Hmm. Aren't Management "employees" as well?

In my experience involving the workforce is actually best practice, rather then imposing RAs from the "ivory tower". You are dead right about the training though, although RA is simple enough, and you do not have to be an expert, the process needs to be led and controlled by a competent person. This should be coupled with some basic training for the RA teams. IMHO.

I asked this question of the new HSE advice service following an article in SHP:

"HSE investigation found that the fault had occurred several times in the past after the machine was restarted following previous Christmas shutdowns, but Pirelli had failed to carry out a specific risk assessment for this maintenance work –
HSE inspector told SHP that the company has three employees in its health and safety department and around 120 maintenance staff, each of whom carry out between one and 10 maintenance tasks a day. The company had no feedback at all from its maintenance staff on what they were doing in respect of their point-of-work risk assessments and no idea, therefore, if it was fulfilling its legal duty – “

Can you confirm that the HSE guidance is that point of work risk assessments are a legal duty in a company that has written health and safety procedure for maintenance work, and safe working procedures guidelines?

In response to your post I will share their answer.

“”Thank you for your enquiry.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to so called "point of work risk assessments" - basically there has to be some system in place (from the employer) to ensure that they (the employer) fulfil their legal duty under Regulation 3(1) and 3(6) of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999.

The legislation is goal setting and hence there is nothing specific on the website for this type of risk assessments (there is guidance for the very simple "Low-Risk" risk assessments for shops and offices etc).

The advice below is intended to illustrate the issue and is not intended to be a comprehensive or definitive solution.




The Legal Duty on the employer is:

Regulation 3(1) of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 states that:

"...Every Employer shall make a suitable and sufficient assessment of - (a) the risks to the health and safety of his employees to which they are exposed whilst they are at work; and (b) the risks to the health and safety of persons not in his employment arising out of or in connection with the conduct by him of his undertaking,"

Regulation 3(6) states that "...where the employer has 5 or more employees, he shall record the significant findings of the assessment."


To comply with Reg 3(1), the employer can:

1) Make this assessment themselves, personally (e.g. a sole trader with a small number of employees);

or the employer (particularly if the employer is a corporate entity) can nominate (and delegate the authority to) an employee or an outside consultant to carry out the assessment on their (the employer's) behalf; e.g.

2) A Director or a Manager (of a corporate entity) can make the assessment (e.g. a small Ltd Company with 10 employees);
3) One of the employees in their H&S Department can make the assessment (e.g. larger business with an H&S Department and routine activities);
4) A nominated (and trained) H&S coordinator, officer, advisor or consultant can carry out the assessment (e.g. any size of business); or
5) They can have a system in place for certain (adequately trained and competent) other employees (i.e. not in the H&S Department) to make the assessments (e.g. medium to large size factory with hundreds of maintenance activities taking place on a daily basis).



So for example:

For maintenance activities in a large factory where there are hundreds of maintenance activities carried out per day; and the employer is a corporate entity (a Ltd Company):

Option 1 (the employer doing the assessments personally) is not possible (the employer is not a person).

Some of these maintenance activities will be routine and repetitive; (options 2, 3, 4 or 5 can be applied)

Some of these maintenance activities will be non-routine.

There may be far too many non-routine maintenance activities for options 2, 3, or 4 to be practical;

Therefore the AUTHORITY to carry out the assessment of risks from these non-routine activities will (for practical purposes) have to be delegated down to an appropriate level; potentially the engineers doing the maintenance or (more likely and a better idea) the engineers and their supervisors together.

These assessments can be called "point-of-work" risk assessments (as they are carried out by the employees at the point of doing the work itself) - they are sometimes (unfortunately) known as "Dynamic Risk Assessments" - (NOTE: From personal experience this is a description best avoided as it can encourage people to believe they should start carrying out the activity before assessing the risk from that activity - and therefore having an "accident" before working out that they will be at risk)

The RESPONSIBILITY for ensuring that the assessments are being done and are suitable and sufficient remains with the employer at all times.
So...
Where "Point of Work" Risk Assessments are supposed to be carried out, the employer must have a system in place to ensure that:

1) Those assessments are being carried out (by suitably trained and competent people)
2) Those assessments are themselves suitable and sufficient
3) Those assessments are recorded where there are significant findings

That System should involve supervision (the Supervisors checking what the maintenance staff are actually doing: did they assess the risks? is it a safe system of work? did they plan it? why are they doing it that way? etc) and audit (checking any records that are kept - were Company Policies and Procedures followed? were the decisions sound? was the system of work adopted safe? were permits to work needed? etc)

I hope this helps.
Visiting Officer””

The business model we use is that all employees are trained in the RA process. The line managers do the RAs with input from the employees who then sign off to say they have read and understood. The HSE Manager also signs off the RA. Minimum review period is one year but newly detected hazards, accidents, process and equipment and other changes will also require a re-draft and sign off by all concerned. If an operator works in more than one area then he/she signs off on the other area RAs too. Floating staff (i.e. facilities, engineers) have their own RA's which cover risks in the areas which they work.

Thanks for all the replies. I think it's the absence of any training that's leading to most of the concerns.