The £150,000 dust problem hiding in your factory

Why visibility and digital audit trails are your first line of defence against serious dust breaches.

Dust. It’s present in almost every food production environment that handles dry ingredients and carries a number of risks beyond simply keeping things clean.

A recent Health & Safety Executive (HSE) inspection drive targeting bakeries and a string of enforcement actions and compensation claims against food manufacturers, make clear that regulators are treating dust as a risk. One that businesses are legally required to control, and will be held to account for if they don’t.

The risks are serious, and legally defined

The health consequences of uncontrolled dust exposure are well-documented. Flour, grain, spices, dried milk, instant coffee and potato powder are all recognised hazards. Prolonged exposure to flour dust, for instance, is a leading cause of occupational asthma, a condition that can be permanent and the basis for compensation claims running into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The legal framework is equally clear. The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 (COSHH) requires employers to prevent or adequately control exposure to harmful dust. Specific Workplace Exposure Limits (WELs) apply to recognised hazards like flour, and are published in the HSE’s EH40/2005 guidance – a document that food manufacturers are expected to monitor as limits are updated.

Beyond health, dust presents an explosion risk. The Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations 2002 (DSEAR) govern the management of combustible dusts, (a category that includes flour, sugar, and instant coffee) where the wrong concentration, combined with an ignition source as minor as static electricity, can have catastrophic consequences.

In 2018 an English bakery was fined over £150,000 for dust control failures, cited as insufficient ventilation, cleaning processes that generated more airborne dust than it removed and a health surveillance programme that didn’t meet the required standard.

The invisible gaps that increase dust safety risk

What makes dust risk so persistent is the speed with which it accumulates on surfaces in between cleaning cycles. This compounds when the routines designed to manage it are inconsistently applied, not properly recorded, or simply assumed to be happening when they’re not.

This is where many food manufacturers are most exposed. When schedules and processes exist as documents rather than live workflows with evidence it’s hard to know whether the standard has been upheld until something goes wrong.

Without accurate data that can be checked and verified in minutes of a safety request, something as small as dust could leave a huge compliance hole in your food safety operation.

mpro5 CRO Fred Whipp demonstrates the automated processes that protect your business against compliance fines

Designing a dust-controlled environment with mpro5

At mpro5, we work with food and drink businesses to close the gap between what processes say should happen and what can be proven to have happened.

For dust risk specifically, that means making the critical controls like cleaning, ventilation maintenance, health surveillance and risk assessment into structured digital workflows rather than paper-based assumptions.

Scheduled cleaning checks

Cleaning routines can be configured as recurring digital tasks, assigned to specific team members at defined frequencies.

Completion is logged in real time, with the ability to upload photographic evidence and flag exceptions. If a check isn’t completed, managers are alerted immediately, so no surprises at the next audit.

Ventilation and equipment maintenance

Planned preventive maintenance (PPM) schedules for extraction and ventilation systems can be managed within the platform, with automatic reminders and digital sign-off.

The kind of ventilation failure that led to the £150,000 fine becomes far harder to miss when maintenance is tracked against a live schedule rather than a paper log or buried in a spreadsheet.

Health surveillance records

Tracking which employees have completed required health surveillance, when it’s due for renewal, and whether any concerns have been flagged can be centralised and automated. No more relying on a spreadsheet that someone last updated six months ago.

COSHH documentation and risk assessment workflows

Risk assessments can be stored, reviewed and updated within the platform, with version control and audit trails that show ongoing management rather than a one-time exercise.

Corrective action tracking

When a check flags an issue, whether it’s elevated dust levels, a faulty extraction unit, a missed surveillance appointment, the platform triggers a corrective action workflow, assigning responsibility, setting a deadline and chasing until it’s resolved.

Training records

Ensuring that employees handling hazardous dust understand the risks, the controls and their own responsibilities is itself a COSHH requirement. mpro5’s training management capability lets businesses track who has been trained on what, and when, and flag knowledge gaps before they become liabilities.

What being ‘audit ready’ means in reality

The bakery case cited in Food Manufacture included a damning finding: the employee responsible for health and safety compliance didn’t have sufficient experience to properly assess the risks. That’s a training and oversight failure as much as a technical one.

When the HSE arrives, whether as part of a proactive inspection drive or following an incident, being truly audit ready means being able to demonstrate, with timestamped records, that your controls were in place and consistently applied. That they are regularly reviewed, rather than buried in a shared drive. And that ongoing training and oversight is applied.

mpro5 gives food and drink manufacturers that capability: a centralised, real-time record of every safety-critical action across every site, plus training records and sign offs – accessible at any point and fully exportable for audits.

Having a digital process doesn’t eliminate dust. But it does eliminate the blind spots and in a regulatory environment where the HSE is actively inspecting, and where the consequences of failure include six-figure fines, permanent employee health damage or significant reputational harm, that visibility isn’t optional.

mpro5 helps food and drink manufacturers build structured, audit-ready workflows across health and safety, cleaning, maintenance and compliance processes. To find out how we can help you manage risk and stay inspection-ready, get in touch with our team.