Garages and workshops

Work undertaken in garages and workshops often involves working in a restricted area around inspection pits and on floor surfaces with the potential for oil and grease spillages.

Oils and greases

These and other risks to staff and others, left unmanaged, could cause accidents and potentially put you on the wrong side of the law. To ensure that this doesn’t happen, you should complete a risk assessment for such work which, identifies all “significant” hazards and appropriate “reasonable” ways of reducing risks to an acceptable level.

You should ensure that your document only addresses “significant” hazards, i.e. any that could, and more importantly are likely to, cause an accident or injury.

Managing the risks

To help you identify the hazards associated with garage and workshop activities and the appropriate ways of controlling them, use our example Risk Assessment - Garages and Workshops. It covers the generic hazards associated with this type of activity and suggests control measures to reduce risks to an acceptable level.

Make your instructions clear

Don’t include activities in your document that simply don’t need to be there. Work to the principle that if there is any chance of your staff being unaware of the safe way of doing something, then you will need to make it clear in your document. Finally, always ensure that any control measures you identify and follow are decided upon the principle of “so far as is reasonably practicable”.  

Note. The list of potential hazards is not exhaustive. However, not all garages and workshops are the same as all will have different equipment and work activities. For your risk assessment to be considered suitable and sufficient in the eyes of the law it must accurately reflect the “significant” hazards found in your garage/workshop environment. 

Note. You should also refer to our other risk assessments such as our Risk Assessment - Use of Hand Tools for additional information on risks that may occur when working in this environment.