H&S Bites 3: What is an adequate risk assessment?

As part of our ‘H&S Bites’ series, we are looking at some of the largest health and safety fines imposed over the last 12 months and the practical lessons that flow from them, as well as some interesting trends identified by our Health & Safety specialist team, part of our wider Corporate crime, investigations and inquiries team.

Busway deaths: a “rigid and blinkered” response to risk

• In June 2025, Cambridgeshire County Council was fined £6 million following multiple serious health and safety failures relating to a guided busway running through Cambridge.
• The busway allowed buses to travel at speeds of up to 60mph alongside a public footpath. It was separated only by a kerb. Between 2015 and 2021, three people were killed and a number of others seriously injured when crossing or falling into the path of the busway.
• The prosecution was brought under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 (HSWA), supported by the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 (MHSWR). Regulation 3 MHSWR underpins an employer’s duties to their employees and to members of the public by requiring them to carry out a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks.
• Despite opening in 2011, the Council only conducted a risk assessment for the first time in 2016 (following the death of a pedestrian who was struck while crossing the busway), a fact the Sentencing Judge described as "particularly shocking".
• Even that risk assessment was found to be limited; two deaths and several serious injuries occurred following it.

The risk assessment: more than a paper trail

A risk assessment must be more than a paper exercise. HSE Guidance sets out a five-step approach to assessment, and this includes taking adequate steps to mitigate the risks:

• Identify all the hazards – what could cause harm (even if unlikely)?
• Assess the risk - how likely is it that harm will occur, and how serious would the consequences be?
• Control the risks - decide what additional measures are required to eliminate or reduce risk so far as is reasonably practicable.
• Record your findings - where five or more people are employed, record the significant findings of the risk assessment, but remember that paperwork does not replace the need to control the risks.
• Keep under review - keep risk assessments under review to ensure controls remain effective, and revisit them where there are changes to work activities, incidents, near‑misses or other indicators that risks have shifted.

Although these steps can be easily summarised, doing them in practice can be difficult, time consuming, and require co-operation and buy-in from multiple stakeholders within an organisation in order to be effective. Risks assessments are only as good as the data and thought that has been put into them. Yet they remain an essential (and indeed legally mandatory) part of the safety tool kit.

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Read the previous article in our series: H&S Bites 2: Effective Risk Reduction: Using an evidence-informed approach and applying the ‘hierarchy of control’ 

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