assessment is the person who writes it and presents it.
Compare the three engagements if you are not sure this is the one you need.
Questions before commissioning one
Common questions answered
Is a stress risk assessment the same thing as a wellbeing audit?
In practice, yes. A stress risk assessment, a psychosocial risk assessment and a workplace wellbeing audit describe the same piece of work: an assessment of the organisational factors that create risk to psychological health, and what should be done about them.
The names come from different places. "Stress risk assessment" is the health and safety vocabulary and is the one HSE uses. "Psychosocial risk assessment" is the ISO 45003 vocabulary. "Wellbeing audit" is the one the consulting market grew. This page uses the first because it is the one that names a duty.
Is this a legal requirement?
The assessment is. HSE states that employers have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it. The duty sits under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, which requires employers to ensure health, safety and welfare so far as is reasonably practicable and which HSE reads as covering psychological health, and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which require assessment of foreseeable risks.
The Management Standards themselves are not. HSE says directly that they are not intended to be legally enforceable. They are the recognised method for discharging the duty, which is a different thing, and anyone telling an organisation that certification against them is mandatory is selling something.
What does the organisation have to provide?
Whatever records already exist: absence and turnover data, grievance and exit records, structure charts, consultation papers, and any engagement or wellbeing survey already run. Access to the people who can explain what the records mean. And a decision, before starting, about whether the findings will be acted on.
Thin records are workable and are themselves informative. An organisation that cannot say how many people work more than their contracted hours has already answered a question about Demands.
How long does it take?
Typically six to eight weeks from scoping to presentation, driven by organisation size, how many sites are involved, and whether the existing records are usable as they are.
Rushing it produces an assessment that cannot be defended later, which is the only quality that matters if it is ever tested.
What does it cost?
From £6,500, and no VAT is added: Lighthouse Mentoring is not VAT registered, so the figure quoted is the figure invoiced. What moves it is size, number of sites, and how much of the evidence has to be gathered rather than read, all three of which are set out in full above. The scoping conversation produces a written proposal with a fixed figure in it before any commitment, and that figure does not move afterwards.
On the other side of the ledger, the figure worth quoting is CIPD's: UK employees averaged 9.4 days of sickness absence in the twelve months to 2025, against 5.8 days before the pandemic, with mental ill health the leading cause of long-term absence. What that costs a particular organisation is a question that organisation's own data answers, which is what the assessment is for. The percentage returns quoted by wellbeing providers are not repeated here.
Still have questions?
Get in TouchStart with the question you actually have.
Whether that is what the duty requires, what an assessment would involve, or whether you need one at all. The first conversation costs nothing and does not end in a proposal you did not ask for.
Written on this
On the duty, the evidence and the assessment
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