Lone Working on Remote Sites: What the Law Expects and How Vygard Delivers It

Remote and rural sites concentrate every lone-working risk in one place: dangerous work, no colleagues in earshot, patchy signal and long distances from help. This guide covers what UK law actually expects of employers — and walks through, in practical detail, how Vygard turns those duties into a working system. Last updated: July 2026. What the law expects The Health and Safety at Work Act and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations don't ban lone working — they require you to assess its risks and control them. In practice the HSE expects four things: a risk assessment that specifically considers working alone, a means for the worker to summon help, a way of knowing the worker is okay, and a tested plan for what happens when they are not. Most incidents that end badly fail on the last two. How Vygard covers the "are they okay?" duty Scheduled check-ins. Workers start a lone-working session in the app and confirm they are safe at intervals matched to the risk — every 30 minutes for chainsaw work, every 2 hours for low-risk site visits. Miss a check-in and the system starts chasing: first the worker, then the escalation tree. Man-down detection. The phone's sensors detect a fall or sudden impact followed by no movement, and raise the alarm without the worker touching anything — the scenario check-ins alone can't cover. Panic activation. A deliberate SOS that fires the full escalation immediately, with live location attached. Low-signal design. Sessions and alerts are engineered around the reality of remote sites — the system distinguishes "no signal for a while" from "no response", so a blackspot doesn't trigger a false emergency and a real emergency doesn't hide inside one. The escalation tree: where most systems fall down An alert that lands in an unwatched inbox is not a safety system. In Vygard every alert walks a defined tree — buddy first, then supervisor, then on-call manager, then (where contracted) professional response — with each step time-boxed and every action logged. Who was notified, when, who acknowledged, what they did: it is all on the record, which is precisely what an HSE inspector or insurer asks for after an incident. Our earlier post on Vygard's AI dispatch covers how the platform decides and routes those next steps intelligently. Sector apps, not generic software Vygard is rolling out as sector-specific apps — forestry first, with agriculture, security, utilities and field services following. The difference is practical: a forestry crew gets felling-appropriate check-in cadences and terminology; a security officer gets patrol-friendly workflows. Same platform, shaped to the job. Making it stick on real sites The systems that work are the ones workers actually use. Three lessons from deployments: set check-in intervals with the crew rather than for them; pair the app with device policy (a lone-worker system on a phone that lives in the van is theatre); and test the escalation quarterly like a fire drill. Lone-worker compliance sits naturally alongside the site security and monitoring we already provide. For Vygard pilots or sector partnerships, talk to our team.