Risk Assessment & Method Statements
Risk Assessment & Method Statements
Overview This talk will cover: what risk assessments and method statements mean to you.
Risk assessments
1 All employers have a legal duty to prepare risk assessments for work activities that could foreseeable result in
injury to people or damage equipment.
2 Risk assessments outline the ways in which the job could result in injury or damage and the measures put in
place ensure that the chance of anything going wrong is eliminated or reduced to an acceptable level.
3 Employer with five or more employees must have written risk assessments.
4 If there are less than five employees, the risk assessments must still be carried out although there is no legal
duty to write them down
5 Employers also have a legal duty to communicate the findings of the risk assessment to operatives who may
be affected by it.
6 Therefore, depending upon the size of your company, you should either be told, or be asked to read, what the
risks and control measures are for each job that you carry out.
7 There is no specified way for laying out a risk assessment so you must familiarise yourself with the way your
employer lay out theirs.
8 In many cases, the risk assessments are part of the method of statement.
Method statements
1 Method statements are a written list of operations, to be carried out in a specified sequence, in order to
complete a work activity in a safe manner.
2 Everyone involved in a job which a method statement has been written should read it and sign as having done
so.
3 Well-written method statements address all the hazards present and plan the work so that the risk of accident
is eliminated or reduced to an acceptable level.
4 Most method statements also include the risk assessments for the same job so that the operative can read
what hazards have been considered and how the risk of accidents have been overcome.