The employer carries the duty and somebody competent has to do the work, and in a small firm those are usually different people. That gap is where most weak assessments come from: the person with the authority does not know the process, and the person who knows the process has not been asked. This page is about who should actually hold the pen, when an assessment is necessary at all, and the handful of different kinds a normal firm ends up carrying.
Competence is about this work, not about a certificate
The person doing the assessment needs the training, knowledge and experience to understand the hazards of that particular work, plus the judgement to know where their knowledge runs out. A supervisor who has run a process for a decade is often the best assessor of it and the wrong assessor of a confined space entry. A consultant with a qualification and no knowledge of your premises is the reverse. The useful question is never who is qualified, it is who understands this job.
Involve the people who do the work, and record that you did
Assessments written without the operators are the ones that describe an ideal version of the task. The people doing it know the shortcut everybody takes when the line is behind, the guard that gets in the way, and the step that is genuinely dangerous on a wet morning. Consulting them is a duty in its own right in Great Britain and it is also the cheapest quality improvement available: an assessment produced with the operators is usually shorter and always more accurate.
When one is necessary
Before work with foreseeable risk starts, and again when the assessment is no longer valid or the work has significantly changed. In practice: new equipment, a new substance, a new process, a new site, a new group of workers whose vulnerability differs, or an incident that showed an assumption was wrong. Assessing only when a client asks for evidence means assessing on somebody else's schedule, which is the pattern behind most out-of-date sets.
The kinds a normal firm ends up carrying
General workplace assessments for the premises. Task or activity assessments for the work itself. Substance assessments under COSHH. Person-specific assessments for new and expectant mothers, young workers and display screen users. And activity regimes with their own shape, such as confined space entry or work at height. They are one method at different scopes, and the count is what decides whether the set can be maintained, which is what the free risk assessment form worksheet on this site prices.
Questions people ask about who should perform a risk assessment
Can I write my own risk assessments?
If you understand the work and its hazards, yes, and you will usually produce something more useful than an outsider would. Where the hazard is specialised, get help for that assessment rather than writing it anyway. Mixing the two is normal and sensible.
Why are risk assessments important?
Because they are the moment a firm decides, deliberately and in advance, whether what it already does is enough. Without one the firm is relying on the assumption that nothing has changed since somebody last thought about the job, and that assumption is usually wrong in a way nobody has noticed.
What are the main types of risk assessment?
General workplace, task or activity, substance assessments under COSHH, and person-specific assessments for particular groups. Some activities carry their own named regimes on top. The list is short and the count of individual assessments is not, which is the thing to plan for.