How to Build Your Own HSE Legal Register

An effective HSE management system requires that you have in place the processes and procedures required to meet the legal requirements of the jurisdiction in which you operate.  These legislative requirements will obviously depend upon the country of operation, and can include a handful to literally hundreds of laws and regulations (as discussed in detail in previous blog posts: An Overview of Occupational Health and Safety Laws and Regulations in Asia and the Middle East and An Overview of Environmental Laws in Asia and the Middle East.

The regulatory regime in every country constantly evolves, so developing an HSE Legal Register is most definitely not a do-it-once-and-forget-about-it-task, but rather one that requires regular review and updating.  This means regularly scanning for new laws and regulations and updating the register as required.

There are several options for obtaining an HSE Legal Register for your company, including do-it-yourself, hiring a consultant, or retaining the services of one of the many web-based HSE legal register providers.  Each has their pros and cons:

Redlog does provide HSE legal registry services and would of course be pleased to assist you in your needs.  However, for many smaller facilities and companies in the developing countries of Asia, hiring consultants is often not an option due to limited HSE budgets.

We do not believe, however, that this means that you cannot have in place a fully operational HSE Legal Register, which is suitable for your needs. It is not all that difficult, and for many developing countries with limited laws and regulations it is frankly quite easy (albeit time-consuming).

In this blog post, I am going to take you through a five-step process to enable you to develop your own HSE Legal Register.   We will use Afghanistan as an example and the result will be a fully functional (and free!) HSE Legal Register in Excel format that you can download and modify for your use.  And, for those of you in Afghanistan, this register is complete and ready for you to use as is and to customize for your operations.

The HSE Legal Register Development Process

Step 1: Develop the Template

The first step is to develop a generic template and format for the HSE Legal Register. There are really no restrictions as to how this can be done. But my experience is that simpler is better.  I prefer to use an Excel spreadsheet for the register, but they can also be done in MS Word, in a database such as MS Access, or even written out on index cards if you are old school!

For the purpose of this example, we will use Excel. You don’t need to be an Excel wizard but you do need to know how to manipulate a spreadsheet and it is useful to have skills in Excel formatting and database functions.

Excel can be broken down into worksheets. I suggest that one worksheet (“Summary”) be used to list HSE laws, regulations and other legislative and policy documents and the other worksheet ("Requirements") for the requirements associated with each of these pieces of legislation.

For the Summary worksheet, we typically include the following headings in the worksheet columns:

• No. – a simple identifier, e.g., 1, 2, 3…
• Legislation/Regulation Title – The name/title of the piece of legislation
• Summary of Duty(ies) Imposed – A brief summary of the purpose of the legislation and listing of Articles applicable to HSE issues
• Effective Date– Date that the legislation was promulgated or came into effect
• Source – URL to a website, a reference to physical location of the document

The Requirements worksheet is the heart of the HSE register and we typically include the following headings along the worksheet columns:

• No. – a simple numeric identifier, e.g., 1, 2, 3…
• Industry – major categories of industry, e.g.., oil and gas, mining, manufacturing, etc.; only needed if you have multiple operations across a broad range of activities
• Project Phase –development, operations, and decommissioning phases of a project; there may be different HSE requirements for each, e.g., EIA for project development, rehabilitation plan for mine site decommissioning
• Category – subdivide into as many categories as make sense, e.g.,:
  • Violations
  • Emergency Response
  • Risk Management
  • Worker Health and Safety
  • Air Emissions
  • Water Use
  • Wastewater
  • Water Resources
  • Environmental Protection
  • Historical and Cultural
  • Communities
• Law/Reg/Standard/Guideline – The name/title of the relevant piece of legislation
• Governing Body – the national body responsible for governing the legislation
• Effective Date - date that the legislation was promulgated or came into effect
• Article/Section No. – Article of Section number of the specific HSE requirement
• Article, Title or Main Issue – title or heading of the specific HSE requirement
• Requirement – complete text of the requirement of that Article
• Notes – any notes needed to clarify the article or context
• Applicable to the site? (Yes/No) – simple yes or no as to whether the specific article applies to the site
• Rational for Applicability or Non-Applicability – the reasons that the article is or is not applicable to your operation

Step 2: Gather HSE Laws & Regulations

This step is relatively straightforward.  For many countries, HSE laws and regulations and other regulatory documents can be entirely sourced on-line from government websites (typically in both native and English languages).  There are other databases, albeit often incomplete, that include national and international HSE legislation (although not necessarily complete and up-to-date), for example:

• ILO NATLEX database
• The World Law Guide
• Ecolex environmental law database
• FAOLEX law database

One can also usually obtain hard copies of all pertinent requirements from various government agencies or libraries.

Regardless of the source, make sure to download or obtain the complete document in the governing language and also English, as might be required by you or your management.

Remember, that pertinent HSE laws and regulations are often not restricted to national labor or environmental agencies, but also may be included in legislation from other government bodies, e.g., ministries of oil and gas, mining, water resources, public health, etc. 

Also, there may be additional HSE requirements imposed by state, provincial, municipal and industrial estate bodies.

Finally, international agreements can, in some cases, also directly affect corporate HSE requirements, so do not forget to identify those that have been ratified by your country (see these earlier blog posts for a review of such agreements: What Asian Businesses Need to Know About International OHS Agreements and What Asian Businesses Need to Know About Multilateral Environmental Agreements.

Step 3: Identify the Relevant Articles and Clauses

Once you have the laws and regulations in place, the hard (and tedious) work begins. You now need to go through each piece of legislation and identify each article that pertains to HSE.  A word/pdf search for keywords such as environment, pollution, worker, health, safety is helpful here.

You will find that some Articles are very specific to a single HSE topic and/or requirement while others are general in nature or have many different sub-clauses that refer to different topics and/or requirements. In any case, identify each Article and the specific clause(s) that references HSE requirements and record those in the Summary worksheet.  Check out a few examples below from the Afghanistan register:

Step 4: Fill in the HSE Register

Fill in each row of the “Requirements” worksheet with one Article/Clause/Section or part thereof if there are many different requirements. Note that in some cases the same Article may have multiple requirements for different categories, e.g., both worker health and safety and environmental protection. In these cases, enter that Article twice, once for each category.

This is easier to grasp by looking at some examples from the HSE Legal Register for Afghanistan:

Note that I suggest that for completeness that all HSE articles are included at this stage, even ones that you know are not specifically applicable to your facility. Two reasons for this: (1) company’s modify processes, make changes, and expand so what is not relevant today may be relevant in the future, and (2) it is much easier to include at this stage then to try to go back through all legislation in the future to try to find if there are any other missing Articles.

Step 5: Customize the HSE Register

The final step in developing the HSE Legal Register is to customize it for your needs – or more precisely your company’s needs.

During this step you will identify those Articles that are specific to your operations and provide justification for those that are not applicable; enter this into the last two columns of the "Requirements" worksheet.   Make sure to add sufficient detail so that a third party can readily understand your reasoning behind inclusion or exclusion of an Article.

Congratulations - You're Done!

That’s all there is to it.

Now, feel free to download Redlog’s free HSE Legal Register Template.

This is more than a blank template, indeed, it is a complete HSE Legal Register for Afghanistan. So, for those of you lucky enough to  be working in Afghanistan feel free to use our HSE Legal register.  All you will need to do is customize it (Step 5) for your specific needs. For those of you in other countries, feel free to use this as a template.  You can review the Afghanistan register to give an idea of how much detail is required.

Admittedly, I did overstate the simplicity of developing such the register.  A legal register for Afghanistan is was pretty much as simple as there is – because of the paucity of laws and regulations - and yet even that one takes considerable time and effort to produce.   The time required and complexity would increase many fold for those preparing a register from scratch for a more developed country with more comprehensive HSE laws and regulations.   But, if you have the time, desire and expertise, I encourage you to consider doing this yourself as you will learn a lot and gain considerable knowledge that will be helpful in your career.

And, of course if you need help, contact Redlog and we will be pleased to provide customized HSE Legal Registers for your needs!

What About HSE Compliance Auditing?

Good question and this is the topic for next week’s blog post. In that post we will discuss the types of implementing measure to ensure compliance and how to carry out an internal audit for HSE compliance at your facility.

Thanks for reading.  Keep safe.  Be healthy.  Respect your environment.

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Next Week’s Blog Topic: How to Carry Out Your Own HSE Compliance Audit

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