Its tricky to know whether one legally should create a Risk Assessment (written if over 4 employed) when lifting up any bulky or heavy items.

The whole day could be spent writing rather than working - any thoughts ?

If I have interpreted your post correctly, are you suggesting that you would need to create a risk assessment for each and every type of lift? I would say, that unless there are some really specific risks attached to the movements, a generic assessment of your manual handling, your control measures and any improvements would suffice.

I tend to find that most of my control measures for manual handling activities are to provide training and try to make the training appropriate to the common work activity of the people being trained. So I guess I'm saying I'm not a great fan of conducting lots of assessments for every available task (there are too many).

My advice is to look at what would reasonably cause harm with the common things that people would be expected to lift whilst at work, and not assess every thing (don't concentrate too much on bulky or heavy items, think about the complete task in hand).

BJC, if your reference is specifically to Manual Handling (risk assessments) as indiacted by your topic heading, then there are guildelines etc available to "filter" activities and not undertake detailed manual handling risk assessments of ALL activites based on Schedule 1 to the regulations.

http://www.hse.gov.uk/msd/manualhandling.htm
http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/priced/l23.pdf

If your reference is to general risk assessments that are not ciovered by specific regulations (COSHH, DSE, manual Handling etc) then there are no prescribed.madated methods. It is upto the empoloer etc to demostrate that they have undertaken "suiatbel & sufficient risk assessments" etc.