If you own a beauty salon or barbershop, ensuring health & safety in your business must be your top priority.
Business owners who don't comply with health & safety regulations can face serious issues. These could be injuries to your employees or clients, hefty penalties, and even imprisonment.
In this guide, we'll look at what a beauty salon risk assessment is, the law around risk assessments, and your legal responsibilities.
What is a beauty salon risk assessment?
A beauty salon risk assessment is a document that you use to identify and eliminate the health & safety hazards in your beauty salon.
The risk assessment is not only required by law but also helps you recognise specific risks. These are risks that have the potential to harm your salon, your employees, visitors, and clients.
The law around risk assessments
All employers are required by law to protect their employees and everyone else on their premises from harm. As an employer running a beauty salon, you must be familiar and act in accordance with the following legislations:
- Health and Safety at Work Act 1974: This requires you to assess risks in your business. As such, you should identify all activities that can potentially cause injury in your salon. You must then take actions to eliminate, or if not possible, minimise the hazards.
- Control of Substances Hazardous to Health (COSHH): This requires you to assess your use of hazardous substances and chemicals and assess the risks that they pose. You then need to make sure that your employees and everyone else in your salon are protected from the risks they pose.
- The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999: These regulations require all employers to conduct risk assessments and implement necessary precautions. You should appoint a competent person to help you comply with these health & safety laws and provide them with appropriate training.
Non-compliance with health & safety regulations can have serious consequences. This could be severe injuries, reputational damages, hefty penalties, and imprisonment.
How to perform a beauty salon risk assessment
In order to perform a risk assessment in your beauty salon, you need to take the following five steps:
Identify the hazards
Identifying the hazards is the first step you should take. As a salon owner, you need to:
- Walk around the salon and the stockroom and note anything that could be hazardous.
- Talk to your staff members about health & safety issues in your salon.
- Check the products you use for warning labels or potential hazards.
- Look at your accident book to recognise what issues have previously resulted in incidents.
Physical risks include hazardous manual handling, exposure to electricity, slips, trips, and falls. You should also consider chemical hazards. For example many salons use bleach and barbicides, which are corrosive and flammable.
Decide who could be harmed and how
This could potentially be the employees working in your salon, temporary visitors such as contractors, or your clients.
You should also consider the types of injuries or health complications that could occur from exposure to each hazard.
Evaluate the risks and take action to prevent them
In this stage, you need to evaluate the severity and likelihood of each hazard. Also, write down what controls, if any, are in place to manage the risks.
If your current controls are not good enough, make note of what else needs to be done to prevent incidents from happening.
Examples of actions you could take are using newer or safer equipment, avoiding harmful chemicals, and providing health & safety training.
Record your findings
The purpose of recording the findings of your risk assessment is so that you can use and review the assessment moving forward. If you employ five or more employees, it's a legal requirement to document the findings.
It's always good practice to pin the risk assessment somewhere clearly visible so that all your employees can see it.
Review the assessment regularly
You should review your risk assessment on a regular basis and update it if necessary. There's no specific period for this.
However, you should evaluate your risk assessments at least every year, or straightaway if any significant changes happen.
Get advice on beauty salon risk assessments with Peninsula
As a business owner, your responsibilities include protecting everyone on your premises. To achieve this you need to perform risk assessments and review the results regularly.
Failure to comply with the regulations has long-lasting consequences such as severe injuries, hefty penalties, and imprisonment.
Peninsula offers 24/7 Health & Safety advice which is available 365 days a year. We can advise you on complying with health & safety regulations and performing risk assessments.
Want to find out more? Contact us on 0800 029 4376 and book a free consultation with one of our health & safety consultants.
