Posted By Alan Higgins Reading Richard North’s article in this month’s SHP I was reminded of this extract taken from a paper by John Rimington, one time Director-General of the HSE, written I think on his retirement from the Civil Service in 1995: “The Community’s 3rd health and safety action programme (1988) included the six major new worker protection directives which became the “Six pack” in January 1993. During the very hurried negotiations on the framework directive, the UK found itself in a collapsing minority in defence of its main principle - that health and safety law should be founded on reasonable practicability, involving a balancing of cost against risk. We contrived to substitute for it the principle which we consider equivalent - that health and safety measures should be based on an assessment of risk. Unfortunately in the course of negotiations, our proposals became amplified into a decision in favour of written risk assessments applying on a very wide scale. I believe written risk assessment to be a useful discipline so long as it is strictly confined to important risks; but applied too widely it can easily become bureaucratic bindweed preventing small firms in particular from seeing and doing the obvious.” For those who entered the profession post-1993, formal documented risk assessment has probably always been a part of the health and safety landscape and they perhaps cannot imagine how we would get by without it. For me, Regulation 3 of MHSWR has always been an example of “too much law” as well as being legislation that is “badly structured”. I scream inwardly whenever I hear someone suggesting that we should “carry out a risk assessment”. I feel it only delays and perhaps stalls necessary action. Much better that we should just get on and do “what is reasonably practicable” to make the workplace safe. I think the term used by Mr Rimington, “bureaucratic bindweed”, described Regulation 3 very well. Ten years on, what do others think?

Posted By Iain W Ten years on - I think formalised risk assessments should be second nature by now. Times change, we move on and learn from mistakes, we continually try to improve processes and try to find new ways of trying to reduce accidents / incidents through developing new strategies. It is called moving with the times. Having formal risk assessments are to show that you have adequately assessed the risks, you can't tell that someone is aware or has assessed the risk from somebodies mind. To make a statement that all it does is hold the job up or stall necessary action, sounds like something a health and safety dinosaur would say and one that I hope would not get aired in front of the workforce by a senior manager and especially a safety professional. Where jobs are properly planned or emergency breakdowns happen, there should be no need for a written risk assessment to hold the job up. I think I would rather use on hour to put a risk assessment together to ensure the job was carried out safely, rather than standing in a court after an incident trying to explain how we didn't properly assess the job because it was costing the company xxx pounds for every xxx minutes that production line was out of service.