Workplace health and safety inspection checklist

A general template for a routine workplace health and safety inspection: forty-two things to look at across seven sections, then an action plan carrying a severity, an owner and a date.

What this checklist is for

To give a consistent structure for a routine walk-round, so that the same things are looked at each time, findings are recorded with a severity, and actions have someone's name against them and a date by which they are meant to be done.

The seven sections cover general condition and housekeeping; welfare and the working environment; electrical and equipment; substances and materials; people and tasks; emergency arrangements; and contractors and visitors. Each section is a table of numbered lines with a wide observation column, and the numbering is alphanumeric — A1, C4 — so an action plan row can point back to exactly the line it came from.

An inspection is not a risk assessment

This is the most important thing on the page, because the two are routinely confused.

A risk assessment identifies your hazards, evaluates who might be harmed and how, and decides what controls are needed. An inspection checks whether what was decided is actually happening. You need both, and this is only the second one.

Nothing in this checklist identifies your hazards or decides your controls. It walks the workplace and asks whether the arrangements you already have are working in practice. Where a finding keeps coming back, that is usually a signal to go back to the risk assessment rather than to remind people again.

Who it is for

Employers and duty holders with general duties under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and arrangements to make under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, and the people who carry out the inspection on their behalf: health and safety officers, office and site managers, and facilities managers.

It is written around offices, light industrial units, retail, education and the non-clinical parts of care settings. It is meant to be walked with someone who works in the area being inspected — ideally a safety representative — rather than completed at a desk.

How findings are recorded

Every line is scored S for satisfactory, A for action required, or N/A. Three labelled states rather than a tick box, because a tick conflates "satisfactory" with "not looked at", and an unmarked row is then visibly incomplete. Anything marked A goes into the action plan with an owner and a date.

The action plan carries a severity column — High, Medium or Low — because an inspection that files a blocked fire exit and a dusty shelf as equivalent findings has not helped anyone prioritise. The severity is always written as a word and never carried by colour alone, so it survives a greyscale photocopy and reads correctly for someone who is colour-blind.

The instruction about immediate risk sits above the action plan rather than below it. Anything presenting an immediate risk of serious harm is dealt with at the time and recorded, not entered on a plan and scheduled — and that has to be read before anyone starts prioritising ordinary actions.

Section F, on emergency arrangements, deliberately overlaps the fire resources elsewhere in this library: escape routes, fire doors, firefighting equipment, fire action notices, first aid, and whether an accident book or reporting route exists and is known to staff. The form asks whether that route exists and is known; it makes no judgement about what has to be reported to anyone. The overlap is there because this is the resource most likely to be downloaded by someone who has read nothing else on the site. It is a routine check of arrangements, not a fire risk assessment, and the form says so on the page it appears on.

What it does not do

This is a general template, and a general workplace checklist will not cover the hazards that actually matter in a workshop, a kitchen, a laboratory or on a construction site. Adapt it, or use something written for the setting. A generic checklist used unchanged in a specialist environment produces false reassurance, which is worse than no checklist at all.

It does not replace, and must not be presented as:

• a suitable and sufficient risk assessment;
• a competent fire risk assessment;
• professional fire-engineering advice;
• a fire door survey;
• statutory inspection, examination, testing or maintenance — including any statutory thorough examination regime that applies to your equipment;
• premises-specific legal advice.

No inspection, examination, testing or servicing interval is stated anywhere in this resource. Where the form asks whether a record is available and in date, the period is your premises' own arrangement, and nothing here asserts what it should be.

Available formats

The PDF is the one to print and carry round. It is A4 portrait, five pages, laid out so the observation column is wide enough to write in.

The Word file matters more here than on any other resource in this library. Sector-specific adaptation is precisely why someone downloads this: a user in a workshop needs to delete the display screen line and add machinery guarding, and a user in a kitchen needs lines that are not in a general template at all. An uneditable file would either be used unchanged — the failure described above — or abandoned. The Word version uses real heading styles and marked, repeating table header rows, so sections and rows can be deleted and added without the document falling apart.

There is no printable HTML version, and that is the point rather than an oversight. Adaptation before use is what this resource is for, and an HTML page is the one format a user cannot adapt.

Version, issue and review

Version 1.0, first published 1 August 2026. Reviewed 1 August 2026 by Batir Turakulov, Fire Engineer (MIFireE) and Chartered Health & Safety Professional (CMIOSH). Next review due 1 August 2027, or sooner if the workplace, its activities or its equipment change, or if there is a relevant change to legislation or guidance.

The version number is in the filename, because a document downloaded today has to be able to identify itself a year from now in somebody's folder.

Accessibility

The PDF is tagged, with a document title, en-GB language metadata, a real heading structure, bookmarks for each section, and table header cells that repeat across page breaks. The Word file carries the same title, language and heading structure.

Severity is a labelled word rather than a colour. That matters more on this document than anywhere else in the library, because red, amber and green are the convention it is deliberately not relying on: the labels survive a greyscale photocopy, a monochrome printer and a colour-blind reader. The S / A / N-A scoring works the same way, as three labelled states rather than a shaded cell. The section references are themselves an accessibility feature — they let someone using a screen reader connect an action plan row to its source line without re-reading the whole table — and the observation columns are sized both for handwriting and for magnification.

There is no printable HTML version of this resource, and that is deliberate. This is a document that has to be changed before it is used, and an HTML page is the one format a user cannot change. The editable Word file does everything a printable HTML version would do and does it editably; publishing both would put a fixed, unadaptable copy of a checklist that must be adapted at the top of the page. The explanatory content lives here instead.

Licence and permitted use

Free to use, print, complete and adapt for your own workplace or organisation, including by your staff and contractors working on those premises. No registration, payment or attribution is required for that use. Not for resale, licensing, distribution for a fee, or republication on another website or in another collection; an adapted version must not be presented as our work. © Lion Risk Management Solutions.

Disclaimer

This checklist is intended solely as a routine workplace inspection aid. It is not a risk assessment, does not certify compliance, and must not be relied upon to determine whether the workplace satisfies legal requirements. An inspection checks whether existing controls are working in practice; it cannot identify your hazards, evaluate who might be harmed and how, decide what controls are needed, or replace any statutory inspection, examination or testing regime that applies to your premises or equipment. Completing it does not by itself discharge any legal duty: the employer or duty holder remains responsible for deciding whether this template is appropriate to their workplace, for adapting it, and for acting on what it records. Where defects are identified or compliance is uncertain, advice should be obtained from a suitably competent person.