Safeguarding a scheme where volunteers work alone
A lone working policy is the written statement of how an organisation keeps a person safe when they work with nobody else present, covering how the risk is assessed before the work starts, who knows where that person is while it happens, how they raise an alarm, and what happens if they do not make contact when expected.
A coordinator writing the policy that will govern a volunteer sitting in somebody’s front room with the door shut. It is also for the volunteer who is about to do that for the first time, and for a family deciding whether to let a stranger visit their relative.
Both people, in both directions. A lone working policy protects the person visited from an unsupervised adult, and protects the volunteer from an allegation they cannot answer, from a situation they cannot leave, and from being the only person who knows where they are.
Nobody notices for four hours. The failure in a visiting scheme is almost never a dramatic one, it is a volunteer who did not come back and a coordinator who had no expected return time to compare against.
In a mentoring or befriending scheme it carries a second load that a warehouse policy does not: the lone worker is a volunteer, the other person in the room is a child or an adult at risk, and the policy has to protect each of them from the other.
Most published material on lone working is generic health and safety template writing, written for construction sites, night retail, community nursing and social work caseloads, and much of it is not written for the UK at all. This page is the volunteer visiting slice of the subject and nothing else. There is no UK statute called a lone working law and no law banning working alone. The duty comes from an organisation’s general duty to assess and control risk, on which the Health and Safety Executive publishes guidance, and from safeguarding law where children or adults at risk are involved.
What a lone working policy has to contain in a visiting scheme
A lone working policy for a visiting scheme contains seven things, and a policy missing any of them will fail at the moment it is needed.
- States which activities count as lone working, naming home visits, car journeys, and one to one meetings in a closed room.
- Names the risk assessment that is done before a volunteer visits an address for the first time.
- Names one safeguarding lead and one deputy, by name, with a number that is answered.
- Sets the check-in and check-out routine and the expected return time for every visit.
- Sets the escalation steps if the volunteer does not check out.
- States what the volunteer must not do, such as give lifts, hold keys, handle money, or give out a personal phone number.
- States how a concern or a disclosure is reported, to whom, and within what time.
The risk assessment is about the visit, not about the volunteer’s character. It asks concrete questions: who else lives at the address, is there a dog, is there a history of aggression, are there stairs or a lift that fails, is the area one the volunteer can leave easily after dark, does the person supported have fluctuating capacity, and is there anyone at the address the scheme has not been told about. It gets reviewed when something changes, and a new person moving in is a change.
Check in and check out, the mechanism that actually does the work
Checking in and checking out is the single control that separates a scheme with a lone working policy from a scheme with a document about one. The routine is short enough that volunteers will keep doing it for a year.
- Send a message to the scheme’s monitored number on arrival, with the address if it is not the usual one.
- Send a message on leaving, with a one word status.
- Give an expected return time before the visit, and change it if the visit runs long.
- Expect the scheme to make contact if no check-out arrives by that time.
- Escalate on a stated ladder: call the volunteer, call the volunteer’s emergency contact, call the person visited, then call the police.
Two details decide whether this works. First, somebody has to be watching the number during visiting hours, and a scheme that runs evening befriending calls needs cover in the evening rather than a coordinator who reads messages the next morning. Second, the escalation ladder needs a named person at every rung. A rota with a gap on it is the whole failure.
The volunteer does not check out
The volunteer, if they are safe and simply forgot, sends the message the moment they realise and does not apologise their way out of the routine. The coordinator starts the escalation ladder at the expected return time rather than waiting to see, works down it without skipping rungs, and writes down each step with the time it was taken. A false alarm handled properly is training. A real one handled late is the incident.
Screening, and the fact that the check is not the safeguard
Screening establishes that a volunteer has no known record. It does not establish that they are safe, and a scheme that treats the certificate as the safeguard has misunderstood what it bought. The four nations run different systems and a policy has to name the right one:
| Nation | Check | Body |
|---|---|---|
| England and Wales | DBS check, basic, standard or enhanced, with or without a barred list check | Disclosure and Barring Service |
| Scotland | PVG scheme membership for regulated roles with children or protected adults | Disclosure Scotland |
| Northern Ireland | AccessNI check | AccessNI |
A Scottish scheme joins the PVG scheme, it does not get a DBS check, and writing “DBS” as though it covered the United Kingdom is the most common error in published guidance on this subject. Checks are free of charge for volunteers who meet the DBS definition of a volunteer, though an umbrella body may still charge its own administration fee, and Disclosure Scotland and AccessNI set their own arrangements. Fees for paid staff are set by those bodies and change, so check the current figure with them rather than with any third party.
The first hour after a disclosure
In the first hour after a disclosure, the volunteer does five things and stops. This is the part of the policy that gets read once and used at the worst possible moment, so it is written as five steps and not as a paragraph of principles.
- Listen, and let the person finish in their own words.
- Say that you have to pass this on, and never promise to keep it secret.
- Ask nothing beyond “is there anything else you want to tell me”, because questioning contaminates an account and an investigation is not the volunteer’s job.
- Write it down as soon as you are out, with the date, the time, the place, who was present, and the person’s own words in quotation marks rather than your summary of them.
- Report it to the named safeguarding lead the same day, and call 999 first if anyone is in immediate danger.
The volunteer does not tell the person’s family, does not discuss it with another volunteer, does not go back to check, and does not delete the notes. The coordinator receives it the same day, records the referral decision including a decision not to refer, and tells the volunteer what happened to the report, because volunteers who hear nothing back stop reporting. Where the disclosure concerns a child, the framework is the Children Act 1989 in England and Wales, with schools additionally working to Keeping Children Safe in Education, and Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own child protection systems. Where it concerns an adult at risk, the framework in England is the Care Act 2014, and again the other nations have their own.
The befriender or mentor
- Checks in on arrival and checks out on leaving, every visit, including the easy ones.
- Leaves if they feel unsafe, and explains later rather than staying to be polite.
- Reports a concern the same day, to one named person, in writing.
- Keeps to the boundaries the scheme set: no lifts, no keys, no money, no personal number, no visits arranged privately.
The person visited
- Is told before the first visit who the volunteer is, what they will and will not do, and how to stop the visits.
- Is given a number for the scheme that is not the volunteer’s number.
- Can ask for a different volunteer without giving a reason.
- Is told that anything raising a safeguarding concern will be passed on, before anything is said, not afterwards.
The scheme monitors the check-in number during visiting hours, answers the safeguarding phone, assesses each address before the first visit and again when circumstances change, and takes the report off the volunteer’s shoulders the moment it is made. It also accepts that lone working is a design choice: if a scheme cannot staff the escalation ladder, it should be running its matches in public places or by telephone instead.