Maintaining your LTMP
OK. Now you've got an H&S plan, you are now compliant. You can drop it in the bottom drawer and relax. There's nothing more to do. Right?
Wrong.
The law says you need to "maintain" an H&S plan. Not just establish one.
How do we maintain it?
Without digging into the requirements of the legislation, let's look at if from a practical point of view.
The objective is to maintain a safe environment. You also need to demonstrate that you are taking health and safety seriously. If the worst happens, you will need to prove that you have been taking every practical step to maintain a safe environment.
There are a few things you can and should do to complete these objectives.
Establish a H&S policy.
Appoint a Health and Safety Officer. This is the person who takes the lead on health and safety matters.
Establish your H&S plan based on an analysis of the current hazards that exist. Then maintain these in a register of Hazards along with the controls you have put in place to eliminate, contain or minimise the risks associated with the hazard.
Your H&S plan should include an accident or incident register. Your accident and incident register may not have any records, but you still should have one. But if there are any accidents or incidents the register should be updated. An incident might require reviewing the hazard register and adding or editing a hazard. Note that you must notify Worksafe after some events.
As part of establishing and routinely maintaining your H&S plan, you should consult all of your owners and ask them if they are aware of any H&S matters that need to be addressed. You can do this by including an invitation to comment in the annual "Intention to hold an AGM" notice.
Then, include a discussion on H&S and approval of the current H&S plan by including H&S as an item in the AGM agenda.
Anything that comes from the discussions at the AGM, including the acceptance of the H&S plan, is recorded in the minutes.
For large BCs, you might want to also include an agenda item and a minute relating to committee meetings.
After that, every year, the content of the H&S plan is reviewed, any changes are made, it is given a new start date, and the process is repeated.
Our Plan Heaven Health and Safety plans help you will all of the above and more.
Updated 6 February 2025 JB
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The Plan Heaven team.
Disclaimer. Plan Heaven is not qualified in law and any comments made on this website are only the opinion of Plan Heaven and should not be regarded as legal advice. Our comments are merely providing some thoughts on how the legislation might be interpreted and how we go about attempting to meet its requirements. You should not rely on this information in isolation and do you own homework and at all times if you wish to be sure of your position relating to legal matters you should seek advice from a suitably qualified lawyer.