Health & Safety

Risk assessments

Risk assessment is a fundamental element of health and safety management. Not only is it a legal requirement, but without it, how can you be sure your workplace is safe and compliant?

Whether you’re looking for a full health and safety audit or a task-specific risk assessment, our experts can take a systematic look at your premises and practices and work with you to ensure safety and compliance.

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Identify issues, maintain high safety standards

Risk assessment comes in many forms. If you’re not confident in your current safety management system, you may need a full intensive health and safety audit to check everything is in place and working the way it should.

Alternatively, you might need a more specific assessment of a particular activity or piece of equipment or just need support keeping your risk assessments up to date.

  • Get an on-site audit of your working environment in the form of a General Risk Assessment
  • Help formulating assessments for specific risk areas such as DSE, manual handling, COSHH and fire safety
  • Build your own assessments and checks, assign responsibilities and monitor actions with our award-winning Health & Safety Software
  • Unlimited advice and guidance from a named Health & Safety specialist to keep you compliant

Related resources

Free guide

Definitive Employer's Guide to General Risk Assessments

Blog

12 Common Risk Assessment Mistakes | Top Tips for Getting it Right

Free template

Homeworking Risk Assessment Template

Meaningful risk assessment tailored to you

With the HSE more rigorously pursuing enforcement action against those found to be in material breach of health and safety law, ensuring risk is appropriately managed is crucial to avoiding significant financial penalties and damage to your reputation.

Rather than relying on generic risk assessment templates, with support from a qualified professional, you can ensure your risk assessments reflect your specific activities, the particular risks present within your workplace and the controls you have in place. That way, you can reduce the risk of injury and ill health, demonstrate compliance and stand up to regulator scrutiny.

Popular FAQs

Common risk assessment queries and questions about our service, answered by our Health & Safety specialists.

Is a risk assessment a legal requirement?

Yes. Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, all employers, regardless of size or sector, must undertake a “suitable and sufficient” assessment of the health and safety of risks their employees are exposed to while at work, as well as the risks to any non-employees (customers, visitors, contractors, etc.) who may be affected by their activities. If you employ five or more employees, it is a legal requirement to keep a written record of your assessment and significant findings. If you’re not sure where to begin with risk assessment, we can help you.

Can you do risk assessments for particular pieces of machinery?

If, for example, the audit we’ve conducted for you (or that you’ve conducted yourself) has revealed a number of items of machinery that you haven’t completed risk assessments on, we could support you with this as an additional piece of work outside of our core service. The same applies to risk assessments for lots of hazardous substances, or a large workplace with interactions between moving vehicles and pedestrians. In these cases, we can discuss this as an additional fee, or you can download and modify a particular risk assessment from our Knowledge Hub (included as part of our core Health & Safety service), which we will then review for you free of charge.

Can you help us with our Fire Risk Assessment?

If our General Risk Assessment identifies shortcomings with your fire safety arrangements and your Fire Risk Assessment then, depending on the complexity, we may be able to support you ourselves or through our partner organisation.

What’s the difference between a health and safety audit and a General Risk Assessment?

A health and safety audit is a thorough appraisal of your safety management system, normally conducted by an external health and safety professional as an independent assessment of compliance. It will reveal any areas where you are exposed, such as a missing safe system of work or an uncontrolled hazard, so that you can take corrective action. A General Risk Assessment is the method we use at WorkNest to conduct your audit. It allows us to take a systematic look at your workplace: identifying risks, evaluating the likelihood and severity of harm occurring giving the measures you currently have in place, and then recommending ways to reduce risk further.

We have an in-house health and safety team, but they haven’t had formal risk assessment training.

Risk assessment is the foundation of an effective safety management system, yet many individuals with this responsibility have not been taught the basic principles of how to conduct a risk assessment and what the law expects. This can result in an inaccurate estimation of risk, which may lead to certain control measures being recommended that are not necessary or, worse, control measures not being identified or implemented. If you are keen to make sure this essential task is being done properly, our expert Health & Safety Team can devise a risk assessors training package to develop internal competence.

Do I need a coronavirus (COVID-19) risk assessment?

Yes. COVID-19 is a biological hazard, and just like any other workplace hazard, all employers must conduct a risk assessment to identify and control the risks so far as is “reasonably practicable”. The government “expects” employers with over 50 workers to publish the results of these risk assessments online (via their website). It is important that you take these steps as regulators such as the HSE are now conducting spot checks to assess organisations’ compliance with COVID-secure measures. As part of the inspection, the regulator will want reassurance that you have conducted a COVID-19 risk assessment and communicated this to staff and may ask you to produce evidence to this effect. At WorkNest, we have the knowledge and templates to help you to compile the necessary assessment so that you’re regulator-ready.

Will you conduct specific risk assessments for us?

There is nobody better placed than you to conduct a risk assessment. You are familiar with your workplace and the particular activities that go on within it. While we won’t conduct specific assessments for you, we can help you to construct them so that they are suitable a sufficient, and we can even train your staff to become risk assessors so that you have the necessary skills in house. We will, however, we conduct a thorough examination of your premises, practices and procedures at the beginning of your relationship with WorkNest to help you identify and remedy any areas where you’re exposed.

How can the Health & Safety Software help with risk assessment?

Included as part of our core Health & Safety service, our award-winning Health & Safety Software will revolutionise your approach to auditing. Not only can you create your own assessments and checks, but you can monitor and control the actions identified in your General and Fire Risk Assessment, assign ownership to those responsible for actioning each task, and pull your data into one risk status indicator.

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Why choose us?

Experts in Health & Safety

We have the expertise to help you simplify complex health and safety legislation, find workable solutions to health and safety challenges, and protect your organisation from the rising cost of non-compliance. 

  • Approved by a Primary Authority
  • Dedicated specialists with recognised qualifications
  • Genuine hands-on experience of managing risk
  • Cost certainty with our unlimited, fixed-fee model
  • The confidence to act as one of your competent persons

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