Health and Safety Risk Assessment

5. Existing Precautions

For every hazard you have identified, decide whether your existing precautions are adequate.

5.1 Your precautions must be sufficient to reduce the risk to an acceptable level.

• Your local council, the Health & Safety Executive or the Department for Communities and Local Government can advise you (see 8).

5.2 Your precautions should meet industry standards.

• Your trade association may be able to provide advice or information.
• You may want to include management of health and safety as part of a benchmarking exercise against other companies. (See Benchmarking.)

5.3 Ideally, your precautions will reduce risk as far as reasonably practicable.

• You are fully justified in balancing cost against risk in deciding what precautions are reasonable.