Hi All, we are currently looking to change from an 5x5 risk assessment template to the wider businesses prefered 4x4 scoring, so i am posting here to see if anyone has anything they recommend to use?

We have done wonders this year in terms of compliance as a whole, gaining ISO 45001 certification whilst integrating this into a combined management system with ISO 9001 and ISO 14001.

We have over 30 risk assessments all signed off and reviewed accordingly, so wish to somplify our 5x5 into the 4x4 approach to improve our scoring and give a fresh approach to risk assessments

Any templates you have and how they are formatted eg excel etc would be most useful for us!

many thanks in advance, Sam

Why not go the whole hog and simplify even further to Low, Medium, High?

Numbers are always open to debate about how they were derived - in thirty years I have never seen discussion about Low, Medium, High.

With 30 RA's it is not as though there are loads of documents competing for resource and requiring prioritising by some arbitrarily applied score.

Risk matrices can be very misleading when it comes to ensuring you havesufficient control measures to comply with the law. They don't take "so far as is reasonably practicable" into account. The law doesn't specify that you need to reduce the likelihood/consequence below an arbitary number, you must do all that is reasonably praticable.

For example, if there was a cable across a access route that is only used once or twice a year, a risk matrix would tell you that this is ok. Likelihood of an accident happening is very low, and the consequence is not that bad either. However the law would say that it was reasonably practicable to move that cable.

Counter to this an adventure company that arranges high risk weekends would not be allowed to operate under a risk matrix, as it would always come out at too high risk, even with reasonably practicable controls in place. The law says they can operate as long as they have met their legal duties.

I would imagine this is why the HSE doesn't push them in their risk assessment examples. 

(credit to NCRQ for my examples)

Thanks to everyone so far, for their replies, we like the red amber green method, as this has been adopted already with the scoring system using the treat, terminate, tolerate, transfer outcomes.

I can see why the HSE dont really score as it can be biaised when manipulated.

Any templates you have would still be great though, even if not scored so we could adapt what is deemed as good practice by anyone.

many thanks

Sam