Legal requirement r3 Management Regs. Need to do a R/A before you can write a SSOW or SOP - the two are hand in hand, to train the staff against and obtain a signature, to pull out of a filing cabinet to mitigate an EL claim and get 20% reduction when settle on contrib. To keep me in work until I decide to retire.

^^ Bet you didn't know any of that did you Super Forum User Invictus. Yawn.

As above and: It's a tool to help someone organise their thoughts regarding Health and Safety risks/ hazards in a formal way. So that they can either pass on the information or demonstrate to others they have considered all the significant issues.

Sounds likes a test or interview question to me!? :P

It's not an interview question, it comes about through refresher training and the people they are supposed to be aimed at either not being bothered or not understanding them, some said they are to complicated and some said there's to much information for them to be bothered reading them. Ours are basic, but then we have to ask ourselves do they meet the legal requirements, should we have two, one for the employees and one for the employers to defend cases, (my head hurts). I always understood that they were a working document that are applied to the working situation. Fire risk assessments are an empoyees tool to ensure compliance as are the above, but then how do you translate this to the person who is working or visiting, do they need to know that there are dampers in the air system to ensure fire/smoke doesn't pass from one area to another, what the walls are made off, are fire doors fitted that give 30, 60 or 90 minutes I've never seen anyone wait that long to check the fire resistance of the door. Shouldn't they be written in plain language so that the people who need them understand them.

thought id put my ten pence worth in and hopefully take this topic in a slightly different direction. To start with "acts and statutes are only given the force of law by the consent of the goverened" That statment in itself is another whole discussion point but bear with me. So employers complete Risk Assessments (in a formal written format) and should deliver these to employees. This empowers employees to either agree or disagree with the control measures in place, highlight any difficeincies (no ones perfect) when employees are happy with the risk assessment employers request thier signature. At the signature stage a contract (joinder) has been agreed. So further down the line, should a job go the way of the pear and there is serious injury harm or loss the employer can defend themselves by claiming employee has consented and agreed that the employer had fulfilled its duty of care. Heres where the earlier statement gets interesting "the law" refers to the "law of the land". and the "law" of the land states that so long as an individual is not causing any harm injury or loss OR fraud then they are considered law abiding. Remember "acts and statutes are only given the force of law by the consent of the goverened" so when asking employees to sign RA we are asking them to enter into contract with the employee. To highlight a point here is a test for you to answer truthfully how many believe you own your car? how many of you have ever been stopped by the police and when done so did said police man ask you your name? have a look on your birth certificate, ever wondered why it says "not proof of ID". its all a game and like any game as long as you play by the rules there will be no drama

Can #13 There is a flip side to your point (which I agree with) in the fact that the more learned will ask for a R/A as a means to an end. Perhaps they have not been able to secure CapEx for an improvement or something similar. We all know that a R/A can be manipulated to say/score whatever it 'needs' to be. OK, you could argue that it would not satisfy the suitable and sufficient test if ever 'tried' but as you allude to in the case of a 'high risk assessment' being stapled to the back of a CapEx document, it probably won't get read anyway.

I hate doing risk assessments. Just saying...........

Our RA's are in two parts. The first is the Ra compiled by myself or a manager, the second part is for the employee to add to should the need arise. If the hazards are there then the person charged with doing the work should know of them.

one great thing about risk assessments is that they provide an employer and an employee with knowledge as without knowledge how can a business run and in many cases allows money to be saved as work can be made more cost effective as well as safe etc. - the comment 'money saved' will get a managers attention!!!

Invictus: #10: "Shouldn't they be written in plain language so that the people who need them understand them." #19: "if we do not make them usere friendly and ensure that all employees understand what is expected of them" It is not the purpose of the Risk Assessment to instruct or inform the employee. The employer has overarching duties to provide suitable and sufficient supervision along with comprehensible information, instruction and training.The Risk Assessment can itself challenge the suitability of these elements! The R/A will not necessarily describe a whole safe system of work. Reading a document doesn't mean comprehension and it certainly doesn't make me competent. Irrespective of the simplicity of language, the employee may not be able to read. In my own experience, attempts to use R/A to perform a dual function (management tool and method of instruction/provision of information) usually fails - badly.

Invictus, I tend to agree. It is neither the end of the story nor the complete story. Risk assessment is NOT an end in itself, although I suspect that many think it is. The majority of us will already know what the law is and what it is SUPPOSED to deliver, but I would suggest that there is something of a gap between the theory and the reality on the ground. The key issue to me is what is it actually doing for most businesses? I would suggest that there is a wide range of answers to that. Some might argue that it has been a largely ineffective tool and that it hasn’t in many cases achieved what the architects set out to achieve. I believe that the European Agency for Health and safety at Work themselves recognised that risk assessment was not delivering the necessary outcomes and a few years ago this became a 2 year project to try and demystify the process. And as Damel at #14 has suggested, some will use it as their own means to end, and arguably if that is a positive outcome then I guess that it might be argued that it has done it’s job. However, overall, time and again I see people do risk assessments and then consider this to be ‘job done’ (the end in itself) The sad fact is that many are not robust enough to deliver real management of risk and others simply totally fail to deliver the outcome of the assessment into the work place in order to actually manage the risks that they have assessed.

The intent of performing a risk assessment is to measure risk. The measurement process should provide an output that falls somewhere on a scale between absolute safety (no injury is possible) and certainty of death (the worst possible outcome). Therefore risk assessment is a only a measurement tool. I think there are two schools of thought, optimistic and pessimistic. The optimist looks at the risk from the perspective that once a control set is implemented the risk virtually disappears or reaches ALARP. The pessimist looks at the risk from the perspective that controls are needed, where hazards exist, but that controls can fail to have the desired effect. Coming from a design background, when looking at OH&S risks I believe the pessimistic route provides the opportunity to have a better understanding of risk. In ordinary language, risk is about measuring the the effect of failure on the objective of keeping workers safe. The hierarchy of controls is based on the principle that some types of controls are less prone to failure than others. The regulatory requirements and the resulting process documentation should not be the objectives. Rather, once a suitable risk assessment process has been completed those items will simply exist. Therefore the outcome of a risk assessment should result in an indication of the amount of risk, an opportunity to decide where the risk can be reduced, a document, compliance with regulatory requirements, and most importantly the framework that guides the implementation of risk controls. On the topic of presenting the result directly to the workers, I find that there is very little to gain. If the objective of risk assessment is to measure the effect of failure, presenting the results to the worker will not be useful. On the other hand, The risk assessment should include a list of hazards and/or hazardous situations, and a description of the controls selected to reduce the risks. The worker needs to understand how badly they could be hurt while they are performing their work and what they need to do to ensure that they do not get hurt. This in itself will typically reduce the potential for failure. All to often I have seen risk assessment lead to confusion when presented to someone that does not understand the process. The risk assessment can be used as a source of information that serves the workers need to understand how they effect risk. Cheers from Canada Tom

Back to the original post - there is a bit of a clash between the requirements of HASAWA, that is - reasonable actions to manage risks, and management regs' requirement for risk assessment, in order to minimise risk. They might seem similar but they are not, so to me risk assessment is too open to bias and to unknown limitations of the risk assessor. In themselves RA's are risky. I would prefer a different system but until that happens we jump through the hoops to avoid prosecution and to keep our jobs and hopefully help colleagues stay a bit safer, which in reality in a lot of cases is the true reflection of priorities.

Like Martin at post #28 I am not convinced that RAs are all that effective and far too often the process is used to tick a box. Many RAs are generic and add little value to the SSoW, especially where they contain a risk matrix. Sure there is a legal requirement blah, blah. However, for many activities it's a time consuming process to do a proper RA and once again, I think the benefits are often problematic. For example, I do a RA everyday when driving to work, crossing the road and so on. I don't record it - there's no point.