Planning & documents
What is a risk assessment?
A risk assessment identifies the hazards of a task, who might be harmed and how, and the controls that will reduce the risk. It is the first half of RAMS and a legal requirement in its own right.
It is required to be suitable and sufficient, which means proportionate to the risk rather than exhaustive. A twenty-page assessment for a simple task is as much a failure as a one-line one for a complex task.
Controls should follow the hierarchy: eliminate the hazard, then substitute, then engineer, then use administrative controls, and personal protective equipment last. Assessments that reach for PPE first have skipped the effective steps.
It has to be reviewed when things change, and on a construction site things change constantly, which is why an assessment dated at tender and never revisited rarely describes the work being done.
What goes wrong in practice
- PPE listed as the primary control for a risk that could have been engineered out.
- Generic assessments describing hazards not present and missing ones that are.
- Never reviewed as the site, the sequence or the workforce changed.