Writing COSHH risk assessments for cleaning tasks that hold up to scrutiny

A COSHH risk assessment is meant to answer a specific question: for this substance, used this way, on this site, by this team, what's the risk and what controls it? Written properly, it's a genuinely useful working document. Written as a template with the product name swapped out, it's a piece of paper that satisfies a filing requirement without satisfying the actual regulations behind COSHH for cleaning contractors.

What generic templates miss

The most common shortcut is a single assessment written for "cleaning chemicals" in general, then reused across every site the contractor works. It looks efficient. It also misses the things that actually vary site to site — a cramped store cupboard with poor ventilation at one location, a client-mandated dilution rate that differs from the manufacturer's default at another, a task performed daily at one site and once a month at a second, which changes the exposure picture even for an identical product.

What a specific assessment actually needs

A working assessment should tie together the substance itself (drawn from its current safety data sheet — see what to keep on file and where), the specific task it's used for, how often, by whom, and the control measures actually in place: dilution, ventilation, personal protective equipment, and what happens if something goes wrong. It should also name who's responsible for reviewing it and when the last review happened.

Reviewing rather than archiving

An assessment that's correct on the day it's written and never looked at again has a shelf life, and that shelf life is shorter than most contractors assume. A product substitution, a site layout change, a new starter unfamiliar with the specific dilution routine — any of these can quietly invalidate an assessment that still looks current in the file. The practical answer is fewer assessments held to a higher standard, reviewed against real changes, rather than a large archive nobody has time to keep current.

• –Write assessments per substance and task combination, not one generic version for "cleaning chemicals"
• –Pull hazard detail directly from the current SDS rather than institutional memory of what the product does
• –Record the actual dilution, frequency and PPE in use on that site — not the manufacturer's default assumption
• –Name an owner and a review trigger, ideally tied to product or process changes rather than a fixed calendar date
• –Keep the assessment somewhere the team on shift can actually find it, not only in a compliance folder at head office

How this shows up in an audit

When a client audit or an HSE inspection asks to see COSHH assessments, what tends to get noticed isn't the existence of a document — it's whether it matches reality. An assessor who asks a cleaning operative a follow-up question about the product they're using and gets an answer that doesn't match what's written down has found a real gap, not a paperwork technicality. Building a COSHH audit checklist supervisors will actually use on site is a reasonable way to catch that drift before an external auditor does.

This is a working guide, not a legal template — HSE's own COSHH guidance sets out what the regulations require in full, and is worth checking directly for anything site-specific or unusual.