The sixteen-year-old in the warehouse, the apprentice on the wash bay, the school leaver shadowing the fitters - transport employs plenty of under-18s, and the law treats them differently from adults for good reason: young workers get hurt more, because they lack the experience that reads danger. HSE’s young-workers guidance sets out what the employer must do before and after they start.
Young people are not small adults at work. They may be inexperienced, immature in their judgement of risk, unaware of how to raise concerns, and eager to impress - a combination that turns the ordinary yard into a different risk profile: the forklift they did not want to admit they could not operate, the trailer they climbed because nobody said not to, the chemical they splashed because the training assumed knowledge they never had. The statistics follow the logic: young workers feature disproportionately in workplace injuries, which is exactly why the law adds duties rather than subtracting them.
The employer’s obligations start before the first shift. The risk assessment: HSE expects the workplace risk assessment to consider young people specifically - the hazards of the job assessed against a young person’s inexperience and immaturity, with the work, supervision and training matched to what the assessment finds. Some work may be ruled out entirely for under-18s on the back of it; other work proceeds with closer supervision and clearer limits. The induction and training: introducing the young person to the workplace properly - the rules, the hazards, the people to ask - with ongoing training rather than a first-morning download. The supervision: a named, competent person watching the work at a level the assessment says is needed. And the communication duty: the guidance reaches beyond the gate to parents, carers, schools and colleges - for work experience and younger placements, the adults around the young person are part of the safety loop.
In a transport business the hot spots are predictable: yard work around moving vehicles, workshop tasks with machinery and substances, and any driving-related duty. The practical approach that satisfies the regime: put young starters on the structured work - the apprentice framework, the supervised stores role, the mentored workshop placement - rather than the loose labouring jobs where nobody owns their day; brief the whole team, because the young worker’s safety partly depends on the experienced staff around them knowing what the assessment allows; and review after the first weeks, because the assessment written for a nervous sixteen-year-old needs adjusting as competence grows.
Under-18s get specific protection because inexperience is itself a hazard: assess the work for the young person before they start, induct and train them properly, supervise to the assessment, and keep parents and schools in the loop for placements. Done well, the young-worker rules are simply good management of the industry’s next generation.
Most transport under-18s arrive through apprenticeships, and the framework helps: the training provider shares the development duty, the placement is structured, and the risk assessment conversation has a natural home. But the legal duties stay with the employer - the apprentice on your yard is your young worker, whatever the paperwork calls the arrangement. The fleets that run young starters well treat the first months as a formal phase: the assessment reviewed monthly, the supervisor named and briefed, the near-miss conversation encouraged rather than teased out. The industry’s driver and fitter shortages make the young pipeline strategically precious; the young-worker rules are simply the craft of not breaking it on entry.
Assess the work for the young person before day one, induct properly, supervise to the assessment, and treat inexperience itself as the hazard the law says it is. The under-18 in the yard is the industry’s future - the young-worker rules are how the industry avoids breaking its own pipeline at the door.
The youngest workers arrive as work experience - a fortnight from school, sometimes younger than sixteen - and the duties compress rather than disappear: the placement needs its own risk assessment, the school or college is part of the loop, and the supervision is at its tightest because the young person knows least. The transport businesses that host placements well - and the industry needs hosts, because the placement is where teenagers meet the trade - run them as designed experiences: structured days, safe observation points, real tasks within the assessment’s limits, and someone accountable for the student every hour of the fortnight. Done badly it is a liability; done well it is the cheapest recruiting the sector has.