A huge share of grounds work is done alone: one person, one mower, a site with no phone signal and nobody due past till Thursday. Lone working is legal and normal — but the law expects you to have thought about it, and the trade's real risks make that worth doing properly, not as paperwork.
What the law actually requires
There's no ban on lone working. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act and the Management Regulations, an employer (including a self-employed contractor for their own safety) must assess the risks of lone work specifically and put reasonable measures in place. The HSE's guidance (INDG73) is the reference. In practice that means: identify which jobs and sites are higher-risk alone, decide which tasks shouldn't be done alone, and run some means of monitoring — a person who notices when a lone worker doesn't come back.
Higher-risk-alone tasks in this trade: chainsaw work (industry standard: never alone), work at height, machinery on slopes and banks, chemical handling, and remote sites with no signal.
The real failure mode
It isn't usually the dramatic accident — it's the ordinary one with nobody there: a rolled ankle in a far field, a mower on a slope, heat exhaustion in July, a diabetic episode. The difference between an incident and a tragedy is how long until someone notices. A "my partner would eventually wonder" plan is not a system; hours matter.
A workable system, in layers
1. Visibility: the office (or a designated buddy) should know where every lone worker is now — which site, since when. If your job system tracks clock-ins per site, this exists already; the SwardOps live view shows who's on site where, updated as crews clock in and out.
2. Rhythm: the day has natural heartbeats — clock in, start task, travel, clock out. A lone worker who clocked in at 7:40 and has produced silence since is a signal worth noticing. Agree what "worryingly quiet" means and who checks.
3. Alarm: a one-press SOS beats any phone call when things go wrong — SwardOps puts one on the crew app (reachable from the lock screen on the native builds) that alerts the whole team with live location. For frequent no-signal sites, a dedicated satellite communicator or lone-worker device is the belt-and-braces layer.
4. Escalation: write down (one paragraph) what happens when a check-in fails: call, wait ten minutes, call again, drive out or call 999 with the site's what3words. Everyone should know the paragraph exists.
Signal dead zones
Plenty of grounds sites have no coverage at all — plan for it rather than around it. Know before the visit that the site is a dead zone (record it against the site), agree fixed check-in times from the nearest coverage, and treat the higher-risk-alone tasks as two-person on those sites. Where lone visits to dead zones are routine, the £200 satellite communicator stops being optional kit.
Make it real, not laminated
The test of a lone-working policy isn't the document — it's whether anyone would actually notice within the hour if your quietest worker didn't clock out today. If the honest answer is no, fix the noticing first; the paperwork can catch up.