Phoenix Journal · LEV Testing
The HSE has a clear ladder of enforcement - from a Notification of Contravention to notices, fees and prosecution. Here is what each rung means for a commercial kitchen, and how the right LEV records keep you off it.
When an inspector calls
A busy kitchen passed its fire risk assessment, held a shiny extract cleaning certificate, and still ended up with an improvement notice pinned to the office wall and an invoice from the HSE two months later.
Here is how it happened. An environmental health officer visited after a staff complaint about fumes on the line. During the walk-round, the inspector asked one simple question about the local exhaust ventilation over the fryers and chargrill - when was it last thoroughly examined and tested? The manager produced the annual grease-clearance report and assumed that was the answer. It was not. Grease cleaning tells you the ductwork is clear of a fire load. It says nothing about whether the system still captures and removes the cooking fumes and the products of combustion that people are breathing in.
There was no LEV thorough examination and test on file. No airflow readings, no capture-velocity checks, no competent-person report. Within the hour the inspector had formed an opinion that health and safety law had been breached, and the machinery of enforcement started to turn. This article walks through exactly what the HSE can do next - the notices, the fees and, at the far end, prosecution - so none of it is a surprise if it ever happens to you.
The gap was not dirt. It was evidence. The team had confused two separate legal duties and only had paperwork for one of them.
Extract cleaning is driven mainly by fire safety and insurance, and it is usually benchmarked against TR19 Grease. Local exhaust ventilation is a different duty entirely. Under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002, any engineering control that removes hazardous fumes has to be maintained in efficient working order and, under regulation 9, thoroughly examined and tested by a competent person. For most systems that examination has to happen at least every fourteen months. Higher-risk processes listed in Schedule 4 need it far more often. A commercial kitchen canopy pulling combustion products and airborne grease off the cooking suite sits squarely inside that regime.
So when the inspector asked for the LEV test record and the manager reached for the grease certificate, the two of them were talking about different things. The fourteen-month figure is a legal maximum, not a target and not something you can average out. Once it had lapsed with nothing to replace it, the breach was, in the inspector's words, material - serious enough to require a written notice. That single judgement is the switch that turns a routine visit into a chargeable, on-the-record event.
The other quiet problem was retrieval. Even where records existed, they were scattered across three inboxes and a filing cabinet. An inspector reads hesitation and missing paperwork as a sign that control is not being managed, and that perception feeds directly into how seriously the whole thing is treated. If you want to know exactly what an officer will expect to see on the day, we have set out the documents an HSE inspector will ask for in a separate guide.
Before we get to fixing it, it helps to see the scale of what is at stake. These are the figures that shape every enforcement decision in 2026.
The HSE has a ladder of responses, and an inspector will climb only as far as the situation demands. Understanding each rung is the difference between a manageable morning and a genuinely damaging one.
Where an inspector decides there is a material breach, the most common outcome is a Notification of Contravention. This is a letter that sets out the law they believe you have broken, the reasons for that opinion, and what you need to put right. Crucially, a material breach also triggers the Fee for Intervention. From 1 April 2026 the HSE recovers its costs at £188 per hour - up from £183 the previous year - covering the time spent identifying the breach, writing to you and any follow-up work. Invoices land every two months until the matter is closed. A single moderate case can run to several hundred or a few thousand pounds; a complex one, far more.
An improvement notice gives you a deadline - usually at least 21 days - to bring something up to standard. A prohibition notice is more serious: it stops an activity immediately, or from a set date, because the inspector believes there is a risk of serious personal injury. In a kitchen that could mean shutting down a cooking line until ventilation is proven to work. Both notices are published on the HSE's public register. At the top of the ladder is prosecution. Fines are set by the Sentencing Council's definitive guideline, which weighs your culpability, the risk of harm and, importantly, the size of your business. A micro-business found to have very high culpability faces a starting point around £250,000; for a large organisation the same category starts at roughly £4 million.
The kitchen in our story closed the gap in a fortnight and lifted the improvement notice comfortably inside its deadline. Here is the order they worked in, and it is a sound template for anyone.
Do those six things and the two most expensive triggers - a lapsed statutory test and paperwork you cannot produce - simply disappear. Most enforcement in this area comes down to missing evidence rather than dramatic failures, and the same pattern shows up across sectors; the most common HSE enforcement triggers in manufacturing read almost identically, with uncontrolled exposure and absent examination records near the top.
None of this is about fear. The HSE's ladder is predictable, and every rung on it can be avoided with evidence you were going to need anyway. A kitchen that can hand over a current LEV report, a clean extract-cleaning certificate and a tidy maintenance log turns an inspection from an ordeal into a formality. The paperwork is not the enemy of a busy kitchen - it is the thing that keeps the doors open, the fryers running and the invoices from ever arriving.
Questions
An improvement notice tells you to put a specific breach right within a deadline, usually at least 21 days, while you keep operating. A prohibition notice is more serious and stops an activity - immediately or from a set date - because the inspector believes there is a risk of serious personal injury. Both are recorded on the HSE's public register, and a prohibition notice in a kitchen can mean shutting down a cooking line until the ventilation is proven to work.
When an HSE inspector decides you are in material breach of health and safety law, you become liable for the cost of their time at an hourly rate. From 1 April 2026 that rate is 188 pounds per hour, up from 183 pounds the previous year. The fee covers identifying the breach, writing to you and any follow-up work, and the HSE invoices every two months until the case is closed, so the total depends entirely on how much time the matter takes.
No. A TR19 Grease extract-cleaning certificate deals with fire load and is not the same as an LEV thorough examination and test. Under COSHH regulation 9 your extraction must also be examined and tested by a competent person, in most cases at least every fourteen months, to confirm it still controls fumes and combustion products. An inspector will expect to see both records, kept for at least five years.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix examines and tests local exhaust ventilation to HSG258 and COSHH - measured, reported and certificated, UK-wide.