News Update 

This week, the Safewell team put down their laptops, picked up some cutlery, and did something we don’t do nearly often enough: stopped to celebrate. It’s been twenty years since Safewell first opened its doors – or more accurately, since Nick Evans opened his home office and decided the world of occupational health and safety needed a shake-up.

It’s a milestone with a bittersweet edge. Nick, who founded the business in 2006 after a decade in corporate health and safety, passed away unexpectedly two years ago. His long-time colleague and business partner, Gail Farrow, has since stepped into the role of managing director – and the 13-strong Safewell team has carried the business forward together ever since.

Nick and Gail’s story actually goes back even further than Safewell itself. The pair first worked together in 1998 at Cardinal Health in Swindon, where Gail led the Occupational Health & Safety team and Nick joined two years later. What started as a working relationship became a genuine friendship – and eventually, a shared mission. Nick, a Chartered Safety Practitioner, left corporate life determined to build something different: health and safety advice that was practical, plain-spoken, and free of unnecessary jargon. Gail joined him soon after to lead the occupational health side, bringing a nursing background and a hard-earned set of postgraduate qualifications in health, safety and employment law.

By 2010, the business had outgrown Nick’s home office and moved into a new home at Templars Way Industrial Estate in Royal Wootton Bassett. Along the way, Nick’s contribution to the industry was formally recognised when he was named Wiltshire Business Person of the Year for Medium-Sized Businesses in 2019.

“Nick had a gift for making health and safety feel human,” says Gail. “He believed in straight talking and common sense over box-ticking, and that’s still exactly what we do. The team has kept that spirit alive every single day. This anniversary is a celebration of everything we’ve worked towards – with Nick, and in the two years since.”

It’s a sentiment that runs right through the business. Safewell was never built to be the biggest name in health and safety – its aim was to be a reliable, straightforward one. Twenty years on, that founding idea hasn’t changed, even as the company itself has grown well beyond a spare room in Nick’s house.

“Twenty years is a serious achievement for any business, and we’re incredibly proud to have reached it,” Gail adds. “It’s thanks to the culture Nick and I set out to create together, and an amazing team who’ve backed each other through the hardest of times as well as the good ones.”

Here’s to the next twenty.​