A risk assessment at work is a careful look at what in your work could cause harm to people, so that you can decide whether you have taken enough precautions or should do more. That definition is deliberately plain and it is the regulator's own emphasis: it is a decision-making exercise, not a document-production exercise, and the document exists to record the decision. This page answers the four questions people actually arrive with, which are what it is for, who has to do it, when one is needed, and how many different kinds a normal firm ends up with.
What it is for, and what it is not for
The purpose is to decide whether your precautions are enough, and to act where they are not. It is not to prove that you have a folder, and it is not to transfer risk to the person who signed it. A useful test: if reading an assessment would change nothing about how the work is done, either the work was already well controlled and the assessment says so with evidence, or the assessment is decoration. Both happen, and only one of them is fine.
Who has to carry one out
The duty sits with the employer, and it has to be done by someone competent, which means someone with the training, knowledge and experience to understand the hazards in that work. Competence is specific rather than general: a manager who knows the process may be the right person for a workstation assessment and the wrong person for a confined space entry. Where the firm does not hold that competence, the honest answer is to get help for that assessment, not to write it anyway and hope.
When one is necessary
For any work with foreseeable risk, before the work starts, and again whenever the assessment is no longer valid or the work has significantly changed. In practice that means new equipment, a new substance, a new process, a new location, new people whose vulnerability differs, or an incident that showed the assumption was wrong. A firm that only assesses when a client asks for evidence is assessing on somebody else's trigger.
How many kinds you end up with, and why it matters
Most firms discover they need several: general workplace assessments, activity-specific ones, assessments for particular substances under COSHH, and assessments for particular people such as new or expectant mothers and young workers. They are the same method applied to different scopes, and the reason to count them early is that the number, not the difficulty, is what decides whether the set can be kept current. The free risk assessment form worksheet prices exactly that.
Questions people ask about what is a risk assessment at work
Why are risk assessments important?
Because they are the point at which a firm decides, deliberately and in advance, whether what it already does is enough. The document is secondary; the decision is the thing. A firm that has never made that decision explicitly is relying on the assumption that nothing has changed since the last time somebody thought about it.
Who should perform a risk assessment?
Someone competent to understand the hazards in that particular work, appointed by the employer, who remains responsible. Competence is specific to the work rather than a general qualification, and the right answer for a workshop process may be the supervisor who runs it rather than the person who holds a certificate.
What are the different types of risk assessment?
In practice a firm holds general workplace assessments, activity or task-based ones, substance assessments under COSHH, and person-specific ones such as new and expectant mothers, young workers and display screen users. Some activities also carry their own named regimes, such as confined space entry, where the assessment feeds a permit.