Phoenix Journal · LEV & Air Quality
HSE inspectors visit unannounced, and they target workplaces with asthma and cancer risks: dust, fume and spray. A smooth visit turns almost entirely on the paperwork you can produce on the spot, because a material breach now costs 188 pounds an hour to put right.
An HSE inspector does not usually phone ahead. The regulator runs unannounced, proactive visits as well as reactive ones, and in recent years it has deliberately targeted workplaces that expose people to substances known to cause asthma and cancer: flour dust, wood dust, welding fume, silica and spray paints among them. If your business works with any of those, a visit is a question of when, not if, and the difference between a smooth one and an expensive one is very largely the paperwork you can produce on the spot.
The stakes are concrete. If an inspector finds a material breach, something serious enough that they must write to you about it, you pay for the time it takes them to sort it out under the Fee for Intervention scheme. That rate rose to 188 pounds an hour on 1 April 2026, charged for the whole visit and the office work behind it, and the average invoice runs well into the hundreds. A breach also triggers a Notification of Contravention, the formal letter that records what was wrong. The scheme has run since October 2012, when the rate was 124 pounds an hour, and it has climbed steadily since; the average invoice now sits in the hundreds, and in the 2024 to 2025 year the HSE recovered several million pounds this way from a few thousand businesses. None of this is charged if you are compliant; the whole cost turns on whether your documents show that you are.
Most of what an inspector asks to see is not exotic. It is the ordinary evidence that you have identified your risks and are actually controlling them. Having it filed, current and findable is itself a signal that the business is run properly, and it shortens a visit considerably.
The core file
The starting point is your written health and safety policy, which is a legal requirement once you have five or more employees, along with the risk assessments behind it. Where hazardous substances are in use, the inspector will want the COSHH assessments and the evidence that the controls in them are real: your local exhaust ventilation examination and test reports, which must be no more than fourteen months apart under COSHH, plus the commissioning report that shows the system worked when it was installed.
From there the list is about people and proof. Expect to be asked for training and competence records, health surveillance records for anyone exposed to an asthmagen, your RIDDOR records and accident book, equipment maintenance logs, and your certificate of employers' liability insurance. That last one is easy to overlook and carries its own penalties: you must hold at least five million pounds of cover from an authorised insurer and display the certificate, or face a fine for each day you are without it.
A quiet trap sits inside the LEV file specifically. Inspectors are now trained to check extraction reports against a compliance checklist, and a report that omits the hazardous substance being controlled, or never measured the dust in the cleaned air, can itself be the material breach even where the fan is working. A test report is only useful if it proves the system captures the contaminant at source, which is a very different thing from confirming that air is moving.
Records that stand up
Where an inspector suspects a control is being leaned on, they will ask to see that it is verified, and respirators are the classic example. Loose reliance on masks without evidence they fit is a common finding, which is why the fit-test records from face-fit testing, why it is not optional belong in the same folder as your LEV reports. A named record showing who was tested, on which mask, and when, turns a claim that people are protected into something an inspector can accept at a glance. Missing or generic records have the opposite effect, inviting a closer look at everything else.
Storage and substances
Inspectors do not read your file in an office; they walk the floor with it, and the place a documentary gap shows up fastest is around chemicals. The labelling, segregation and safety-data-sheet duties set out in chemical storage and handling, the basics done properly are visible in seconds: an unlabelled decanted container or incompatible substances stored together contradicts any assessment that says otherwise. When the walkround and the paperwork disagree, the inspector believes the walkround, so the real test is whether what is written down matches what is actually happening in the store, on the line and at the extraction point.
Questions
Under Fee for Intervention, a business found in material breach pays for the time the HSE spends putting it right. The rate rose to 188 pounds an hour on 1 April 2026, covering the whole visit and the office work behind it. If there is no material breach, there is no charge.
You must have a written health and safety policy once you employ five or more people, and record the significant findings of your risk assessments. Smaller firms still benefit from writing them down, and an inspector will expect to see the thinking either way.
Because a report can look complete and still miss the point. Inspectors check that the report names the hazardous substance, shows the system captures it at source, and measured the dust in the cleaned air. A report that only confirms a fan is turning can itself be a material breach.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Extraction reports are where inspections most often come unstuck. Phoenix examines and tests LEV to COSHH Regulation 9 and reports on the substance, the capture and the clean air. UK-wide.