COSHH, the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations, is the UK framework requiring employers to assess and control exposure to substances that can harm health: dusts, fumes, vapors, solvents, and biological agents. It reaches almost every manufacturing site, and much of what it requires is maintained engineering: extraction that must keep working, controls that must be tested, records that must exist. This is an educational overview, not legal advice.
The regulation makes control maintenance a legal duty, not a nicety. An extraction hood credited to keep welding fume out of a breathing zone only protects while its airflow holds; a solvent enclosure only controls vapor while its interlocks and seals work. COSHH therefore demands that these controls be maintained and, for LEV, formally examined and tested, typically every 14 months. A COSHH assessment that credits controls the maintenance program does not sustain is describing a protection that has quietly stopped protecting.
A fabrication shop’s COSHH assessment credits LEV for keeping welding fume exposure below the workplace exposure limit, so respiratory protection is a backup, not the primary control. Over eighteen months the extraction fan’s performance drifts, a worn impeller, a partially blocked duct, and capture velocity at the hood falls below the design figure. Nobody notices, because fume you cannot see feels the same as fume that is being captured. The next LEV thorough examination flags it: face velocity below the standard, control no longer adequate. The fix is fan maintenance and a duct clean, but the eighteen-month gap is real exposure that health surveillance may later reveal. A scheduled airflow check between examinations, exactly the discipline of fan maintenance, would have caught the decay early. Under COSHH, a credited control is only as good as its upkeep.
COSHH compliance is demonstrated with documents: the assessment, LEV examination reports, control-maintenance records, exposure monitoring, and health surveillance. The recurring inspection question is not "do you have controls?" but "prove they work", face-velocity trends, examination reports within their intervals, defects found and corrected. Undocumented control maintenance is, for enforcement purposes, absent control maintenance.
Fabrico is not a COSHH assessment tool and does not classify substances or set exposure controls, occupational hygienists and safety professionals do that. What Fabrico keeps true is the maintenance half of every credited control: LEV and extraction on airflow-verified schedules, statutory LEV examinations tracked so they never lapse, control defects escalated at health priority, and the evidence, schedules, readings, examination reports, ready when the inspector asks, under EU governance. The assessment says what protects workers; Fabrico proves the protection is maintained. EU-built, with EU data residency.
Not by name in every case, but COSHH requires adequate control by the most effective reasonable means, which for airborne contaminants usually means engineering controls such as LEV before relying on RPE. Where LEV is provided as a control, it must be maintained and thoroughly examined and tested, commonly at least every 14 months.
Ongoing health checks for workers exposed to certain substances (for example, respiratory or skin monitoring), required where there is a recognizable disease or health effect linked to the exposure and a valid technique to detect it. It is an outcome measure: it can reveal whether controls have actually protected people.
A competent person with knowledge of the substances, the process, and exposure control, sometimes supported by an occupational hygienist. Maintenance input matters because the assessment credits controls that maintenance must sustain, and maintenance holds the truth about whether those controls still perform.
Want every COSHH control’s maintenance and examination provable on demand? Book a Fabrico demo to see health-control discipline run through a field-ready CMMS.
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