The foundation: Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974

HASAWA 1974 is the primary piece of UK health and safety legislation. It doesn't list specific hazards — instead, it sets out broad duties that apply to almost every workplace:

• Employers must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of employees and anyone else affected by the business (visitors, contractors, the public).
• Employees must take reasonable care of their own health and safety and that of others, and must co-operate with their employer on safety matters.
• The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) enforces the Act — inspectors have the right to enter premises, investigate, issue improvement or prohibition notices, and prosecute where necessary.
• Northern Ireland has an equivalent order — the Health and Safety at Work (Northern Ireland) Order 1978 — with the same broad duties.

"So far as is reasonably practicable" is a key phrase — it means balancing the cost, time and effort of a precaution against the size of the risk it removes. It doesn't mean eliminating every conceivable risk regardless of cost.

🦺 Common PPE types

PPE must be suitable for the wearer and the hazard, provided free by the employer, and maintained in good condition.

Roles and responsibilities of those involved

• Employers — provide a safe workplace, safe equipment, training, PPE, and written policies where they employ 5 or more staff.
• Employees — follow safe systems of work, use PPE correctly, report hazards, and never misuse anything provided for safety.
• HSE — sets guidance, inspects workplaces, and has powers of enforcement including improvement notices, prohibition notices and prosecution.
• Others — management set the safety culture from the top; subcontractors must follow the host site's rules; the public, suppliers, customers and visitors must also be protected from the business's activities.

The ISO 14000 family — managing environmental performance

Where the Acts above set legal minimums, the ISO 14000 family is a voluntary but widely-adopted management framework that helps organisations go further and demonstrate continual improvement:

• ISO 14000 — the overall family of standards; a management tool rather than a single fixed rulebook.
• ISO 14004 — guidance on the elements of an Environmental Management System (EMS) and how to implement one; explains the principal issues involved.
• ISO 14001 — specifies the actual requirements an organisation must meet to have a certified EMS; this is the standard a business gets externally audited against.

In short: an EMS is what an organisation does, systematically, to minimise the harmful effects its activities have on the environment — from raw material use through to waste and emissions.

Safe disposal of waste

Engineering processes generate waste that ranges from harmless off-cuts to hazardous chemical residues. Safe disposal generally requires:

• Correctly classifying the waste (general, hazardous, controlled).
• Using licensed waste carriers and disposal sites, with a documented waste transfer note or consignment note for hazardous waste.
• Segregating waste streams (e.g. oils, solvents, metals) rather than mixing them, both to comply with the law and to enable recycling.
• Storing waste securely to prevent leaks, spills or unauthorised access before collection.

Identifying hazards

Hazards can be found by several complementary methods, and a thorough assessment usually uses more than one:

• Walking the workplace and observing tasks, equipment and layout directly.
• Reviewing accident and near-miss data — patterns in past incidents often point to ongoing hazards.
• Consulting the workforce — the people doing the job daily often spot hazards management doesn't.
• Predicting outcomes of a task or process before it's carried out, especially for new equipment or procedures.
• Considering categories relevant to the environment: confined spaces, work at height or over water, electrical hazards, chemicals, noise, moving machinery.

Electrical hazards can cause shock, burns or fire — control includes RCDs, fuses, insulation checks and avoiding circuit overload. Mechanical hazards from rotating equipment or sharp edges are controlled through guarding, interlocks and safe systems of work.

The hierarchy of control measures

Once a hazard is identified, control measures should be chosen in this order — the higher up the pyramid, the more reliable and preferred the control:

This hierarchy matters when a question asks you to justify a chosen control measure — relying on PPE when a hazard could realistically have been engineered out is a weaker answer than removing the hazard at source.

🎯 Hazard vs Risk — the difference that matters most

These two words get mixed up constantly, but they mean very different things, and mixing them up is one of the most common mistakes in this subject:

• A hazard is a thing — it exists whether or not anyone is nearby. A puddle of oil on the floor is a hazard whether the workshop is empty or full of people.
• A risk is a judgement — how likely that hazard is to actually hurt someone, and how bad it would be if it did. The same puddle is a much bigger risk in a busy walkway than in a locked, disused store room.

In short: hazard = what could cause harm. Risk = how likely and how bad that harm would actually be, in this specific situation. You cannot always remove a hazard, but you can almost always reduce the risk around it.

The five steps of a risk assessment

📊 The 5×5 risk matrix

Likelihood and severity are usually scored from 1 to 5 each, then multiplied together to give a risk score. This is exactly what the calculator below does — the grid shows how the score maps to a risk band:

📝 Sample risk assessment 1 — Using a bench grinder

📝 Sample risk assessment 2 — Manual handling of engine components

Notice the back-injury row: even after control measures, the residual risk (6) is still Medium — some risks can be reduced but not fully eliminated. That's exactly why the assessment gets reviewed rather than filed away and forgotten.

Aids and equipment for moving loads

The right equipment depends on the load's weight, shape, and the distance and route it needs to travel:

• Pinch bars, rollers, skates — for short-distance repositioning of heavy, awkward items.
• Pallet trucks and forklift trucks — for palletised loads moved across a workshop or yard.
• Scissor lifts — for raising loads or personnel to height safely.
• Wall and overhead cranes — for heavy loads that need lifting and moving through the air.
• Ancillary lifting gear — block and tackle, pull lifts, slings (chain, rope, polyester), shortening clutches, lifting/plate clamps, eye bolts, and shackles — all used to safely attach a load to the crane.

Safe lifting procedures

• Never exceed the Safe Working Load (SWL) of any piece of lifting equipment or sling.
• Check sling angles — the safe load a sling can carry drops sharply as the angle from vertical increases.
• Keep a clear way — never move a load over anyone's head, and never transport people on a load.
• Use agreed hand signals between floor staff and crane drivers when visibility or noise prevents verbal communication.
• Protect chains and slings from sharp corners, and set hooks and chain lengths correctly before lifting.

Storage principles that apply across all hazardous materials

• Building structure — dedicated, well-built storage areas with fire-resistant construction for flammable substances.
• Stillages and shelving — keep containers off the floor, organised, and secured against toppling.
• Ventilation, extraction and temperature control — prevent the build-up of vapours and keep substances within their safe temperature range.
• Good housekeeping and stock management — rotate stock, remove damaged containers promptly, and never store more than needed.
• Safety data sheets readily available for every substance stored, so anyone handling them knows the specific hazards.

⚠️ Common hazard pictograms

These diamond hazard symbols appear on containers, safety data sheets, and storage cabinet doors — always check them before storing two substances together.

What must be reported

• Deaths — of any person, resulting from a work-related accident, including members of the public.
• Specified injuries to workers, including: fractures (other than to fingers, thumbs or toes), amputations, permanent loss of sight or reduction in sight, crush injuries to the head or torso, serious burns, scalping, loss of consciousness caused by head injury or asphyxia, and any injury requiring resuscitation or admittance to hospital for more than 24 hours.
• Over-7-day incapacitation — where a worker cannot carry out their normal duties for more than 7 consecutive days (not counting the day of the accident itself) because of a work-related injury.
• Occupational diseases — certain diagnosed conditions clearly linked to the work being done, e.g. some skin conditions, hand-arm vibration syndrome, occupational asthma.
• Dangerous occurrences — specified near-miss events, such as collapse or failure of load-bearing equipment, explosion, electrical short circuit causing fire, or the accidental release of a substance likely to cause serious injury — reportable even if nobody was actually hurt.

Injuries to members of the public are also reportable if they result in the person being taken directly to hospital for treatment.

Who reports, and how

The duty falls on the Responsible Person — normally the employer, or whoever is in control of the premises where the work is carried out (this could be a self-employed person, or the site owner where contractors are working).

• Reports are made to the HSE, most commonly online through their reporting service.
• A fatality or specified injury should be reported without delay — by telephone for the most serious cases — followed by a written report within 10 days.
• An over-7-day injury must be reported within 15 days of the accident.
• A dangerous occurrence is reported without delay, in the same way as a specified injury.
• Records of every reportable event must be kept by the organisation, whether on paper, in a book, or electronically.

Why reporting and recording matters

Accurate reporting isn't just a paperwork exercise — it underpins the whole safety system:

• It gives the HSE visibility of where serious harm is occurring across industry, so guidance and enforcement can be targeted.
• It creates a record an organisation can analyse for patterns — the same near miss happening repeatedly is a warning sign.
• It supports learning — a proper investigation identifies root causes, not just what happened on the surface.
• It protects the organisation legally — a documented, honest record shows a genuine safety culture if an incident is later investigated.

The cost of getting it wrong

When an accident happens, the visible cost is rarely the whole story:

• Direct costs — medical treatment, sick pay, compensation claims, HSE fines, damaged equipment.
• Indirect costs — lost production time, retraining a replacement, management time spent investigating, damaged reputation with customers, lower morale across the wider team.

Indirect costs are usually far larger than direct costs but are much easier to overlook — which is exactly why a thorough assessment of an accident's impact needs to look beyond the immediate medical bill.

Scenario 1 — The unguarded machine

A CNC machine's safety interlock has been jammed open by an operator "just to save time" between short runs. No accident has happened yet.

• Legislation: this breaches the general duty under HASAWA 1974 and the requirements of PUWER 1998 for safe work equipment.
• Hazard & risk: the hazard is the rotating/moving parts; the risk has increased significantly because a key engineered control has been defeated.
• Control measure: the interlock should be restored immediately (engineering control) — relying on the operator simply "being careful" is an administrative control far lower down the hierarchy and is not an adequate substitute.

Scenario 2 — The chemical store

A workshop stores both a box of oxidising cleaning powder and a drum of solvent-based adhesive on the same shelf, because "there was space".

• Legislation: COSHH 2002 requires substances to be assessed and controlled — incompatible storage is a clear failure of that duty.
• Hazard: oxidisers stored near flammable/combustible materials significantly increase fire risk.
• Correct approach: segregate the two substances, check the safety data sheet for each, and store according to their specific hazard class.

Scenario 3 — The lifting incident

A sling snaps while lifting an engine block, which drops less than half a metre with no injury, but the crane operator carries on working without reporting it.

• Legislation: LOLER 1998 requires lifting equipment to be properly examined and safe; this needs investigating as a possible equipment failure.
• Reporting: even with no injury, a dropped load like this can meet the definition of a RIDDOR dangerous occurrence and should be reported and investigated, not ignored.
• Cost implication: failing to report and investigate risks a repeat failure next time — potentially with an injury and a much higher direct and indirect cost.