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A Briefer History of CoSHH

By Dale Allen

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Published: 03Dec2009
Word count: 1068
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This article is written for employers to help them to understand their general duties under CoSHH. It will also be useful to safety representatives, health and safety professionals and anyone interested in health and safety issues pertaining to the safe use of hazardous substances in the workplace.

CoSHH stands for the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health which is a regulation that applies to every business in the United Kingdom. There are businesses which believe that if they have less than 5 employees? they do not have to abide by the CoSHH regulations, however this is not the case.

If you are using hazardous substances such as lubricants, paints, thinners, air fresheners, washing up liquid (the list goes on) then you need to abide by the CoSHH regulations. The reason for this is because you may subject not only your employee but the public to any one of these substances and therefore there MUST be prevention of damage to health put in place.

As a basic example, imagine a decorator who is painting a home working as a sub contractor for a larger enterprise. The decorator mixes white spirits with the paint he is using to help thin the paint before application. This is a relatively ordinary and every day process for a decorator.

Here are the possible risks to health from this process:

1. Dermatitis caused by the decorator not wearing suitable hand protection (gloves) from white spirits. The Safety Data Sheet for paint may say that it is non-hazardous; however the manufacturer and provider of the SDS did not take into account the use of the thinners and has no legal obligation to do so.

2. The decorator may leave white spirits or paint lying about the home of the customer and this may come into the hands of a child.

3. White spirits is highly flammable and the white spirits or paint solution may become exposed to a naked flame and cause a fire. Does the decorator smoke?

This is why we must risk assessment and in this specific case produce a CoSHH assessment. CoSHH risk assessment is unique and must be treated separately from all other forms of risk assessment that a business would do under the requirements of the Health and Safety at Work Act. This is why chemical risk assessment has its own regulation so that it can be treated as a different animal.

There is no requirement to be qualified to produce a CoSHH assessment. In fact there is no legal quality standard that a CoSHH assessment must follow. The reason for this is because if you have a CoSHH assessment and an accident occurs then is has failed and it wasn't good enough. Therefore there will be repercussions, the level of which is determined by the employers' reasonable foresight of the accident and its reasonable control to prevent it from occurring.

So the premise is that if you produce a CoSHH assessment, you must produce the best CoSHH assessment you can. If you do not you may receive heavy fines both to the company and personally with the potential of imprisonment for severe breaches of the regulation for Directors' or the offending party.

Remember ignorance will not be tolerated by the Health and Safety Executive! If you are going to take on the responsibility of producing CoSHH assessments for your business then you must understand both the task that is being performed by the operator and the substance that is being used. You must take into account the environment that the task is carried out in and the reaction of the substance in that environment. I recommend that you at least take a basic risk assessment course so that you can become familiar with assessment. This will help you so understand not only the risk posed but also that control mechanisms that can be put in place as prevention.

If you have many chemicals and many processes that are being carried out DO NOT be tempted to download template assessments from assessment vendors. This is not only frowned upon by the Health and Safety Executive but is a significant risk to the operator who may be carrying out a task differently. The person who produced the assessment you downloaded may not know that the decorator was using white spirits as a thinner or possibly any of the other substances the use during their working day or even at home. This is why the risk assessor must have seen the process, must have spoken with the operator so that all risks can be assessed as they are and not as they are assumed to be.

DO NOT let a simple solution land you with heavy fines, damage the health of your workers or land you behind bars. Either produce your own assessments of bring a health and safety consultant onto your site to carry out the CoSHH assessments.

It is advisable that you find a CoSHH management solution to help control your CoSHH assessments and to remind to you to periodically review each of your assessments. If something in the process changes then a CoSHH assessment needs to be reviewed. If a Safety Data Sheet is updated by a manufacturer then you MUST have the latest copy and you MUST review your CoSHH assessment.

There are service providers out there that will help manage all this for and the requirement to use one of these providers is down to your in house ability to manage CoSHH compliance. CoSHH is a specialist subject to it is advisable that if you don't know, then ask!

If you have read this article and you do not have CoSHH assessments in place and they have not been provided to your workers, then take it from me that you are doing something very wrong. If you think that your business does not use hazardous substances then think again, even in an office products are used that contain chemicals and you would be surprised what your workers can get up to with them!

The Health and Safety Executive are seldom surprised because they've seen it and heard it all before. Did you know that flour dust and poor ventilation led to a school chef developing severe asthma? No? Well you probably wouldn't have thought of that unless you'd carried out an assessment and this claim would have cost you �200,000 in compensation.

So, please think again, do you really use hazardous substances?

Dale Allen delivers CoSHH compliance as one of the UK's leading compliance authorities. Find out more about how you can use his online COSHH365 CoSHH asssessment tool to produce compliant CoSHH assessments with the benefits of a managed Safety Data Sheet library.

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