We get to travel around the UK visiting businesses of all sizes and across a wide range of business sectors. What we are there for is to provide a specialised independent professional look at what the business is doing and whether it is meeting health & safety DSEAR compliance obligations.

In many instances this will mean looking at both established operations and others that have been newly set up. One of our first questions is what risk assessments have you undertaken and when were they last updated and obviously who by (to check competence).

What surprises us is the number of times when we are told there isn’t a risk assessment or we thought we would have one completed once everthing is in place. Given that DSEAR risk assessment is what identifies whether your operations are compliant why wait until you have spent a lot of time and an awful lot of money before asking for professional advice?

It may seem to some business owners that the first stage is to get a process operational and then look at the risk assessment but that is the wrong way round. What if you find that the controls in place are not sufficient then often it’s a bit too late to try then to design them in? As the saying goes: after the horse has bolted!

Making the effort to consider the DSEAR risks at the start of the process will very often help prevent a much bigger headache later and save a lot of unnecessary additional costs. for instance having to replace the expensive LEV extraction system with one correctly designed and rated for handling highly flammable and explosive dusts, vapours or gases.

Recently, while working with a number of businesses, we have seen examples of warehousing being turned into bakeries, laboratories scaling up processes to production levels, and the mixing of highly flammable substances without suitable LEV in place.

Our consultants are highly experienced, professional and best of all fully independant (not connected to elecrical or LEV suppliers) to fully assess your fire & explosion risks.

If you have a project you think you might need help with then why not start by asking the right questions before making decisions that will cost a lot to put right later.