Cleaning risk assessment. A printable general risk assessment for cleaning work — slips, manual handling, working alone, electrical equipment, height and the public, with the controls that apply to this site.

Cleaning is assessed as a low-risk activity and is not one. The injuries are real and predictable — slips on floors the cleaner has just wet, backs hurt moving machines up stairs, hands cut on waste nobody warned them about — and nearly all of them are foreseeable from a walk of the site.

Wet floors get the most space because the person most likely to slip on a wet floor is the one who wet it. Signage protects the public; the control that protects the cleaner is how the area is worked — which half first, which route out, and whether anybody is coming the other way.

Lone working is treated as the condition it is rather than as a hazard to tick. Most commercial cleaning happens when the building is empty, and the question is not whether lone working occurs but what happens in the twenty minutes after somebody falls off a step stool in an empty building.

The client's own hazards are on the sheet because a cleaning contractor is assessing somebody else's building. Sharps in a medical practice, machinery in a workshop, chemicals in a lab — the cleaner is exposed to all of them and the information belongs to the client, who has to be asked.