When the Site Doesn’t Match the Risk Assessment

The risk assessment for the job was written on a Tuesday, in an office, from a drawing and a site visit three weeks earlier. The work starts on a Monday morning in the rain.

Overnight the scaffold has been altered. The groundworkers have opened a trench across the route the delivery driver was supposed to use. The roofer who knew the building has been moved to another job and there’s an agency lad in his place. None of that is in the risk assessment, because none of it existed when it was written.

That gap between the paperwork and the site is where a lot of people get hurt. Dynamic risk assessment is how you close it.

What a dynamic risk assessment actually is

A dynamic risk assessment is the check you do at the point of work, on the day, before you start. It asks one question: does what’s in front of me match what the risk assessment assumed?

If it does, you crack on. If it doesn’t, you deal with the difference before anyone starts work. That might mean an extra control, a change of method, or stopping until something is sorted.

It’s worth being clear about what it isn’t. “Dynamic risk assessment” isn’t a term you’ll find in the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. It’s not a replacement for a proper assessment, and it’s not a licence to work things out as you go. It sits on top of a written, approved assessment and checks that the assessment still holds.

Why the law already expects it

Regulation 3(1) requires every employer to make a “suitable and sufficient assessment” of the risks to employees and anyone else affected by the work. Regulation 3(3) then says the assessment must be reviewed if there’s reason to suspect it’s “no longer valid”, or if there has been “a significant change in the matters to which it relates”.

On a fixed production line, that change might happen once a year. On a construction site, a client’s premises or a road, it can happen between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.

Some regulations spell it out for specific risks. The Work at Height Regulations 2005 say work at height must only be carried out “when the weather conditions do not jeopardise the health or safety” of the people doing it. You can’t assess that from an office three weeks in advance. Someone has to look at the sky on the day.

And where more than one employer shares a workplace, regulation 11 of the Management Regulations requires them to co-operate, co-ordinate and tell each other about the risks they create. On a busy site, that’s the other trades. What they’re doing this morning is a hazard your assessment probably didn’t know about.

How hazards change on site

In my experience, most of the changes that catch people out fall into a handful of groups.

Weather and ground conditions

Rain, wind, ice, heat and low light all change the risk. A flat roof that’s fine in the dry is a different job when it’s wet. Ground that took a mobile tower on Thursday might not take it after a weekend of rain.

Access and the layout of the site

Routes get blocked, scaffold gets adapted, excavations open up and barriers get moved. The access the assessment planned for isn’t always the access you’ve got.

Other trades and other people

Hot works next door, a crane lift overhead, members of the public using an entrance that was meant to be closed. Your activity might be exactly as planned, but the work around it isn’t.

People and equipment

The team on the day isn’t always the team that was briefed. Someone is new, someone is missing, or the equipment that turned up isn’t the equipment that was specified. A different MEWP, a shorter ladder, the wrong harness.

The task itself

Once the job is opened up, it’s often not what was expected. More corrosion, hidden services, a material nobody knew was there. That’s when the plan needs to stop and be looked at again, not stretched to fit.

Where dynamic risk assessments usually fall down

Most organisations already do some version of this. The problem is how.

Often it’s a verbal “everyone happy?” at the start of the shift. There’s nothing wrong with talking, but nothing gets recorded, and nobody can show afterwards what was checked.

Sometimes it’s a generic point of work card with the same ten tick boxes for every job. It’s quick, but because it isn’t linked to the actual assessment for the task, it can’t ask the right questions. Ticking “PPE checked” tells you nothing about whether the edge protection on this roof is still in place.

And when a change is spotted, it often goes nowhere. The supervisor sorts it on the day, which is good. But the core assessment never gets updated, so the same change catches the next team out the following week.

What a good dynamic risk assessment looks like

It doesn’t need to be long. It needs to be:

• Tied to the core assessment. The person on site should be checking against the hazards and controls that were actually approved for the job, not a generic list.
• Quick to complete at the point of work. If it takes twenty minutes, it won’t get done properly on a cold morning.
• Clear about what’s changed. Any new hazard on the day gets written down, along with the control put in place for it.
• Recorded. Who checked, when, where and what they found.
• Fed back. If the same change keeps turning up, that’s a sign the core assessment needs reviewing under regulation 3(3).
• Backed by a right to stop. People need to know that “this doesn’t match, so we’re not starting” is the right answer, and that they won’t be criticised for giving it.

How R1SK handles it

This is one of the problems we built R1SK to solve.

In R1SK there are two kinds of assessment. The core assessment is the full, approved assessment for the activity, with its hazards, scores, controls and sign-off. The dynamic assessment is built from that approved core assessment and taken to the point of work.

The core hazards come across locked, so the approved assessment can’t be quietly rewritten on site. The person doing the job then confirms the conditions on the day match what the core assessment assumed, and adds any site hazards that weren’t there when it was written. Weather, access and other trades are the usual ones.

Each dynamic assessment is saved as its own record against the core assessment it came from, so you can see what was checked on a particular day and by whom. When the same site hazards keep appearing, you’ve got the evidence that the core assessment needs another look.

The paperwork will never match every site on every day. What matters is that someone checks, writes down the difference and deals with it before work starts. If you’d like to see how that works with your own assessments, you can get in touch.