The competent person

If you run a hotel or holiday park and employ people, you must appoint one or more competent people to help you meet your health and safety duties. That person can be you, a suitably competent employee or an external adviser. The level of competence needed depends on the risks and complexity of your operation, whether you are a four-room guesthouse or a park with two hundred pitches.

What "competent" actually means

The word trips people up because it sounds like it should come with a certificate. It does not. A competent person is simply someone with the right mix of training, knowledge and experience to spot the risks on your site and help you deal with them sensibly.

The word that matters there is "your". Competence has to fit the place. Someone who is a safe pair of hands for a quiet office is not automatically right for a commercial kitchen going flat out on a bank holiday, a caravan park with gas cylinders and open water, or a seafront hotel where the fire strategy depends on things you cannot see from the corridor. The support you need should be proportionate to what you actually run, not gold-plated for its own sake and not stretched too thin either.

In-house, or bring someone in?

The role can sit with you, with someone on your team, or with an outside adviser. Where you already have someone in-house with the knowledge and the time to do it properly, they are often the best person for the day-to-day, because they know the building, the team and the busy periods better than any visitor could.

The honest question is where that in-house knowledge runs out. Legionella on a private water supply, fire risk in sleeping accommodation, a serious incident with an inspector on the phone, an insurer asking pointed questions after a claim. These are the moments where "we've always sort of handled it ourselves" starts to feel thin, and where bringing in someone experienced earns its keep.

The part that catches people out

Here is the thing most operators do not realise until it matters. Bringing in outside help does not hand your responsibility over to them. An adviser can assess your site, make recommendations, train your team and be there when you need an answer, but the responsibility for keeping people safe stays with you as the business. Appointing someone does not move it off your plate.

That is not a reason to avoid getting help. It is a reason to get help that is worth the name, and to stay involved rather than filing the report and forgetting it. Good support leaves you more in control of your risks, not less, because you understand what you are signing off and why.

The gap a lot of parks and hotels are in right now

There is a pattern we keep meeting across hospitality and leisure, and it is worth naming. For years, many operators leaned on one trusted adviser: someone who knew the site, turned up when needed and quietly kept things straight. Some of those advisers have now retired. Owners open the drawer to find the risk assessments are a few years out of date, the reassuring phone number no longer answers and nobody has picked up the thread.

If that sounds familiar, you are not behind through neglect. You are between advisers, and it is a straightforward thing to put right.

Where TSP fits

Our Retained Competent Person support is built for exactly this gap. You get a named safety professional who knows hotels and holiday parks, keeps your risk assessments and arrangements current, and is on the end of the phone when an officer, an insurer or an incident lands on your desk. It is proportionate to how your site actually runs, and it never pretends to take the responsibility off you.

If your long-standing adviser has stepped back, and you are honestly not sure who your competent person is any more, that is the conversation to have. Tell us what you run and where the cover has dropped, and we will show you what retained support would look like for your site.