The lone-worker duty every agency already holds

If your branch sends a negotiator to an empty property to meet someone they've never met, you are running a lone-worker operation — whether or not anyone in the office would describe it that way. And lone working comes with a legal duty that sits on the employer, not the employee. Most agencies meet it informally, which is another way of saying they don't really meet it at all.

What the law actually requires

The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places a general duty on employers to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of their employees. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 then require a suitable and sufficient risk assessment of the work being done. The Health and Safety Executive is explicit that lone working is not banned — but it must be assessed and controlled like any other hazard.

That phrase "so far as is reasonably practicable" matters. It doesn't mean you have to eliminate all risk. It means you weigh the risk against the time, cost and effort of controlling it, and you put proportionate measures in place. For a task as routine and as exposed as a solo viewing, the bar for "proportionate" is not high — which is exactly why falling short of it looks negligent after the fact.

Where agencies typically fall short

The common failure isn't malice or even carelessness. It's that the controls live in someone's head rather than in a system. A few patterns recur:

• No written risk assessment. The risk is acknowledged in conversation but never documented, so there's nothing to point to and nothing to improve.
• "Text me when you're done." A check-out that relies on the worker remembering, and a manager noticing the silence, is not a control. It fails precisely when it's needed.
• No way to summon help fast. A phone in a pocket is not an alarm if the worker can't reach it, and a number that rings out at 7pm is not a response.
• No record afterwards. If you can't show who went where, when, and that they got out safely, you can't demonstrate you discharged the duty.

"Most viewings are fine" is true. It is also exactly the reasoning that leaves you exposed on the one that isn't.

Self-employed and contract workers don't remove the duty

A frequent misunderstanding: agencies assume that using self-employed viewers or contractors hands the safety obligation to someone else. It doesn't, cleanly. Where you direct the work, control how and when it's done, and benefit from it, duties under health and safety law can still reach you. The honest approach is to make sure the people doing visits on your behalf are protected, regardless of how they're engaged — because the reputational and legal fallout from an incident won't politely stop at a contract boundary.

What a defensible arrangement looks like

You don't need a security operation. You need a small set of controls that are used every time and produce a trail:

• A documented risk assessment for solo visits, reviewed when circumstances change.
• Arrival and departure check-in, where a missed check-out automatically prompts a human to follow up within minutes.
• Live location for the duration of the visit, so help can be directed to a precise point, not a guess.
• A one-tap SOS that escalates to someone who can actually respond, with location and context attached.
• An audit log capturing who attended, when, and that they left safely — generated automatically, not reconstructed.

How Seeky builds the duty in

This is the part most agencies dread setting up, and the part Seeky treats as default. Every Seeker is ID-verified, DBS-checked and insured, and every single job runs through arrival check-in, live location, automatic check-out and a one-tap SOS that escalates to a monitored response. The trail is produced for you, so the question "can you show you protected the person you sent?" has an immediate answer.

The result is twofold. The person attending is genuinely safe rather than hoping for the best, and your branch meets its obligation with evidence to back it up — which is what insurers, staff and landlords increasingly expect. It pairs naturally with the practical controls covered in keeping lone viewers safe.

The duty is already yours. The cheapest time to put real controls behind it is before you need them. See how Seeky keeps every visit safe and auditable.