Making Health and Safety Work for You - Risk Assessment

Continuing our series of Health and Safety articles by Rod Trippier; this is the first of two exploring Risk Assessment.

Mention risk assessment and the majority of those present will cringe; I’m speaking generally, and not about intrinsically safe enterprises that use far more robust models and methods than are describe here to safeguard there operational and commercial interests, although the principles are exactly the same.

I’ve used that word again; commercial. Health and Safety is commercial, as we said before, its not only about focussing on the people issues, it also includes the design of buildings and structures, the layout of the work-places in and around them, and the plant, equipment and tools used in that work-place by them. Because by getting this right first most of the hazards with the potential to harm people would have been eliminated or reduced to a lower order before the people concerned even got to work in the facility.

Some of you may have been involved with the selection of manufacturing plant; although CE marked, it doesn’t mean to say its fit for your purpose. Yes it complies with current regulation, but as designed will it work for you; often the answer is no. Unless designed specifically to suit how you operate and maintain the plant, particularly during planned shuts, guarding can be a nightmare. Not only can it encourage people to take short cuts, but valuable time can be wasted removing and replacing the guard if fixings and fixing points are inappropriate. And sometimes because its too troublesome, fixings don’t necessarily get put back correctly which can defeat the original function.

This is where the risk assessment comes into its own. An example involving £20M worth of new plant from a few years back springs to mind, this featured isolation mechanisms, interlocks and physical guards. The risk assessment carried out by operational staff identified design failures in a number of areas. When controls were put in place they made the plant safer to operate and reduced maintenance down time, giving an annual pay-back of £25,000.00 from a capital outlay of less than £2,000.00.

Risk assessment, how do we do it?

Well here is the dilemma, as we’re interested in reducing or eliminating significant risk how do we know what significant risk is until we’ve assed it? And this is where I think most of us come unstuck; the amount of time and effort that we think is required looks daunting. But look at it another way, if something did go seriously wrong for the want of a suitable and sufficient risk assessment, the cost, just in terms of time and effort alone would have been a lot more than it would if we’d done the assessment and put in the controls in the first place.

Firstly only select people for your risk assessment teams who are experienced in your business sector, and who have been with you a few years and who know how your organisation functions. And don’t make the mistake thinking that everybody can do a risk assessment without adequate training; they can’t. Risk assessment teams need to be trained in basic techniques; and by someone who is a trained risk assessor. In other words, carry out an assessment first, ensuring that the person you select to undertake the training has the skills and abilities you require.

A risk assessment is an estimation of the people carrying the assessment at that time. The HSE even make the point that a risk assessment team in the same sector, but working for different employers could have a different view on common hazards. I worked with a client team a few years ago, and one of the members insisted that every task they assessed could result in death, the rest of the team members fortunately disagreed. That’s why a risk assessment team should consist of not less than two people who are trained and sufficiently experienced within that sector to discuss the issues and take a realistic and balanced view. If you appoint an untrained team to carry out your risk assessments, as likely as not, either through ignorance or unfamiliarity or both, they will recommend inappropriate control measures.

In HSG 65, it says that it may make life easier if we carry out an initial assessment first, to be honest, it doesn’t just help, so far as I’m concerned it’s essential. By involving operational personnel in this initial assessment process they’ll use their knowledge to say what’s risky in their field because they’ve just as likely as not worked around some of those risks in the past. And this is the danger, becoming accustomed and complacent to risk and accepting it as the norm, this is in itself is a significant risk to the business. But we can cut through any complacency by assembling a team comprising experienced operational personnel to sit round a table and carry out an initial assessment, together with someone from Line Management to act as the “Chair” and give direction.

This can be done in an informal atmosphere, brain storming the issues and getting the team to write down all those things they believe to be a significant risk; it will pay dividends in terms of time saved. Then, all they have to do is run down the list, and review it one last time to make sure everybody agrees which should go forward for team assessment, and when, and in what order of priority. An initial assessment will be very close to the mark, just by the very nature of how it was achieved. Plus, it will only have taken a few people perhaps no more than a day to accomplish. Everybody will have enjoyed themselves (hopefully), getting away from the “day job”; with tea, coffee and biscuits thrown in, plus a free lunch; maybe.


Having prioritised the list and planned the assessment programme all we have to do is nominate trained teams, and if people aren’t trained, train them. Carry out the nominated risk assessments, evaluate if existing controls are adequate or not. If not, agree and record findings and recommend additional controls required to eliminate or reduce the hazards to a lower order, and implement. Then re-assess the controls to make sure they achieve their intended objective; it doesn’t have to be a separate function, it can be done as you work through each assessment. Again, it’s whatever suits you, but to get accuracy you must re-assess at some time during the process. It’s achieving the required standard that matters, not how you do it. Once agreed, prioritise the control implementation programme, not forgetting to consider what’s “reasonably practicable” to achieve.
Doing the risk assessment is only the start; it’s putting the controls in place that helps square the circle. A control measure can be doing something differently; and it can be keeping somebody “safe by position”. That is, preventing people from making contact with dangerous parts of a machine, perhaps by caging them in, this means you don’t have to put a belt and braces physical barrier round the hazard when its operating. In some industries this is achieved with light beams, but do your research first if this is a potential option for you, because systems can fail, particularly electronic guarding systems, so they must be robus, and designed to “fail to safety”.

My back-ground was originally paper making, and a few years ago whilst working in Finland I witnessed the ultimate guarding system. A white line painted down the whole length of the process floor five of six metres from the paper machine; if any anybody walked across that white line when the machine was running they would be dismissed instantly, and visitors would be escorted from the premises, never to return.

When it comes to carrying out risk assessment, some devotees prefer to assess likelihood and severity as a qualitative value, (high medium low), and others as a quantitative value (on a scale, say of 1 to 5, or 1 to 10). My personal preference is quantitative assessment because it is a much more objective and accurate way for a risk assessment team to reach a balanced judgement. But it all depends what people are used to; if whatever you do is fit for purpose and it complies with current regulation and guidance; do it.

In the next article we’ll discuss the practicalities of the risk assessment process, together with a worked example.

Useful reference materials;

Successful Health and Safety Management HSG 65 2nd Edition HSE Books 2000 ISBN 0 7176 1276 7
INDG163 (Rev 2) 5 Steps to Risk Assessment; free down-load from the HSE web-site
Essentials of Health and Safety at Work (Fourth edition) HSE Books 2006 ISBN 0 7176 6179 2
HSE web site; http://www.hse.gov.uk/
Allen & York Health and Safety Recruitment http://www.allen-york.com/

The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of Allen & York.