NeatHouse Partners
Health & Safety Risk Assessments
We help businesses of all sizes overcome their health and safety challenges in the workplace
- Identify hazards
- Identify who might be harmed
- Establish a risk value, the likelihood of accidents, and if the existing risk controls are sufficient
- Record the findings
- Monitor
- Review regularly
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What is a Health and Safety Risk Assessment?
A risk assessment is a process that identifies, assesses and controls the hazards in your workplace.
By mitigating the risk or eliminating the hazard altogether, you can create a safer environment for your employees to thrive.
As an employer, it is a legal requirement under the Management of Health Safety Regulation 1999, Regulation 3 to conduct health and safety risk assessments to ensure the safety of employees and the general public.
Who should conduct a Risk assessment?
This should be what is known as ‘a competent person’.
‘A competent person’ is defined as someone with sufficient training and knowledge of evaluating hazards in the workplace.
Questions you should raise when determining a suitable competent person should be:
- What relevant training have they had?
- What practical knowledge and experience do they have in managing workplace health and safety?
- Can they develop solutions to problems related to health and safety?
If you lack the resources to manage health and safety internally, the HSE (Health and Safety Executive) recommend appointing an external specialist.
Suppose you cannot answer the questions above with confidence. In that case, you or the nominated competent person are not suitable.
Types of Risk Assessments
Not everything in your business will fall under a generic risk assessment, certain hazards require specific risk assessments such as:
- Fire Safety Risk Assessments, following recently published legislation must be conducted for all non-domestic premises
- COSHH (Controlled Substances Hazardous to Heath) risk assessments are required by law for handling all hazardous substances and that does not mean collecting the safety data sheet (SDS) for the product makes you compliant.
- Manual handling Risk Assessments focus on specific tasks, including the handling load, persons involved and working environment
There are many more tasks that require a specific risk assessment, thankfully, our Health & Safety consultants can help with them.
How to Carry out a Risk Assessment
It can seem like a daunting task, but thankfully, the process can be broken down into smaller, more manageable steps using this six-step approach:
- Identify hazards
- Identify who might be harmed
- Establish a risk value, the likelihood of accidents, and if the existing risk controls are sufficient
- Record the findings
- Monitor
- Review regularly
As an employer, you have a legal duty to reduce all risks by eliminating or lowering the risk level to something “reasonably practicable”.
Although you are not expected to eradicate all risks, what is expected is you identify and implement sensible and proportionate control measures to keep risks to a minimum.
Need help with your Risk Assessments?
All you have to do is give us a call at 01244 893776. Our team can then do everything they can to help you out.