Phoenix Journal · LEV Testing
If your kitchen relies on extraction to control hazardous fumes, mists or dust, thoroughly examining and testing that system is a duty written into health and safety law. Here is exactly what the requirement covers and how often it applies.
LEV testing · the legal position
If your kitchen or back-of-house area relies on an extraction system to carry away hazardous fumes, mists or dust, then yes - having it thoroughly examined and tested is a legal requirement, not a nice-to-have.
It is one of the most common questions we are asked, and the honest answer needs a little unpacking. Local exhaust ventilation - LEV for short - is any system designed to capture a hazardous substance at source and take it away from the people working nearby. The duty to look after it sits in health and safety law, and the penalty for ignoring it is not just a fine. It is the very real risk that staff are breathing something they should not be, day after day, without anyone noticing until harm is done.
Below we set out exactly where the requirement comes from, how often testing has to happen, who is allowed to carry it out, and how all of this fits alongside the other compliance work a busy commercial kitchen already juggles. No jargon for its own sake - just what you actually need to know to stay on the right side of the law and keep your team safe.
The requirement lives in the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 - COSHH for short - which the Health and Safety Executive enforces. Regulation 7 says that where you cannot avoid exposing people to a hazardous substance, you must control it, and engineering controls such as extraction sit near the top of the pecking order. Once you have installed that control, Regulation 9 kicks in - it places a clear duty on the employer to keep the system in efficient working order and good repair, and to have it thoroughly examined and tested at suitable intervals by a competent person.
That phrase, thorough examination and test - often shortened to TExT - is the heart of the matter. It is not a quick glance or a filter swap. It is a structured assessment that measures how the system is actually performing against the figures it was designed and commissioned to hit, checks the condition of hoods, ductwork and filters, and produces a written report stating plainly whether the system is doing its job or falling short. The HSE sets out what good looks like in its guidance document HSG258, ‘Controlling airborne contaminants at work’. Strictly speaking HSG258 is guidance rather than the law itself, but inspectors use it as their yardstick - if your testing regime does not broadly follow it, you will struggle to show you have met the Regulation 9 duty at all.
So the shape of the obligation is this. If a hazardous substance is present and you rely on extraction to control it, the law requires that extraction to be examined and tested, records to be kept, and faults to be put right. There is no exemption for small businesses and no grace period for ‘we have always done it this way’.
The headline figure most people know is 14 months. For the great majority of systems, COSHH requires a thorough examination and test at intervals not exceeding 14 months. The slightly odd number is deliberate - it lets an annual test drift a little year to year without the interval quietly creeping past the legal limit. It is a ceiling, though, not a target. For some higher-risk activities, Schedule 4 of COSHH sets much shorter statutory minimums - as tight as every month for certain blasting and metal-cleaning processes, or every six months for specified grinding and non-ferrous casting work. And where a process is especially dirty or the risk especially high, a competent examiner may recommend testing more often than the law’s bare minimum.
Now to the question every catering operator asks - does my kitchen extract count as LEV at all? This is where care matters. A standard grease canopy over a cooking line is, first and foremost, a ventilation and fire-safety system. Keeping it clean is governed by the BESA standard TR19 Grease, and that is a separate discipline driven mainly by fire risk and your insurer’s requirements, not by COSHH. So the everyday canopy is not automatically an LEV system in the legal sense.
The picture changes the moment extraction is there to control a substance that is hazardous to health. Think of a dedicated hood over a ware-wash or pot-wash area drawing off chemical mist and steam, extraction serving a decant or cleaning-chemical store, dust capture in a bakery flour room, or fume extraction in a back-of-house workshop. In those cases the system is doing exactly what LEV is defined to do - capturing a hazardous contaminant at source - and it falls squarely inside the Regulation 9 testing duty. The practical takeaway is simple - do not assume, and do not guess. A competent assessment of what each system is actually controlling tells you which of your equipment needs statutory TExT and which sits under a cleaning regime like TR19 instead.
The law says the examination must be done by a competent person, and competence here is not something you can simply declare. The recognised benchmark is the BOHS P601 qualification - ‘Thorough Examination and Testing of LEV Systems’ - which is respected by the HSE and across the industry. On its own a certificate is not quite enough, though. Real competence combines that formal training with genuine hands-on experience of the type of system in front of you, so the examiner can judge not just whether airflow readings pass a threshold but whether the system is genuinely controlling exposure in the way it was designed to. A good report does more than tick boxes - it tells you where performance has slipped and what to do about it.
The consequences of letting it lapse are worth being blunt about. If the HSE inspects and finds no valid test report, or a system quietly failing, you can expect an improvement or prohibition notice and, under the cost-recovery scheme known as Fee for Intervention, an invoice for the inspector’s time. Where poor control has led to actual harm, prosecution and unlimited fines are on the table. Just as importantly, an unexamined system may be recirculating hazardous fume or mist that you cannot see or smell - the health damage from that builds silently and is often irreversible. Compliance and staff welfare point the same way here.
It is also worth seeing LEV testing as one strand of a wider compliance picture rather than an isolated chore. The same premises that need their extraction examined also need their fixed wiring and portable appliances kept safe, and our guide to PAT testing and electrical fire risk in kitchens covers how those duties sit alongside your ventilation obligations. Handled together, they become a manageable annual rhythm rather than a scramble. Keep every TExT report for at least five years, act on the recommendations, and you have a clear, defensible record that your controls are doing their job.
Questions
Yes. Where you rely on extraction to control a substance that is hazardous to health, Regulation 9 of the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 (COSHH) requires that system to be thoroughly examined and tested by a competent person at suitable intervals. The Health and Safety Executive enforces this, and there is no exemption for small businesses. Failing to comply can lead to enforcement notices, cost-recovery charges and, where harm results, prosecution.
For most systems the maximum interval is 14 months - the slightly unusual figure lets an annual test drift a little without breaching the limit. Certain higher-risk processes listed in Schedule 4 of COSHH must be tested far more often, in some cases every month or every six months. A competent examiner may also recommend more frequent testing where a process is especially dirty or high-risk.
It depends on what the system controls. A standard grease canopy over a cooking line is primarily a ventilation and fire-safety system, governed by cleaning to the BESA TR19 Grease standard rather than by COSHH. However, extraction that is there to remove a hazardous substance - such as chemical mist over a ware-wash area or dust in a flour room - is LEV in the legal sense and falls under the Regulation 9 testing duty. A competent assessment confirms which of your systems needs statutory testing.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix examines and tests local exhaust ventilation to HSG258 and COSHH - measured, reported and certificated, UK-wide.