This would have been a comment on Carpsio’s post, but comments require Blogger membership and I’ll be damned if I will comply.
He asks:
I’m curious as to at whether failing to do a risk assessment is now considered to be a criminal offence.
Answer: Yes. See my post below.
In a previous post, Carpsio picks up on what concerns me most about our risk averse culture:
A pale, emasculated culture, where ‘risk’ is something you can avoid by filling in an Excel spreadsheet.
Indeed. Good risk management is about recognising and managing risk. You can do this with a few notes on the back of a fag packet if you like. When training people in assessing risk, I find an obsessive adherence to formulae – the 5×5 system – instead of a practical observation of the task and the risks it imports. The 5×5 all too often leads to an unrealistic assessment. When faced with a “high” figure from a trainee, I usually ask: “To the best of your knowledge, just how many people have been killed or injured doing this?” The answer is usually “none”. I then ask them to think carefully (without recourse to figures or formulae) just what the likelihood is that continued application of the task will lead to death or injury. The answer is invariably “none” or “unlikely” even if we accept that it is possible. The risk, then, is low, is it not? Excel didn’t tell us this, our brains did. :dry: