Carry out a workplace risk assessment

Every employer must assess the risks their work creates, from the day they take on staff, whatever their size or sector.

The assessment must be suitable and sufficient. In practice that means it covers the significant hazards in your actual workplace and the people who could be harmed by them, and it is proportionate to the risk. You do not need to list every trivial risk, and an office needs a different assessment from a chemical plant. You can do it yourself or appoint a competent person to help you.

Carry out the assessment

1. Walk round the workplace and look at how people work, which equipment and substances they use and the state of the premises. Check your accident and ill-health records, and include non-routine work such as maintenance and cleaning.
2. Look for hazards to health as well as to safety, such as manual handling, chemicals and causes of work-related stress.
3. For each hazard, work out who could be harmed and how, whether they are employees, contractors, visitors or members of the public. Ask your employees, who often know where the real risks are.
4. Judge how likely harm is and how serious it could be, and compare that with the controls you already have.
5. Decide what further action each risk needs, who will do it and by when.

You are not expected to remove every risk, but you must do everything reasonably practicable to protect people from harm. That means balancing the level of risk against the money, time and trouble needed to control it. Copying a generic template or example without adapting it does not satisfy the law.

Choose the controls

Regulation 4 requires you to base every preventive and protective measure on the general principles of prevention in Schedule 1. In practice you work down a hierarchy, starting by removing the hazard and using personal protective equipment only when nothing higher up the list is reasonably practicable.

Record the findings

Review it

If a review shows changes are needed, you must make them. Also check that the controls you have put in place are working.

Assess risks to young people and to new and expectant mothers

You must not employ anyone under 18 unless you have first assessed the risks to young people, taking particular account of their inexperience, lack of awareness of risks and immaturity.

If women of child-bearing age work for you and the work could put a new or expectant mother or her baby at risk, your assessment must cover that risk. A new or expectant mother is an employee who is pregnant, has given birth within the previous six months or is breastfeeding.

If you do not comply