New UK Safeguarding Rules Leave HR Accountable For Details It Cannot See Alone
This is not just driven by HR. This is actually something that is understood as collective accountability. Moving away from blame and a culture of us and them is going to pay off.
Elena Laguna
Founder
Rewired. People Impact, Unlocked.
The person accountable for deciding whether a new safeguarding rule applies to a role may be the person least equipped to see how that role actually works. UK charities and youth organizations are facing that problem right now. A change to the definition of regulated activity reaches them on September 1st, and determining which roles require an enhanced check means looking at what the person actually does rather than the job title on file.
Elena Laguna is the Founder of Rewired. People Impact, Unlocked., an HR and organizational development consultancy, and a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD. She has spent 15 years in the UK charity sector, most recently as a director at an ambulance service, working across regulated environments where checks, safeguarding, and work with young people are constant considerations. She now advises organizations going through transformation on their people, policies, and structures, which puts her close to the teams absorbing this change first.
“On paper it looks pretty straightforward. When you speak with those working with volunteers and young people, it can become quite complex and challenging,” Laguna says. The new definition of regulated activity removes the supervision exemption. A volunteer who teaches, instructs, or cares for children on more than three days in any 30-day period is now in regulated activity even when a staff member supervises them, which means the role requires an enhanced check with a children’s barred list check.
The hard calls are in the middle
While rule is straightforward, it’s work of applying it to real roles that gets hard. Take a volunteer who helps at a children’s music club twice a week, where an instructor is always present. Before September, that supervision could have kept the role outside regulated activity. After September, the same volunteer falls inside it because they instruct children often enough, and the check changes. A different volunteer helping once a month at the same club, under the same supervision, still sits outside the definition because the frequency isn’t there. From a distance the activity looks almost identical, and what separates the two is how often someone shows up and what they actually do when they’re there.
An HR business partner reading the legislation can’t see any of that, because the definition turns on frequency and on the nature of the contact, details of a role that live in a service manager’s head and never make it into a personnel file. Some roles are clearly inside the definition, but the ones close to the line need a risk assessment and a judgment call that depends on information HR doesn’t hold on its own.
The timing problem HR is inheriting
The operational guidance for charities arrived in June, and a reminder followed in August. That August reminder came in the middle of summer, when staff are on leave and youth volunteers may not return until the school year, leaving very little time to make a change of this scale.
“We all know how busy HR managers are, and when you are already working within very stretched environments, something like this can just make implementation really hard,” Laguna says. It lands on teams that are still rebuilding: BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Index puts nonprofit morale at an eNPS of 38 in the first half of 2026, recovered from a low of 30 in late 2024 but still only mid-pack among the sectors it tracks. In the charities she advises, the assessment of whether a role needs an enhanced check tends to land with HR rather than with the volunteer managers or line managers closer to the work, and it arrives while teams are already absorbing the Employment Rights Act 2025. The difficulty of the rule matters less than who has to interpret it and what they can see from where they sit.
Why the decision can’t sit with HR alone
HR is accountable for a call that depends on knowledge it doesn’t hold. The person reading the legislation understands the definition. The person who knows how often a volunteer actually turns up, and what they do once they’re there, is somewhere else in the organization. That split is the problem, and more time or a clearer flowchart doesn’t give HR the operational knowledge sitting elsewhere in the organization.
“HR managers are not going to know the specific details and practicalities of how those roles work on the ground. Those insights, you’re only going to get them if you engage with your service managers, with your line managers,” Laguna says. That makes the assessment process itself important. The organizations handling the change well bring managers into the assessment early instead of handing them a finished list of roles to check. When the decision arrives as something already settled, managers have no reason to treat it as theirs, and the people who could have flagged a misjudged role stay quiet. When they’re in the room while the picture is still forming, the assessment gets more accurate and the change stops feeling like something done to them.
In practice, that means a few concrete habits. Communicate with leaders and teams before every detail is settled. Bring the managers who run the roles into the assessment itself. Say openly when legal advice is being taken on the borderline cases.
HR still owns the decision. The managers who run the work need to supply the operational detail that determines whether it’s right.
A DBS check isn’t the whole of safeguarding
Safeguarding was never something HR could own on its own. If managers are essential to deciding whether a role even falls within regulated activity, the responsibility was shared from the start. A DBS check confirms a record, and it is worth doing well. It also can’t tell you the things that actually keep children safe day to day.
It says nothing about whether people feel able to speak up when something is wrong in a youth group, whether leaders act on the referrals that do come in, or whether bullying and toxic behavior get addressed before they take root. Those questions sit outside anything a criminal record check can tell you. Laguna’s argument is that the September deadline is a reason to look at all of it, not just the paperwork the law requires.
“This is not just driven by HR. This is actually something that is understood as collective accountability,” Laguna says. The September deadline is a chance to make that shared responsibility part of how the organization works, not just another box to tick. “Moving away from blame and a culture of us and them is going to pay off,” she says.
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TL;DR
Elena Laguna
Rewired. People Impact, Unlocked.
Founder
Founder
The person accountable for deciding whether a new safeguarding rule applies to a role may be the person least equipped to see how that role actually works. UK charities and youth organizations are facing that problem right now. A change to the definition of regulated activity reaches them on September 1st, and determining which roles require an enhanced check means looking at what the person actually does rather than the job title on file.
Elena Laguna is the Founder of Rewired. People Impact, Unlocked., an HR and organizational development consultancy, and a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD. She has spent 15 years in the UK charity sector, most recently as a director at an ambulance service, working across regulated environments where checks, safeguarding, and work with young people are constant considerations. She now advises organizations going through transformation on their people, policies, and structures, which puts her close to the teams absorbing this change first.
“On paper it looks pretty straightforward. When you speak with those working with volunteers and young people, it can become quite complex and challenging,” Laguna says. The new definition of regulated activity removes the supervision exemption. A volunteer who teaches, instructs, or cares for children on more than three days in any 30-day period is now in regulated activity even when a staff member supervises them, which means the role requires an enhanced check with a children’s barred list check.
The hard calls are in the middle
While rule is straightforward, it’s work of applying it to real roles that gets hard. Take a volunteer who helps at a children’s music club twice a week, where an instructor is always present. Before September, that supervision could have kept the role outside regulated activity. After September, the same volunteer falls inside it because they instruct children often enough, and the check changes. A different volunteer helping once a month at the same club, under the same supervision, still sits outside the definition because the frequency isn’t there. From a distance the activity looks almost identical, and what separates the two is how often someone shows up and what they actually do when they’re there.
An HR business partner reading the legislation can’t see any of that, because the definition turns on frequency and on the nature of the contact, details of a role that live in a service manager’s head and never make it into a personnel file. Some roles are clearly inside the definition, but the ones close to the line need a risk assessment and a judgment call that depends on information HR doesn’t hold on its own.
The timing problem HR is inheriting
The operational guidance for charities arrived in June, and a reminder followed in August. That August reminder came in the middle of summer, when staff are on leave and youth volunteers may not return until the school year, leaving very little time to make a change of this scale.
“We all know how busy HR managers are, and when you are already working within very stretched environments, something like this can just make implementation really hard,” Laguna says. It lands on teams that are still rebuilding: BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Index puts nonprofit morale at an eNPS of 38 in the first half of 2026, recovered from a low of 30 in late 2024 but still only mid-pack among the sectors it tracks. In the charities she advises, the assessment of whether a role needs an enhanced check tends to land with HR rather than with the volunteer managers or line managers closer to the work, and it arrives while teams are already absorbing the Employment Rights Act 2025. The difficulty of the rule matters less than who has to interpret it and what they can see from where they sit.
Why the decision can’t sit with HR alone
HR is accountable for a call that depends on knowledge it doesn’t hold. The person reading the legislation understands the definition. The person who knows how often a volunteer actually turns up, and what they do once they’re there, is somewhere else in the organization. That split is the problem, and more time or a clearer flowchart doesn’t give HR the operational knowledge sitting elsewhere in the organization.
“HR managers are not going to know the specific details and practicalities of how those roles work on the ground. Those insights, you’re only going to get them if you engage with your service managers, with your line managers,” Laguna says. That makes the assessment process itself important. The organizations handling the change well bring managers into the assessment early instead of handing them a finished list of roles to check. When the decision arrives as something already settled, managers have no reason to treat it as theirs, and the people who could have flagged a misjudged role stay quiet. When they’re in the room while the picture is still forming, the assessment gets more accurate and the change stops feeling like something done to them.
In practice, that means a few concrete habits. Communicate with leaders and teams before every detail is settled. Bring the managers who run the roles into the assessment itself. Say openly when legal advice is being taken on the borderline cases.
HR still owns the decision. The managers who run the work need to supply the operational detail that determines whether it’s right.
A DBS check isn’t the whole of safeguarding
Safeguarding was never something HR could own on its own. If managers are essential to deciding whether a role even falls within regulated activity, the responsibility was shared from the start. A DBS check confirms a record, and it is worth doing well. It also can’t tell you the things that actually keep children safe day to day.
It says nothing about whether people feel able to speak up when something is wrong in a youth group, whether leaders act on the referrals that do come in, or whether bullying and toxic behavior get addressed before they take root. Those questions sit outside anything a criminal record check can tell you. Laguna’s argument is that the September deadline is a reason to look at all of it, not just the paperwork the law requires.
“This is not just driven by HR. This is actually something that is understood as collective accountability,” Laguna says. The September deadline is a chance to make that shared responsibility part of how the organization works, not just another box to tick. “Moving away from blame and a culture of us and them is going to pay off,” she says.