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Health, Safety & Environmental Bulletin No 114
S Martin – 6 November 2008
On Site Risk Assessments – why bother with clearance certificates?
All of our employees have attended the UK PIA safety passport course, but refreshing parts of
it at times does us no harm.
As part of the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974, we have an obligation as an employer to
ensure that you work using a safe system of work. The same Act specified that “employees
must take reasonable care of their own health & safety and that of others who may be affected
by their acts or omissions” ie. wear a safety helmet, not obstruct a fire exit, drive carefully or
use guards on equipment and specified PPE.
The Management of Health & Safety at Work Regulations 1999 specifies that a site specific
risk assessment MUST be carried out – this is the law! As the person on site, you are therefore
individually responsible for complying with that law!
Where work is repetitive, ie. on maintenance jobs, we recognise that asking you to do this is
unreasonable, so generate “generic JSA’s or Safety Method Statements.
The clearance certificates that you complete on site make the risk assessment and safe systems
of work site specific and ensure that we all comply with the law; providing we have clearly
identified all foreseeable and significant risks not included on the generic document and
reduced the risk to a level ‘as low as reasonably practicable’.
I have spent some time randomly reviewing our clearance certificates and have had discussions
with some of you, but would ask that you all look at your recent clearance certificates and think
how they could be improved.
Things like “the risk is traffic; the control measure is PPE” is far too wooly and shows that you
are “asleep at the wheel” and more likely to have an accident.
I will be looking out for the generic use of PPE on our clearance certificates and asking you
whether for example ear defenders will stop a moving car – we need to THINK and put in
specific control to protect YOU and others on your site.
