Lone working
What is lone working: lone working explained for the people who plan and supervise it
Lone working is any work carried out by someone with no close or direct supervision and nobody immediately on hand to help if something goes wrong. The hazards are usually the same ones everyone else faces. What changes is the consequence, because there is no second pair of hands and no witness.
For field service
Know what the job needs before the van rolls
Venta Capture, a product of VentaVid, lets the customer show you the fault first, so the engineer arrives with the right part or does not need to arrive at all.
The UK Health and Safety Executive uses that framing in its guidance leaflet INDG73, defining a lone worker as someone who works by themselves without close or direct supervision (HSE, Protecting lone workers). You will also see working alone, solo working, and in Canadian and Australian regulation, working alone or in isolation and remote or isolated work.
Who counts as a lone worker?
Wider than most risk assessments assume:
- Single-cover fixed sites: night security, small workshops, forecourts, care settings at low staffing.
- Mobile workers: field engineers, meter readers, drivers, inspectors, delivery crews.
- Workers in other people's premises: home care, housing visits, maintenance calls, a contractor on a site nobody else is attending.
- Out-of-hours workers: anyone in the building once everyone else has gone home, cleaners included.
- People alone inside a busy site: a plant room, a roof, a basement, a tank. Colleagues are on site but not within reach or earshot.
That last group gets missed most often, because the site looks staffed on paper. Assistance being nearby is not assistance being available.
What does the law actually require?
This is where definitions tend to overreach, so be exact: requirements differ by country, and within a country, by industry.
- Great Britain: no law bans working alone as such. The duties come from the general obligations in the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the risk assessment duty in the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. Specific activities, some confined space work among them, are separately restricted.
- United States: no single federal OSHA lone worker standard. The general duty to provide a workplace free of recognised hazards, plus activity-specific standards, carry the obligation.
- British Columbia, Canada: explicit and prescriptive. Part 4 of the Occupational Health and Safety Regulation defines working alone or in isolation and requires a written procedure for checking on the worker, covering the interval between checks, a designated person, a recorded result, an end-of-shift check, and what happens when the worker cannot be reached (WorkSafeBC, OHS Regulation Part 4).
- Australia: the model Work Health and Safety Regulations cover remote or isolated work and require effective communication with the worker.
For anyone running crews across borders, a lone working policy written for one jurisdiction will not automatically satisfy another. Sector rules (healthcare, utilities, rail, offshore, mining) usually bite harder than the general ones, so check the regime that applies to the site.
Why lone working is treated as a risk in its own right
Violence is a large part of the answer. Drawing on the Crime Survey for England and Wales, HSE recorded an estimated 689,000 incidents of violence at work in 2024/25, made up of 370,000 assaults and 319,000 threats, affecting an estimated 329,000 adults (HSE, Violence at work). A worker on their own has nobody to intervene and nobody to corroborate it.
The other half is time. A fall, a vehicle incident or sudden illness turns serious because of how long somebody can be in trouble before anyone notices. The control that matters is the detection gap, not only the hazard.
Lone working: a worked example
A field engineer is booked into an unmanned pumping station at 06:00. The assessment flags rural access with patchy mobile coverage, a ladder down to a wet well, and a solo arrival. The controls are a check-in on arrival, a scheduled call 45 minutes later, a named person holding the escalation number, and a hard rule that the wet well is not entered alone. The engineer misses the 45 minute call, escalation runs, and a supervisor reaches the site inside 20 minutes. Nothing had actually happened. The procedure still did its job, because silence has to trigger something.
Controls that hold up in practice
- Assess the task and the location, not the job title. The same engineer is a different risk at a domestic address and at a substation.
- Build a check-in system with a failure path. A missed call has to escalate on its own. Anything relying on someone remembering to chase will fail eventually.
- Give people the authority to leave. If a worker needs permission to abandon a visit that feels wrong, the control does not exist.
- Screen the visit beforehand: known history at the address, access difficulties, animals, equipment state.
- Test the kit. Devices and man-down alarms count only if someone is monitoring and coverage is checked.
What documentation can and cannot do
Plainly: photos and video sent from site are documentation and preparation. They are not a substitute for a legal duty, for supervision arrangements, or for a physical safety inspection where one is required. A capture of the access route before dispatch improves the briefing, and a visual record of site conditions strengthens the file later. Neither discharges the duty of care, and neither is a check-in system.
The preparation side is covered under pre-visit assessment and pre-visit assessment in field service. For the completion side of the same job, see proof of work.
Commonly confused with
Remote working. A home worker on a laptop is technically alone, but the risk profile is nothing like a technician in a plant room. One policy covering both fits neither.
Isolated working. Isolation is about distance from help, lone working is about the absence of it. A two-person crew four hours from a hospital is isolated, not lone working.
Unsupervised working. An experienced technician on a shared site is unsupervised, not necessarily alone. The test is always whether assistance would reach them in time.
