Working at Height Risk Assessment: The 5 Steps (UK)

Falls from height are still the single biggest killer at work in Great Britain. In 2024/25, 35 of the 124 workers who died in work-related accidents fell from a height, making it the most common cause of all (HSE, 2025).

Here’s the thing: nearly every one of those falls was preventable.

And prevention starts with one document. A working at height risk assessment.

If you or your team ever work up a ladder, on a roof, near an unprotected edge, or off a tower or a MEWP, this is the guide for you. I’ll walk you through the HSE’s five steps, applied specifically to work at height, and show you how to build them around the law’s avoid, prevent, minimise approach.

Let me explain.

Do you legally need a working at height risk assessment?

Yes. In almost every case, you do.

Under the Work at Height Regulations 2005, employers and anyone in control of work at height must make sure it’s properly planned, supervised, and carried out by competent people. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 add the duty to assess the risks in the first place.

Put simply: if the work could cause someone to fall and hurt themselves, you need to assess it.

Who should carry it out? A competent person. That means someone with the knowledge, training, and experience to spot the hazards and choose the right controls. Not just whoever happens to be free that morning.

And if you have five or more employees, you must record your significant findings in writing.

What “work at height” actually means

This trips a lot of people up.

Work at height isn’t only roofs and scaffolds. The HSE defines it as “work in any place where, if there were no precautions in place, a person could fall a distance liable to cause personal injury” (HSE).

Notice what’s missing from that definition: a minimum height.

So it can include working near an unprotected edge, next to a floor opening, on a fragile surface, or even at ground level beside a hole someone could fall into. If a fall could injure someone, it counts.

The backbone: avoid, prevent, minimise

Before we get into the five steps, you need the golden rule that runs through all of them.

The Work at Height Regulations 2005 set out a strict order of priority. You work down it, only moving to the next level when the one above isn’t reasonably practicable.

Straight from the HSE:

“Avoid work at height where it’s reasonably practicable to do so. Where work at height cannot be easily avoided, prevent falls using either an existing place of work that is already safe or the right type of equipment. Where the risk cannot be eliminated, minimise the distance and consequences of a fall by using the right type of equipment.”

Source: HSE, Working at height

That’s your “three rules” of working at height right there. Avoid. Prevent. Minimise.

One more principle sits inside “prevent”: collective protection before personal protection. A guardrail or a properly built scaffold protects everyone on the job without them having to do a thing. A harness only protects the one person wearing it, and only if they clip it on correctly every single time. So collective wins.

Keep that hierarchy in your head. Now the five steps.

The 5 steps of a working at height risk assessment

The HSE’s risk assessment process is the same five steps for any hazard: identify hazards, decide who might be harmed, evaluate the risks and controls, record your findings, then review. Here’s how each one looks for work at height.

Step 1: Identify the hazards

Walk the job. Look at where the work actually happens, talk to the people who’ll do it, and check any records of past incidents or near-misses.

Common work at height hazards include:

• Fragile roofs and surfaces: old asbestos-cement sheets, rooflights, corroded metal. People fall through these every year.
• Unprotected edges and openings: roof edges, floor voids, mezzanines, stairwells.
• Ladders and stepladders: the most common source of ladder falls is overreaching or using the wrong ladder for the task.
• MEWPs and towers: overturning, entrapment, or being thrown from the platform.
• Falling objects: tools or materials dropped onto people below.
• Weather: wind, rain, and ice make every surface and every piece of equipment more dangerous.
• Poor lighting and overhead services: power lines and cables you can’t see clearly.

Step 2: Decide who might be harmed and how

It’s not just the person up top.

Think about the worker at height, the people supervising or assisting, and, crucially, anyone below who could be hit by a falling tool or a falling person.

Pay extra attention to anyone more vulnerable: young or newly recruited workers who lack experience, expectant mothers, and anyone whose health affects their balance or strength. Members of the public passing nearby count too.

Step 3: Evaluate the risks and decide on controls

This is where avoid, prevent, minimise does the heavy lifting.

Avoid. Can you do the job from the ground instead? Long-reach tools, telescopic equipment, or assembling something at ground level and lifting it into place all remove the risk entirely. Always ask this first.

Prevent. If you can’t avoid it, stop the fall from happening. Work from an existing safe place with a permanent guardrail where you can. Otherwise pick the right access equipment, and remember collective protection comes first: a tower, a scaffold, or a MEWP with guardrails before a personal harness and lanyard.

Minimise. Where a fall is still possible, cut the distance and the damage. Safety nets, soft-landing systems, and airbags positioned close beneath the work do exactly this.

Match the equipment to the task, the height, the duration, and the surface. Ladders are fine for light work of short duration only, a maximum of 30 minutes at a time according to the HSE, and never for heavy or strenuous jobs.

Step 4: Record your significant findings

If you employ five or more people, you must write down what you found.

A good record names the hazards, says who’s at risk, sets out the control measures, and, just as importantly, states who does what. Who inspects the tower? Who checks the weather? Who’s trained to use the MEWP?

Keep it clear and keep it accessible. A risk assessment locked in a drawer protects nobody.

Step 5: Review and update the assessment

A risk assessment is a living document, not a one-off.

Review it whenever something changes: new equipment, a new site, a different team, or a change in the weather or season. Always review it after an incident or a near-miss, and give it a routine check periodically even when nothing’s obviously changed.

Don’t forget the rescue plan

Here’s what most people miss.

The law doesn’t just want you to prevent falls. Where you’re relying on equipment like harnesses, you must also plan how to rescue someone quickly if they do fall.

Why the urgency? A person left hanging in a harness can suffer suspension trauma in minutes, even if the fall itself didn’t injure them.

So don’t assume you’ll “just call 999”. Emergency services can take too long, and they may not be able to reach the casualty. Plan the rescue, provide the equipment, and make sure someone on site is trained and ready to carry it out.

Competence, training and equipment checks

A risk assessment is only as good as the people acting on it.

Everyone involved in work at height, from the person assessing the job to the person up the ladder, needs to be competent. That means the right knowledge and training for what they’re doing, and proper supervision where they’re still building experience.

Equipment needs looking after too:

• Carry out a pre-use check before every use, looking for damage, wear, or defects.
• Arrange formal, recorded inspections of access equipment and fall-protection gear at suitable intervals.
• Take any damaged or defective equipment out of use straight away.

If your team could work at height, giving them proper grounding in the hazards and controls is one of the simplest ways to make your risk assessments actually work in practice. Our online Working at Heights course is built to do exactly that, and you can assign it to your whole team through our group management portal.

Get your team ready to work at height safely

Working at height will always carry risk. A solid risk assessment, done properly and reviewed often, is how you keep that risk under control and keep your people safe.

The two go hand in hand with knowing the rules and having trained people to apply them. If you want to go deeper on the legal side, read our guide to the Working at Height Regulations 2005, and to understand exactly what your staff need, see Working at Height Training Requirements (UK).

This article is for general guidance and education only. It is not legal advice. For decisions about specific work at height, refer to the current HSE guidance and the Work at Height Regulations 2005, or consult a competent health and safety professional.