The person who wrote the risk assessment has never done the job.
The person who does the job every day wasn't asked.
That's not a compliance problem. That's a credibility problem.
A risk assessment written by someone who visited the site once and left is a document. A risk assessment written with the people actually doing the work is a tool.
One gets filed. One gets used.
The Gap Nobody Talks About
Most risk assessments are written by H&S advisors, managers, or consultants who understand the theory of the work — but haven't stood in the position, held the tool, or dealt with the actual site conditions.
The result is a document full of generic controls that may well be correct in principle, but bear little resemblance to what the job actually looks like on the ground.
Workers read it, recognise it doesn't quite fit, and file it. Supervisors tick it. Nobody improves it.
What Actually Works
The best risk assessments involve the people doing the work in writing them. Not as a box-ticking exercise — genuinely asking: what do you think the biggest risks are? What have you seen go wrong before? What would you change about how we do this?
That conversation alone is worth more than most formal risk assessment processes.
When workers have been involved in writing the risk assessment, they don't need to be told to follow it. They wrote it. It reflects what they actually do and how they actually work.
The Question Worth Asking
When did you last ask the people on the ground what they'd put in it?
If the answer is "never" or "I'm not sure," that's worth changing — not for compliance reasons, but because the people doing the job are the ones who know what's dangerous about it.
Visit www.safecompli.co.uk for help with risk assessments that actually work.