Before we start a contract with any customer we have to carry out a full, on site risk assessment. This involves one of our managers visiting the site we’re to provide security for and carrying a thorough and detailed investigation to uncover any potential risks to the staff that we provide.
These managers are fully qualified in health and safety with the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health and it’s important that you verify the qualifications of anyone performing a risk assessment or other health and safety function on your premises.
Legally, the purpose of a risk assessment is to identify any on site risks that could put our staff in danger, but these risks are also a danger to the property and the staff we’re hired to protect.
For example, we may find a leaking tap that seems like a minor annoyance, but if the sink blocks overnight then that tap could flood the premises. Or there might be a puddle in a loading bay that’s no problem in the summer but if it freezes over in the winter someone could slip and injure themselves.
These are just relatively minor examples. Our risk assessments occasionally uncover potential disasters. We were once assessing a construction site and found some recently delivered cranes hadn’t been secured properly. If that crane had fallen, it could have injured or killed someone on site. Of course, we didn’t wait to deliver our report to reveal this, we got straight on the phone and informed our client, who were incredibly grateful.
The risks we’ve uncovered in our assessments have probably saved our customers tens of thousands of pounds or more in claims.
Once we’ve completed the risk assessment, we provide you with a report that clearly outlines all potential risks and the steps that need to be taken to resolve them before we can provide your required services. If you need any help solving the problems we discover, we can source trusted plumbers, electricians or any other professional you require from our vast list of contacts.
We repeat risk assessments at least once a year to find any risks that may have emerged since we last checked. For evolving sites, we’ll check more regularly, up to once a month. Though most evolving sites have a permanent health and safety professional present who we can rely on, for the good of our staff we always verify the situation ourselves.
If a security company you work with makes no mention of a risk assessment, this should set off alarm bells. Risk assessments are required to receive accreditation from the SIA but, unfortunately, this accreditation is not mandatory. There’s nothing stopping a rogue security company from skipping the risk assessment entirely, so make sure that any security services you purchase has a risk assessment included as standard before anyone arrives on site.
At Magenta, we go above and beyond the requirements for SIA accreditation. The environment has always been very important to me personally, which led to us being the first security company in the whole of Europe to receive the ISO 14000 environmental standard. That’s why our risk assessments also includes information on the environmental impact of the site, and I’m always happy to provide advice on how to make your business more green.
So while risk assessments are something we have to do for the good of our staff, they’re also an opportunity for you to improve the safety and sustainability of your business. Get in touch with us today to find out more about our award winning security services.
