Phoenix Journal · LEV Testing
COSHH places clear, non-transferable legal duties on the employer - from assessing risk to maintaining and testing the extraction that controls it. Here is exactly what the law expects of you.
COSHH & the employer
COSHH is not a filing exercise or a poster on the wall - it is a set of legal duties that sit squarely with you as the employer, and an inspector will hold you to every one of them.
The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 (COSHH) is the main piece of UK law covering exposure to hazardous substances at work - dusts, mists, fumes, vapours, gases and biological agents. In a commercial kitchen that means grease-laden cooking fumes, cleaning chemicals, oven degreasers, sanitisers and the airborne particulate that builds up in extraction systems. The law does not ask you to eliminate every risk; it asks you to understand it, control it, and keep proving that the control still works.
Below we set out what COSHH actually requires of an employer in plain terms, where your ductwork and extraction fit in, and how to keep the paperwork an enforcing officer will want to see. If you want the letters behind the acronym unpacked first, we cover that in our guide to the COSHH acronym every employer should understand.
COSHH is duty-holder law. The obligations fall on the employer - not the agency staff, not the contractor who fitted your canopy, and not the engineer who tests it. You can outsource the work, but you cannot outsource the duty. In practice, the regulations require you to do the following.
Where five or more people work for you, the significant findings of your assessment must be recorded. Even below that threshold, being able to show your reasoning is what turns a defensible position into an indefensible one when something goes wrong.
COSHH does not just say "control exposure" and leave you guessing. Schedule 2A sets out eight principles of good control practice, and the HSE treats them as the benchmark for whether your controls are adequate. They are worth reading with your own kitchen in mind rather than as abstract theory.
Notice how much of this points back at ventilation. In a busy kitchen, extraction over the range is doing the heavy lifting on principle one - capturing fume at source before it reaches the people working under the canopy. That is exactly why the law then insists you keep it maintained and prove it still performs. The practical detail of turning these principles into a written record sits in the assessment itself, which we walk through in how COSHH assessments should actually be done.
For many substances the HSE publishes a workplace exposure limit (WEL) in the EH40 document - the maximum concentration allowed in the air, averaged over a set period as a time-weighted average. Where a WEL applies, you must ensure it is not exceeded and that exposure is reduced as far below it as is reasonably practicable. WELs are a legal ceiling, not a target to sit comfortably beneath.
Compliance under COSHH is a cycle, not a one-off task. The single duty that catches employers out most often is maintenance and testing of engineering controls under Regulation 9. Any local exhaust ventilation (LEV) system - your kitchen extraction included - must be thoroughly examined and tested by a competent person at least once every fourteen months. That test, often called a TExT, checks that the system is still capturing and removing contaminant to the standard it was designed for, not simply that the fan spins.
Between formal tests, Regulation 8 expects you to carry out regular visual checks - hoods, filters, ducting and hoses - and to repair or replace anything damaged or degraded. If you appoint a P601-certified engineer to run the fourteen-monthly examination, the duty still stays with you: you remain responsible for acting on the recommendations, closing out defects, and holding the records ready for inspection.
Record-keeping is where good intentions become evidence. Keep it deliberate and you will never be caught flat-footed.
Bring those elements together - a current assessment, controls that are maintained and tested on time, records that stretch back the required period, and staff who know how to use the controls - and you have a defensible position. Miss the LEV test date or lose the paperwork, and an inspector has an easy improvement notice to write.
Questions
No. COSHH is duty-holder law and the legal responsibility sits with you as the employer. You can appoint a competent contractor to carry out the work - a COSHH assessment, extraction cleaning or the fourteen-monthly LEV test - but the duty to make sure it is done, to act on the findings and to keep the records remains yours. If an inspector calls, they will hold you accountable, not your supplier.
Under Regulation 9 of COSHH, local exhaust ventilation such as a kitchen canopy or ducted extraction system must be thoroughly examined and tested by a competent person at least once every fourteen months. Between those tests you should also carry out regular visual checks of hoods, filters and ductwork. Keep the test reports for at least five years, as they are the evidence that your control measure actually works.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix examines and tests local exhaust ventilation to HSG258 and COSHH - measured, reported and certificated, UK-wide.