Looking for a risk assessment example is a reasonable thing to do and the regulator publishes them for exactly that reason. It is also the point at which a great many firms take a wrong turn, because an example is a demonstration of a method and it gets used as a template to be renamed. This page is about the difference: what a completed example is actually showing you, how to read one for its structure rather than its content, and why the office examples in circulation are the most dangerous of all.
What a completed example is showing you
Read any published example and the content is unremarkable; the structure is the lesson. It names a specific activity rather than a department, identifies who might be harmed and how, states what is already being done rather than what should be, adds further action with a named owner and a date, and is signed and dated by someone who could defend it. Firms that copy examples reproduce the words and drop precisely those four things, which are the only parts that carry any weight.
The one thing you must not do with it
The regulator's own guidance on its example assessments says in terms not to just copy an example and put your company name to it: doing so will not satisfy the law and will not protect your people. That is not a formality. Two firms doing nominally the same work have different premises, different equipment, different shift patterns and different people, and an assessment that describes somebody else's arrangements is evidence that you did not look at your own.
Office examples are the ones that do the most damage
Office risk assessment examples are the most copied because office work feels generic. It is not: your building has its own stairs, its own contractors, its own lone working at the end of the day, its own display screen arrangements and its own visitors. An office assessment that could be about any office is a document that has assessed nothing, and it is also the one most likely to be handed to a client as evidence of your arrangements.
Use the example for the method, then price the real work
The productive move is to take the structure from the example and then find out what assessing your own activities actually costs, because that is the number that decides whether the set will ever be kept current. The free risk assessment form worksheet on this site takes your activity counts, the minutes each takes to write, your review cycle and the briefing time, and gives the year's hours and money in one place.
Questions people ask about risk assessment example
Where can I get a completed risk assessment example?
The regulator publishes both a template and a set of worked examples covering common workplace types, and they are the best starting point precisely because they are written to demonstrate the method rather than to be reused. Read two or three of them for structure before you write your own.
Can I download a risk assessment form as a PDF?
You can, and the regulator's own template is downloadable in ordinary document formats. Be aware of what a blank form does and does not do: it gives you the columns, and the work is in the content of them. The worksheet on this site is aimed at the other half of the problem, which is knowing what filling in thirty of those forms and keeping them current will cost you.
Is an office risk assessment really necessary?
If you employ people, the duty to assess applies to office work like any other, and the significant findings must be recorded where you employ five or more. The assessment will be shorter than a workshop's; it should still be about your office, its stairs, its equipment, its lone working and its visitors, rather than about offices in general.