How to Write a Campsite Risk Assessment: A Practical UK Guide

Ask most campsite owners where their risk assessment is and you will get one of two answers. Either it is a document from three years ago that nobody has looked at since, or it does not really exist beyond "we're careful." Neither is good enough, and neither takes as long to fix as most people assume. A proper campsite risk assessment is not a box ticking exercise for an inspector's benefit. It is the document that makes you actually walk your site and think through what could go wrong, before a guest finds out the hard way. This guide covers what a risk assessment needs to include, what UK law actually requires of a small site, and how to keep it a living document rather than a drawer file.

Why a risk assessment matters beyond the paperwork

It is tempting to treat a risk assessment as something you produce once, print, and file away in case anyone ever asks for it. That misses the entire point. The value is not in having a document. It is in the process of walking your site with a critical eye and asking, honestly, what could hurt someone here.

Most campsite incidents are not exotic. They are a guest tripping on a raised pitch edge, a child near unfenced water, a barbecue too close to a tent, a step down from a shower block that catches someone in the dark. A proper risk assessment forces you to notice these things before they become a claim, a bad review, or worse. It also gives you something concrete to show an insurer, a club assessor, or an environmental health officer when they ask how you manage safety on site, rather than relying on your word alone.

What UK law actually requires

Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, any business, including a CL, a CS or a larger touring park, must carry out a "suitable and sufficient" assessment of the risks to employees and to anyone else who might be affected by the business, which includes your guests. If you employ five or more people, that assessment has to be recorded in writing. In practice, most sites keep a written record regardless of headcount, because it is the only way to prove what you checked and when.

The Health and Safety Executive does not expect a lengthy academic document. Its own guidance describes five straightforward steps, and a genuinely useful campsite risk assessment follows the same shape:

• Identify the hazards. Walk the site as if you were seeing it for the first time and note anything that could cause harm.
• Decide who might be harmed and how. Guests, children, staff, contractors and delivery drivers can all be affected differently by the same hazard.
• Evaluate the risk and decide on precautions. Weigh how likely harm is against how serious it would be, then decide what you will actually do about it.
• Record your findings. Write down the hazard, who is at risk, what you already do, and what further action is needed.
• Review and update regularly. A risk assessment written for a site with no hot tub is out of date the day you install one.

Common hazards a campsite risk assessment should cover

Every site is different, but most UK campsites share a similar core of hazards worth working through systematically rather than trying to remember them all from memory.

• Fire. Campfires, disposable barbecues, gas bottles and electrical hookups all carry fire risk. Cover fire points, extinguisher checks and evacuation routes, and see our campsite fire safety guide for the detail behind this section.
• Water. Ponds, streams, rivers or a lake on or near your boundary need their own entry, particularly if children are likely to be on site unsupervised near them.
• Electrical hookups. Damaged bollards, trailing leads and water ingress around EHU pedestals are a genuine hazard, especially after heavy rain, and tie into your wider electrical safety testing routine.
• Traffic and vehicle movement. Cars, motorhomes and caravans manoeuvring near pitches, play areas or the reception building are one of the most common sources of near misses on a busy site.
• Trip and slip hazards. Pitch edging, steps into shower blocks, uneven ground and wet paths all belong here, along with a note on how often they are checked.
• Play areas and communal facilities. Play equipment, laundry rooms and toilet blocks each carry their own risks and their own maintenance schedules.
• Legionella and water safety. Any site with a water system, including a single shower block, has a legal duty to manage the risk of legionella.
• Chemical disposal points. These involve handling waste that guests may not use correctly, and deserve a specific entry covering spillage and hygiene.

Turning it into a document that actually gets used

A risk assessment that lives as a static PDF from your first season is nearly as unhelpful as having none at all. The sites that manage this well treat it as a working document that changes as the site does.

A few habits make the real difference:

• Date every entry and set a review point. A yearly review is a sensible minimum, with an extra check whenever you add a hot tub, a play area or a new pitch type.
• Write it with a specific person in mind. "Manage fire risk" is not an action. "Check and log all fire extinguishers monthly, replace any expired unit within a week" is.
• Keep evidence, not just intentions. A dated photo of a checked fire point or a cleared drainage gully is worth far more, to an insurer and to you, than a line saying it gets checked "regularly."
• Involve whoever actually does the work. A partner, a warden or seasonal staff often spot hazards an owner walks past every day without noticing.

This is exactly the kind of recurring, evidence based routine that CampSuite®'s tasks and job sheets are built for. You can set up your risk assessment actions as recurring checks, assign them to whoever is on site that week, and require a photo before a job is marked complete, so the record builds itself as the work actually happens rather than being reconstructed from memory before an inspection. Linking those checks to your parks and pitches setup means a hazard note sits against the actual pitch, hookup or facility it relates to, instead of being buried in a spreadsheet nobody opens between visits.

What inspectors and insurers actually look for

When a club assessor, an environmental health officer or an insurer asks about your risk assessment, they are rarely looking for a perfect document. They are looking for evidence that you take the process seriously and act on what it tells you. That means a document with a date on it that is not years old, entries that clearly link a hazard to an action, and some form of record showing the action was actually carried out. Our campsite health and safety checklist is a useful companion piece if you want a broader list of what to cover on top of the risk assessment itself, and our CL sites and CS sites pages cover more of what club membership specifically expects from a licensed site.

The takeaway

A campsite risk assessment is not there to satisfy a form. It is the habit of looking at your own site with fresh eyes, spotting what could go wrong, and doing something about it before it does. Follow the same five steps the HSE sets out, cover the hazards that are genuinely relevant to your site rather than copying a generic template, and review it properly rather than leaving it to gather dust. Build the checks into your everyday routine and it stops being an annual chore and becomes part of how you run the site. If you want your risk assessment actions, maintenance checks and guest records living in one place instead of scattered across notebooks and old documents, CampSuite is free to get started with for up to 100 pitches, no card needed.