Phoenix Journal · LEV Testing
The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 sets the duties every employer carries, and they reach right into your kitchen, plant room and extraction system. Here is what it asks of you, in the order that matters.
Duty holder guide
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 is the backbone of every duty you carry as an employer, and it reaches into your kitchen, your plant room and every duct that carries fumes away from your staff.
Most operators know the Act exists. Far fewer can point to what it actually asks of them day to day, or how it links to the regulations that sit beneath it - the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations, COSHH, and the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. The Act sets the broad, non-negotiable principle: so far as is reasonably practicable, you must protect the people who work for you and the people affected by what you do. Everything else - risk assessments, extraction cleaning, LEV testing - is how you discharge that principle in practice.
This guide walks through the duties that matter most for a commercial kitchen or food production site, in the order you should tackle them. None of it is theoretical. An inspector who finds a serious failing can recover their time from you at £188 an hour under Fee for Intervention, and the courts treat ventilation and fume control as a genuine health issue, not a housekeeping afterthought.
The Act is written in broad terms on purpose, so it stays relevant as workplaces change. That breadth can feel vague, so here is a practical sequence that turns Sections 2 and 3 into things you can actually do and evidence.
The phrase that does the heavy lifting throughout the Act is “so far as is reasonably practicable”. It means you must weigh the risk against the time, cost and trouble of controlling it, and only where the cost is grossly disproportionate to the risk are you off the hook. For airborne hazards in a kitchen, the balance almost always tips towards action, because the controls are well understood, widely available and modestly priced against the harm they prevent. An enforcing officer knows this, which is why a stalled extraction fan or an untested LEV hood is such an easy finding to make.
Enforcement is not abstract either. When an inspector identifies a material breach - a failing serious enough to be put in writing - the HSE can recover its costs through Fee for Intervention. From 1 April 2026 that rate rose to £188 per hour, covering not just the site visit but the associated investigation and paperwork. A single visit that uncovers a neglected ventilation regime can run into a substantial bill before any improvement or prohibition notice, or prosecution, is even considered. And because breaches of Sections 2 and 3 are judged against the sentencing guidelines, penalties scale with turnover and culpability, not with the size of the immediate harm.
The link between the Act and your extraction plant is direct. Your LEV is a control measure you chose to rely on when you assessed the risk. The law treats a control you have installed but do not maintain as worse than useless, because it gives staff false confidence while quietly failing. That is why COSHH pins a hard interval on thorough examination and testing, and why the examiner must be competent - the recognised route being BOHS P601, working to the HSE’s HSG258 guidance. A test carried out by an unqualified hand, with no airflow or capture-velocity measurements, will not satisfy Regulation 9.
Fire risk runs on a parallel track. The same grease that your extract system pulls out of the air settles inside the ductwork, and once it accumulates it becomes fuel. The Fire Safety Order makes the responsible person accountable for mitigating that risk, and insurers increasingly ask for proof of TR19® Grease cleaning at the right frequency before they will pay out. If your kitchen sits within a residential or mixed-use building, those fire duties widen further - the same principles we cover in our guide to fire safety duties for landlords with catering premises. And where your kitchen feeds a setting caring for young children, your Section 3 duty to non-employees becomes especially pointed, alongside the wider obligations set out in nursery catering and allergen safety for the under-fives.
None of this needs to be daunting. The Act rewards a methodical operator: assess honestly, control sensibly, test on time, clean to standard, and write it all down. Do that, and the sprawling language of 1974 resolves into a short, repeatable routine that protects your staff and stands up to scrutiny.
The difference between an operator who is compliant and one who merely feels compliant is almost always documentation. When you can produce a current risk assessment, an in-date LEV report from a competent examiner, and a TR19® Grease clean record that matches your cooking intensity, you have converted an abstract legal duty into hard evidence. That evidence is what protects you in front of an inspector, an insurer or, in the worst case, a court. It also protects the people who matter most - the staff breathing your kitchen air every shift.
Treat the Act not as a hurdle but as the organising logic behind your maintenance calendar. Every interval it implies - the 14-month LEV test, the risk-based cleaning frequency, the ongoing policy review - is a date you can put in a diary and forget until it comes round. Get the rhythm right and compliance stops being a scramble and becomes simply how the site runs.
Questions
Yes, if you employ five or more people. Section 2(3) of the Act requires a written statement of your general policy, together with the organisation and arrangements for carrying it out. You must keep it up to date as your operation changes and make sure your staff are aware of it. Employers with fewer than five staff are exempt from the written requirement but still hold the underlying duty to protect health and safety.
COSHH Regulation 9 requires a thorough examination and test at least every 14 months for most systems. Higher-risk processes need testing more often - typically annually for welding or woodworking fume, and as frequently as every six months where respirable crystalline silica is present. The examiner should be competent, usually holding BOHS P601 and working to HSE guidance HSG258, and you must keep each report for at least five years.
When an HSE inspector identifies a material breach - a failing serious enough to be written up - they can recover their time under Fee for Intervention, charged at £188 per hour from 1 April 2026. That covers the visit, the investigation and the associated paperwork, and it applies before any improvement notice, prohibition notice or prosecution. Serious breaches of the Act are sentenced against turnover and culpability, so penalties can be substantial.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
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