Answers to many of the frequently asked questions on risk assessment, following HSE 5 Steps guidance and the implications of the legal obligations imposed by the Health & Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and statutory instruments

There are a lot of myths about risk assessment, which this article will hopefully clarify for you. We all assess risk, every day, either consciously and/or sub-consciously. When you drive a car, your brain is (hopefully) assessing the risks and controlling the car in response to the hazards perceived on the road. Clearly this is not a formal written risk assessment, but the hazard awareness and informal risk assessment processing in your brain forms an essential control measure.

In general, risk assessment is the process by which hazards are identified and assessed for a given situation, such as a place of work, or a work activity. The purpose of the risk assessment is to identify the hazards that need to be controlled to reduce the risk of harm being caused to a tolerable level.

There is a legal requirement under the Management of Health & Safety at Work Regulations (MHSWR) to undertake risk assessments. The HSE publication "5 Steps to Risk Assessment" is a good practical and simple guide. There are also obligations under some hazard specific legislation to carry out risk assessments e.g. COSHH, Manual Handling, Fire, Display Screen Equipment, Confined spaces etc.

The absence of any risk assessment is a clear indication of legal non-compliance and inadequate safety management. You would have no defence in a Court of Law.

You need to decide which situations (workplaces and work activities) justify separate risk assessments. This will depend upon the complexity of your organisation’s undertakings. One common difficulty is deciding the level of detail required and whether generic type risk assessments suffice. A good generic risk assessment will cover 95% of the situations that might arise and provide an excellent framework for deciding what safeguards you need to put in place.

HSE guidance warns against over complicating your risk assessments. Avoid producing excessively long repetitive risk assessments. Remember the objective of the risk assessment – to identify whether further safeguards are required to reduce the risk of harm to a tolerable level. In law, they need to be "suitable and sufficient".

One approach is to consider the main activities that your organisation undertakes. A single risk assessment for office based work might suffice. If you carry out construction work a single risk assessment for construction work is unlikely to suffice, due to the variability, complexity and often hazardous nature of construction type work. So in this situation you might need to drill down to activities such as "Working at height", "Working in Confined spaces", "Working with Electricity", etc.

Once you have identified the scope of the risk assessment, you can identify the hazards. A hazard is anything that can cause harm, such as chemicals, electricity, slippery floor, sharp object etc.

Having identified the hazards, you need to consider who might be harmed. For example, it may be your employees, a group of employees, it may be a visitor, a member of the public, or a contractor you employ, such as a window cleaner.

You then need to assess the risk. Risk is normally defined by considering the severity of the possible outcome, and the likelihood of that outcome. Outcomes are usually categorised as one of the following, Fatality, Major Injury, RIDDOR, or Minor Injury. Likelihood is usually expressed qualitatively by phrases such as, Highly unlikely, Unlikely, Possible, Probable or Highly likely. These can be tagged with quantitative values to express the perceived probability per person exposed. The combination of outcome severity and likelihood can then be used to identify whether it is a LOW, MEDIUM or HIGH risk. Matrices are often used. It is easy to get "paralysis by analysis" when assessing risk, due to the entirely subjective nature of risk assessment. For example, the perceived outcome for a slip hazard could be a minor injury (bruised knee) from one assessor to a major head injury from another. The important point to remember is the objective of the risk assessment – to identify whether further safeguards are required to reduce the risk of harm to a tolerable level, and this leads on to the crux of the Risk Assessment process.

You need to list your current safeguards, which may be physical items such as barriers, personal protective equipment, or non physical items such as Safe Working Instructions, skills and competencies.

You then need to determine whether your existing safeguards are adequate, bearing in mind the level of risk. This can be a difficult judgement to make, especially where risk reduction measures could incur considerable costs. Help is sometimes available in the form of Approved Codes of Practice. See Employers quick guide to safety legislation.

n the event of a serious accident it is likely that it will be investigated by the Health & Safety Executive. They are likely to examine your risk assessment(s). They will consider whether the Risk Assessment(s) are "suitable and sufficient". Ask yourself if you’d feel comfortable justifying your decision in a Court of Law – do you honestly believe your specified safeguards reduced the risk of harm to a tolerable level and you can persuade the Judge?