Winter precautions

Winter weather brings with it hazardous conditions that can affect you, your staff and potentially your customers. Use our document to help you manage the risks.

Snow and ice

If these conditions are left unmanaged, it could lead to 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 your specific activities, which identifies all “significant” hazards and appropriate “reasonable” ways of reducing risks to an acceptable level.

Managing the risks

To help you identify the hazards associated with winter weather and the appropriate ways of controlling the risks through forward planning, use our example Risk Assessment - Winter Precautions . It covers the generic hazards associated with poor weather conditions and suggests control measures to reduce 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.

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 only go so far “as is reasonably practicable”.   

Note. The list of potential hazards is not exhaustive. However, 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 workplace.