Est. 1945
About NLHSG
Founded 1945. Eighty-one years of peer-led workplace safety in North Lincolnshire.
We are one of the longest continuously running voluntary health and safety groups in the United Kingdom, bringing local employers together to share what works, learn from each other, and raise the standard of workplace safety.
SGUK Silver
Alan Butler Award 2023
Our Purpose
Where the people doing the work meet the people doing the work
NLHSG exists to connect health and safety practitioners and the businesses that employ them, from sole-trader consultants to major industrial sites, and to cascade the latest guidance from the Health and Safety Executive into the local economy in a practical, peer-to-peer way.
We complement, not compete with, the national bodies. We are the room where local conversation produces better safety outcomes.
Our Story
Eight decades and counting
We were formed in 1945, in a Scunthorpe still rebuilding from the war, by employers and inspectors who believed that local conversation produced better safety outcomes than national pronouncement alone. We have run continuously ever since.
NLHSG was founded in 1945 with the help and advice of the Area Factory Inspectorate and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). We were among the first wave of voluntary local safety groups established across the UK in the post-war industrial recovery, alongside roughly eighty sister groups nationally.
From the very start, our remit was to bring local employers together, share guidance from the Factory Inspectorate (and later the Health and Safety Executive), and improve safety outcomes, particularly for the small and medium enterprises that didn't have an in-house safety function.
Through the second half of the twentieth century the Group settled into its rhythm: monthly meetings hosted in turn by member organisations, an Annual Conference, and a flagship Annual Awards Dinner that recognised excellence across the local industrial base. Members were drawn from across Scunthorpe and North Lincolnshire's manufacturing, ports, logistics, construction, chemicals and steel sectors, with the councils, colleges and trade unions in regular attendance.
In 2020 we marked seventy-five years of continuous service. The Annual Awards Dinner was being planned when COVID arrived.
Like every local safety group across the UK, we faced our greatest test. Meetings could not happen; members were focused on the survival of their own businesses; the in-person format that had served us for seventy-five years was paused.
The committee under former Chairman Rob Knowles kept the Group alive through the difficult years, restarted in-person meetings as soon as it was responsible to do so, reinstated the Annual Awards, and in 2024 handed over to a new generation of committee members. We are now operating under a new cadence, a new portal, and a new vision for the next decade.
In 2023 NLHSG was awarded Silver in the Safety Groups UK Excellence Awards, the Alan Butler Award, narrowly missing Gold. This recognition stands as testament to the persistence of our outgoing committee and the value of what we do.
Three things, well.
What We Do
Leadership
Our Committee
NLHSG is run, as it always has been, by volunteers who hold full-time roles in the safety profession and the local business community. Elected at the AGM each May.
Interested in contributing? Get in touch.
A note on our renewal
The Group came through the pandemic years, recognised its successes and its challenges honestly, and chose renewal. The committee that handed over in 2024 left us with a clear-eyed picture of what works, the SGUK Silver recognition that proves the value of what we do, and a willing membership ready for the next chapter.
We are now busy writing it.