Your business is required by law to carry out health and safety risk assessments, to record significant findings, and identify these to their staff. The Management regulations require employers to examine what could cause harm to people from their work or workplace, and to identify whether enough precautions have been taken to reduce the risks to an acceptable level.
It makes good business sense to approach your risk assessments in as broad a way as possible and consider all risks (e.g. environmental and health & safety). A risk assessment is an important step in protecting your workers and your business, as well as complying with the law. It helps you focus on the risks that really matter in your workplace – the ones with the potential to cause real harm.
The law does not expect you to eliminate all risk, but you are required to protect people as far as ‘reasonably practicable’. Accidents and ill health can ruin lives and affect your business too if output is lost,machinery is damaged, insurance costs increase or you have to go to court. The law does however require you to ensure that your assessments are suitable and sufficient.
You are legally required to assess the risks in your workplace so that you put in place a plan to control the risks. One element of achieving this is that the assessors must have an understanding of what the law requires, in order to determine what are satisfactory precautions.