Posted By Alex W Falconer
Leerob
Having worked in similar situation as yourself (domestic gas central heating industry), there is nothing wrong with doing a desktop risk assessment, and making this document a generic one taking into consideration all the hazards the employee may come across.
Once this has been completed you can cross reference to specific risk assessments that are required under their own regulations, ie Manual Handling, Coshh, etc
Now we come to the key point, as each property differs from one another, ie location of services (main supplies, junction boxes, etc), tenants (old, young, pets, etc) your surveyors should be Site/Task Risk Assessing the property when deciding the nature of the works requiring to be done. This info is additional to the general & specific hazards already identified by the generic risk assessment, and needs not be elaborate (ie a tickbox check risk assessment)
Using an example from previous role would be, based on the nature of the job was to install new gas central heating systems. The generic would identify one key issue as being the old central heating system hot water tank being removed, obviously this would be a manual handling issue, therefore cross referenced over to the manual handling assessment, generally these tanks were all of similar sizes and weights. What the site RA would then identify additional hazards posed by the location of these (always differed from property to property), some located up high, some floor standing, some in cupboards, some in loft spaces etc
Apologies for being long winded, but I am sure you will get my drift. At least the main concept is to save repeating the same RA's over and over, once the key Generic & Specific RA's are in place, then the only work that is required is the site RA's completed by surveyors or supervisors or managers (or whatever) and that these are passed to the installation teams prior to commencing the job.
Hope this helps
Alex