COSHH Risk Assessment Guidance Notes

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A risk assessment is a careful examination of what could cause harm to people in the workplace.

Doing a risk assessment will help employers identify the significant risks in their workplace, and avoid wasted effort by effectively targeting these.

A good risk assessment will help avoid accidents and ill health, which can not only ruin lives, but can also increase costs to business through lost output, compensation claims and higher insurance premiums.

Employers have a legal obligation to protect their health and safety and that of their workforce. Regulation 3, of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, requires, among other things, that all employers assess the risks to the health and safety of their employees while they are at work.

Guidance Notes Tool

Christeyns have developed an online tool to guide users towards creating their own Task Based Risk Assessments.

The example risk assessment generated by the tool, shows the kind of approach a small business might take. It can be used as a guide to think through some of the hazards in your business and the steps you need to take to control the risks.

Every business is different - you need to think about the hazards and controls your business needs. Even where the hazards are the same, the control measures you adopt may have to be different from those in the examples to meet the particular conditions in your workplace.

Please note that it is not a generic risk assessment that you can just put your company name on and adopt wholesale without any thought. This would not satisfy the law – and would not be effective in protecting people.