Introduction
Why a book on risk assessment?
I set out to write this book around 2015. I’ve restructured, revisited, and sometimes buried the whole idea in peat for several months while I got on with the day job. But I continued to see such poor risk assessments in my consultancy work. I still read news reports about deaths and serious injuries or health impacts caused by employers treating risk assessments as a tick-box, form-filling process.
The stated purpose of risk assessment in the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations is for:
identifying the measures .. to take to comply with the requirements and prohibitions imposed .. by or under the relevant statutory provisions.
However, the role of risk assessment goes beyond this. By identifying hazards, we can see how to reduce the harm from them, even when there is no ‘statutory provision.’ In planning, we can compare design options to see which would present the least risk to people. An effective risk assessment is not just integral to successful health and safety management. It is also an aid to business decision making – something emphasised in an excellent piece of research R151 “Good practice and pitfalls in risk assessment.”
Published by the UK Health and Safety Executive in 2003, RR151 also identifies 19 pitfalls that people producing risk assessments fall into, and over two decades later accident reports and my own consultancy still show the same errors been made. This book will help you to avoid those pitfalls.
While this book is based on law, guidance and practice in the UK, it isn’t about how to fill in a risk assessment template with text and numbers. While it covers the detail, it’s a call to re-think how we use risk assessment as a tool. It should be part of our planning process, facilitating good decision making and embedding safety into workplace and job design, and in how we allocate tasks between people and technology.
Who is this for?
While I’d like to think that anyone who wants to assess risk more effectively might read this book, in writing it I’ve realised my key audience is likely to be those who want to provide more thorough training on risk assessment. You could be a health and safety trainer who spends all of their time training. You might therefore have less hands on experience of the practical messiness of real risk assessments. Or you could be the head of a team of people who produce risk assessments or support the risk assessment process, and you want a tool to structure your own improvement process. You could set aside a couple of hours every month to work through the ideas and exercises in each chapter. In between, your team can apply the ideas and then feedback at the next meeting.
If you’re reading this as a student. I’m so pleased you’ve come to this early in your career. You can avoid some of the pitfalls that your more experienced colleagues have already fallen into, and walk into a health and safety role with full awareness of the errors inherent in many companies risk assessment processes.
Whatever your role, this book will take you through the stages of risk assessment, providing tools you can apply to your real-world problems, and exercises designed to develop your thinking.
What this book does
Each part of the book is intended to provide tools – not exact templates or hazard descriptions for you to cut and paste, but ideas to test, modify and incorporate into the way you manage work.
Throughout the book you will see “Ask yourself” challenges. If you are reading this alone, then do try and pause to work through the problem before reading on, or flipping to the answers in Appendix 2. Where provided, my answers are usually suggestions rather than definitive. Even when I suggest legislation, there might be other legislation relevant to your work.
If you are using this book as a training aide, or working through it with colleagues as an improvement project, please use the Ask yourself challenges to prompt team discussions. Listen to everyone’s point of view before seeing what I think – but as I know less about your work than your team do, their answers will probably be better than mine.
The book also includes multiple case studies – some are very old, but have formed the basis for the legal position on things like duty of care, reasonableness and foreseeability. Others are more recent – by the time you read this, many more accidents will have happened from which you can learn. Appendix 1 provides further details of the case studies covered in this book, but keep an eye on the website version as that will continue to expand beyond the publication of the book.
The five steps
This book follows the “Five steps to risk assessment” approach provided by the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE). While I am sometimes critical of outputs from the HSE, including poor examples of risk assessments, I believe there is a lot of sound advice on the HSE website too, and I refer to this in the book where appropriate. If you operate under the regime of other regulators in the UK – local authorities or the Care and Quality Commission (CQC) for example, this book will also be useful to you, as the approaches of those organisations is rooted in HSE guidance. If your operations are based in other countries, some of the legal interpretation and guidance might be different, but if you’ve come this far, you could still find the tools and techniques suggested are useful.
In applying the tools in this book to your own work, it helps to understand how the five steps have changed since the first version in 1998 (published as INDG 163). In that version the five steps were:
- Look for the hazards
- Decide who might be harmed and how
- Evaluate the risks and decide whether the existing precautions are adequate or whether more should be done
- Record your findings
- Review your assessment and revise it if necessary
The current version (since 2019) of the five steps is no longer published as INDG 163. A search of “INDG 163” from the HSE homepage (www.hse.gov.uk) will take you to a webpage on Managing risks and risk assessment at work. This provides the following five steps:
- Identify hazards
- Assess the risks
- Control the risks
- Record your findings
- Review the controls
In relevant chapters I discuss in more detail some of the changes in wording, but up front, I need to highlight the key change – that ‘who might be harmed’ is now included in the description of step 1, Identify the hazards (although not in the title), and that the old step 3 has been split into separate assess (2) and control (3) steps.
The problem has always been that these steps are not linear. Chapters 1 to 4 explain how you can use the iterative nature of identifying hazards and who can be harmed to improve hazard identification. Chapter 5 looks at the messy process of evaluating and deciding on adequacy which belies the new clean steps of 2. Assess and 3. Control.
Note too, the change of wording in step 5 from a review of the assessment, to a review of the controls. This is essential for effective risk management, and failure to do this is repeatedly cited in prosecutions following fatalities. Part 3 of the book provides tools to improve how you do this.
Read Chapter 1.
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Appendix 1: Case studies by year
Appendix 2: Answers to questons posed in each chapter
Appendix 3: Lost HSE references