Can a legionella risk assessment be two pages?

A simple legionella risk assessment, done properly for a genuinely simple premises, fits on two pages. Page one describes the premises and the water system and records what you found on a walk of it. Page two sets out the controls you rely on, the monitoring you will do, and the review date. For a single let with a combi boiler and mains-fed cold water, that is a suitable and sufficient response to the duty, provided every section is completed from a real inspection rather than skipped.

First, check your let actually qualifies as simple

Two pages is an honest fit only for a particular kind of property. Run through this test before reaching for a short form:

• Hot water from a combi boiler or one small cylinder, not a stored calorifier or plant room.
• Cold water straight from the mains, with no cold water storage tank in the loft or anywhere else.
• A single dwelling, not one of several flats sharing a communal water system.
• Ordinary domestic outlets: taps, a shower, a washing machine point. No spray taps, no outside tap left unused, no hot tub.
• No especially vulnerable occupants that the assessment would need to flag, such as a care or supported-living use.

Every "no" you cannot honestly give adds a feature, and every feature adds content. A shared system in a converted house, a stored tank, or a holiday let with a hot tub takes the assessment beyond the two-page form. If any of those apply, the fuller risk assessment template is the right starting point, and do I need a legionella risk assessment explains where the duty bites.

Page one: the premises, the system, and what you found

The first page does the describing. Keep it to three blocks.

Premises and responsibility. The address, the duty holder, who is responsible day to day, the date of the assessment and the date of the next review. Three lines of a table, no more.

The water system in one short paragraph. Where the water comes in, how it is heated, and what outlets it serves. For a simple let this is often a single sentence: mains-fed cold water throughout, hot water from a combi boiler, serving a kitchen tap, a bathroom basin, a bath and a shower. If a simple sketch helps, a thumbnail drawing of the flat with the outlets marked is enough; a full schematic belongs to larger systems.

The findings. This is the part that makes the assessment real. Walk the property and record what is actually there: any dead-end pipework or dead legs left by removed appliances, any outlet used less than weekly, the temperature at the hot and cold taps. You can check the temperatures on the spot with the temperature checker: hot should reach at least 50°C within a minute of running, cold should stay below 20°C. Three findings honestly recorded are worth more than a page of boilerplate.

Page two: controls, monitoring and review

The second page is the one that turns the findings into management, and it is the page most often missing from flimsy one-page forms. It has three jobs.

The controls. One line per finding: the dead leg removed or brought into use, the little-used outlet put on a weekly flush, the temperature held at 50°C at the tap. Each control names what is done and how often.

The monitoring. A short table of the routine checks: flushing little-used outlets weekly, checking temperatures periodically, descaling the shower head. Our flushing log sheet and the log book hold these records, and the monitoring schedule template shows how the frequencies fit together.

The review. A dated line committing to the next review, and the triggers that would bring it forward: a change of boiler, a new bathroom, a long void between tenancies. This is what keeps the assessment a living document rather than a form completed once at the start of a tenancy.

What to leave out, and the trap to avoid

The honest way to shorten an assessment is to omit the sections that have nothing to describe. No cold water tank means no tank section. No thermostatic mixing valves means no TMV register. No cooling tower, spa pool or communal plant means none of those controls. Padding those sections with generic text copied from a longer template does not make the assessment stronger; it makes it slower to review and easier to miss the findings that matter.

The trap is the mirror image: using brevity as an excuse to skip features that are really there. A dead leg behind a capped-off washing machine point is a risk whether the assessment is two pages or twenty, and leaving it off a short form does not make it go away. The discipline runs in one direction only: simplicity removes sections, never findings.

Where the two-page version sits alongside the full template

The short form is not a different duty; it is the same duty under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, ACOP L8 and HSG274 Part 2, answered at the scale the building deserves. Our free risk assessment template is structured so that a simple let completes only the relevant sections, which is the practical way to end up with an honest two pages. Whatever its length, the document is an indicative starting point and a record of what you found and decided: it records, it never certifies. Landlords weighing up the whole job can read can I do my own legionella risk assessment for the competence question that sits behind the page count.