Standards — BS 30480
The first UK standard on suicide and the workplace.
BSI announced BS 30480 on 4 November 2025 and it came into effect on 30 November, after a collaboration between government, specialist charities, advocacy groups and industry experts. It is free to download. Most organisations have not yet worked out what it asks of them, which is the honest reason to read it before deciding anything.
Lighthouse Mentoring provides no clinical care and no crisis response, and does not train people to provide either. Where something needs clinical input, that is said plainly and early, and the referral is to somebody qualified to take it.
If you or someone you work with is in crisis in the UK, the Samaritans can be reached free on 116 123, at any hour.
01 — What it covers
Prevention, intervention, and afterwards.
BS 30480 is a guide rather than a set of requirements. It addresses policy, identifying warning signs, safety planning, and communicating sensitively with people affected, and it carries toolkits written for HR and for line managers. It is drafted for organisations of every size and sector: public bodies, charities and social enterprises as much as commercial employers.
Its scope includes people who are not employees. Customers, service users, suppliers and the surrounding community are all within what BSI describes as those affected, which is a wider frame than most workplace wellbeing policies currently carry.
Anne Hayes, BSI's Director of Sectors and Standards Development, described the purpose as giving organisations “practical and evidence-based recommendations to help plan for, respond to, and support people affected by suicide”.
Sources: BSI launch announcement, 4 November 2025 and BSI Knowledge on BS 30480.
02 — Where it meets the duty
A standard is not the assessment.
BS 30480 is guidance and carries no legal force of its own. The legal duty is the one that already exists: to assess the risk of work-related stress and act on what the assessment finds. What BS 30480 changes is the standard of what a reasonable employer is now expected to have considered, because a published national standard is the benchmark somebody will point at afterwards.
In practice that makes it part of the same piece of work rather than a separate purchase. Where suicide risk is in scope, the stress risk assessment is assessed against BS 30480 alongside the six HSE Management Standards and ISO 45003, and the findings arrive in one document rather than three.
03 — Why this one, here
A public health qualification, not an HR one.
Craig Fearn is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health. On this subject that is the relevant kind of standing: suicide prevention in an organisational setting is a population-level question about systems, communication and who is exposed, and it is not an employee benefits question. The assessment says what the organisation should have in place and what it should stop doing. It does not provide the care.
He also completed LivingWorks' Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training, a fifteen-hour workshop, in September 2017. That is suicide first aid: what an individual does in the moment. It is named here because on this subject it is reasonable to ask whether the person writing about it has ever been trained in it, and unreasonable to imply more than it is. It is not a clinical qualification, it does not expand the limits set out at the top of this page, and it is nine years old.
Read the standard first. Then decide.
It is free, and an hour with it will tell you more than a proposal would. If after that there is a question about where your organisation stands, the first conversation costs nothing.