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Helpdesk

The problem

'I work within the civil engineering services department of a local authority. We currently hold ISO 9001, are working towards ISO 14001 and intend to apply for PAS 99. Has anyone had any experience of keeping track of all the legal requirements for our type of work or any advice on a suitable source of information?'

Over to the expert

I suspect you are not the only person trying to introduce management systems that has asked this question, and you certainly will not be the last. Although PAS 99 is quite specific about the identification of legal requirements, so is ISO 9001 and ISO 14001. In fact, all the major management systems standards include compliance with legal requirements as a statutory duty for any organisation.

Traditionally, the job of maintaining information on legal requirements for any organisation has fallen to the legal department who then would issue updates when these were issued.

However, with the streamlining of activities in organisations and the introduction of management systems standards, this job has increasingly fallen to the management representative for the relevant standards. With PAS 99 all the legal requirements for all the management systems in the scope should be identified as required.

Clause 4.3.2 'Identification of legal and other requirements' states: 'The organisation shall establish, implement and maintain (a) procedure(s) to determine the legal and other requirements relating to its activities, products and services that are relevant to the scope of the management system and take them into account when establishing, implementing and maintaining its management system.'

Establishing and maintaining the appropriate legal requirements for the activities of the civil engineering department will not be easy to do alone. Anything to do with management systems and especially PAS 99 needs to be looked at by a small team of people. They will need the necessary background and expertise in the legal requirements that are relevant to the environment, as well as ensuring that the department meets the customers' requirements while remaining within the law. ISO 9001 mentions 'statutory and regulatory' requirements at least three times as relating to 'top management', 'design' and 'customer related processes'.

The establishment and maintenance of legal requirements is one of the main activities of ISO 14001. I would recommend reviewing the necessary legal requirements that would affect your organisation's environmental management system as well as your customers' needs, to ensure there is no duplication. Undoubtedly, there will also be additional requirements related to building regulations, construction activities of the civil engineering department and/or those related to the suppliers and sub-contractors.

Clause 4.5.2 from PAS 99 states: 'The organisation shall carry out periodic evaluations of compliance with legal requirements that are relevant to the scope of the management system and record the results.'

There is a requirement for legal compliance to be periodically evaluated. This is a good opportunity to test the integrated use of legal requirements that affect the department and its customers. It should be possible to evaluate how effective the integration of the systems by monitoring the duplication of compliance to legal requirements required by the different management systems used.

John Hele is global product manager at BSI Management Systems. For more information visit www.bsi-global.com/integratedmanagement