What Activities Require a Risk Assessment?

At Durham SU, we ask that regular/repeated events in the same spaces require only one initial risk assessment at the beginning of each academic year to be submitted for approval. All other activity outside of this requires a risk assessment for each occurrence, and we will normally ask you to submit this for approval from the ASK Team for anything which poses a medium or large risk. 

What we must risk assess:

• Anything that requires a contract (non-sponsors) 
• Any activity that invites a non-DU/SU person to attend/speak on behalf of an external organisation.
• Any activity taking place on ‘public land and or needs special permissions.’. 
• Any activity taking place outside of central Durham. 
• Any activity that has the potential to cause physical harm. 
• Any activity that involves engaging with young people/vulnerable adults.

You should submit a risk assessment alongside your Student Group Activity Form, which you also need to submit to notify us of the event at least 14 days before the activity or event. For large scale events, we politely request that you do submit this even earlier (at least one month in advance is preferable), as the workload for such events is quite large.  

For low-risk events, such as meetings or socials, you do still need to write a Risk Assessment, though we do ask these documents to be submitted for approval by the ASK Team. We trust you to write these documents and have them to hand at your event - should an incident occur, you will need to provide this immediately. 

For help in writing a Risk Assessment, you can view How Do I Write a Risk Assessment?. 

For any issues relating to accessing the links above, please get in touch here.