Health and Safety
Executive / Commission
Statistics
RIDDOR places a legal duty on employers and other specified duty holders to report certain workplace incidents to the relevant enforcing authority, namely HSE, local authorities (LAs) and the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR). These Regulations came into effect on 1 April 1996. Since 1 April 2006, enforcement of health and safety on railways has been the responsibility of ORR, and they have provided relevant figures for the latest two years that fall within the scope of RIDDOR. Prior to this, enforcement was the responsibility of HSE’s Railways Inspectorate. More information on railway safety can be found on the ORR website.
Incidents falling within scope of RIDDOR are specified fatal and non-fatal injuries; occupational diseases; dangerous occurrences; and certain gas incidents. Aggregated statistics based on these reported incidents are provided in these ‘statistics’ webpages, and a brief description is given below.
Deaths of all employed people and members of the public arising from work activity are reportable to the relevant enforcing authority. There are three categories of reportable injury to workers defined under the regulations: fatal, major and over-3-day injury. Examples of major injuries include: fractures (except to fingers, thumbs or toes), amputations, dislocations (of shoulder, hip, knee, spine) and other injuries leading to resuscitation or 24 hour admittance to hospital. Over-3-day injuries include other injuries to workers that lead to their absence from work, or inability to do their usual job, for over three days. A non-fatal injury to a member of the public is reportable if it results in the injured person being taken from the site of the incident to hospital. Reporting requirements generally exclude incidents that occur to persons travelling in a vehicle, as part of their work, whilst on a public on a highway.
In 2001/02, HSE introduced new guidelines to improve the quality of recording of ‘kinds’ of accident and give more detail on equipment and material agents involved. As a result, there was a small change in the percentage share in each ‘kind’, predominantly for major and over-3-day injuries.
Injuries which are not reportable under RIDDOR 95 are: road traffic accidents involving people travelling in the course of their work, which are covered by road traffic legislation; accidents reportable under separate merchant shipping, civil aviation and air navigation legislation; and accidents to members of the armed forces. Although fatal injuries to the self-employed, arising out of accidents at premises which the deceased person either owned or occupied, are technically not reportable under RIDDOR, any such incidents are presented in the published figures.
While the enforcing authorities are informed about almost all relevant fatal workplace injuries, it is known that non-fatal injuries are substantially under-reported. Currently, it is estimated that just under half of all such injuries to employees are actually reported, with the self-employed reporting a much smaller proportion. These results are achieved by comparing reported non-fatal injuries (major as well as over-3-day), with results from the Labour Force Survey- Injuries (see below).
Selected incidents that have a high potential to cause death or serious injury are reportable under RIDDOR as dangerous occurrences. A dangerous occurrence is reportable whether or not someone is injured.
RIDDOR Regulation 6(1) places a duty on certain conveyors of gas (including LPG), to notify HSE of an incident involving a fatal or major injury that has occurred as a result of the distribution or supply of flammable gas. Regulation 6(2) requires specified gas installation businesses to notify HSE of gas appliances or fittings they consider to be dangerous.
RIDDOR also places a requirement on employers to report prescribed occupational diseases, although such reports are small in number. More details can be found on the RIDDOR website.
The Labour Force Survey (LFS) is a national survey of households living at private addresses in the UK – consisting currently of about 53 000 responding households each quarter. The survey is managed by the Office for National Statistics in Great Britain and by the Department of Finance and Personnel in Northern Ireland on behalf of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETINI).
The HSE commissions questions in the LFS, to gain a view of work-related illness and workplace injury based on individual’s perceptions. The HSE questions are included in two survey modules - ‘The Workplace Injury survey’ module and the ‘Self-reported Work-related Illness (SWI) survey’ module.
The workplace injury survey module was first included in the LFS in 1990, with a limited question set included annually since 1992/93. The LFS gives annual estimates of the levels of workplace injury by a range of demographic and employment-related variables and a broadly consistent time series is available from 1998/99.
The SWI survey module has been included in the LFS annually since 2003/04, and periodically prior to then (earliest results are from 1990, although results prior to 2001/02 are not directly comparable with later time periods). This survey module provides an indication of the annual prevalence (including long standing as well as new cases) and incidence (new cases) of work-related illness and its distribution by major disease groups and a range of demographic and employment-related variables. Because individuals are asked to self-report any work-related illness they believe to have suffered over the previous 12 months, responses obviously depend on laypeople’s perceptions of medical matters. Whilst such perceptions are of interest and importance in their own right, they cannot be taken as a precise measure of the “true” extent of work-related illness. People’s beliefs may be mistaken: they may ascribe the cause of illness to work when there is no such link; and may fail to recognise a link with working conditions when there is one e.g. because of the possible multifactorial nature of ill health or the delay between exposure and ill health (several decades in the case of cancer).
Both the workplace injury and the SWI survey modules have since 2003/04 (and periodically prior to then) also provided information about the number of working days lost due to workplace injury and work-related ill health. Estimates of working days lost for both workplace injuries and work-related ill health are expressed as full-day equivalent days to take account of the variation in daily hours worked (for example part-timers who work a short day or people who work particularly long hours). This information is available by a range of demographic and employment-related variables.
Due to a routing error in the 2007/08 survey, coverage of the SWI survey module was restricted to people working in the last 12 months rather than people ever employed (as in earlier surveys from 2001/02). For comparability with earlier time periods, a top-level prevalence estimate relating to all work-related ill health for people ever employed has been imputed for 2007/08. However, this imputation has not been made at lower levels since the imputation process becomes less precise at more disaggregated levels. All other published estimates for 2007/08 are restricted to people working in the last 12 months.
Since estimates derived from the LFS are based on a sample (rather than the full population), they are subject to a margin of error. The main factor which determines the width of an estimate’s margin is the number of sample cases an estimate is based on. In published reports and tables, the sampling errors are often expressed as 95% confidence intervals. Each of these represents a range of values which has a 95% chance of containing the true value in the absence of bias. Confidence intervals should be quoted in preference to the prevalence or incidence central estimate or rate whenever there are less than 30 sample cases. In order to reflect some of the variability in the days lost estimates (measure from person to person) as well as the sample numbers involved, confidence intervals should be quoted for days lost estimates and rates based on fewer than 40 cases taking time off. Estimates based on fewer than 20 sample cases are deemed unreliable and not published.
More detailed information about the survey design and methods used are given in Technical note Workplace injury and work-related illness survey modules of the Labour Force Survey: Background and methods. Published reports for SWI surveys from 1995 onwards can be accessed via the publications/release schedule.
The Health and Occupation Reporting network (THOR) is a voluntary surveillance scheme for work-related ill health. Under this network specialist doctors undertake to systematically report all new cases that they see in their clinics. These reports are collated and analysed by a multidisclinary team at the Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health, Manchester University. The THOR network is currently consists of 5 specialist reporting schemes. These are SWORD (based on reports from hospital consultants specialising in respiratory disease) EPIDERM (based on reports from consultant dermatologists), SOSMI (based on reports from consultant psychiatrists), MOSS (based on reports from consultant rheumatologists) and OPRA (based on reports from occupational physicians). The databases for several of these schemes now extend back for more than ten years and thus provide a powerful resource for investigating the increased risks of particular types of ill health in relation to occupations, industries and causal agents or work activities.
In all of the THOR schemes there is a sampling process whereby most participating doctors are asked to send in reports for one month in each year, and the numbers of cases that they report are multiplied by 12 in arriving at the estimated annual totals. To avoid any systematic seasonal biases the sampled doctors are randomly allocated their reporting month, and this allocation changes from year to year. Not all reporting doctors are sampled; some are so called 'core' reporters, who report cases every month throughout the year. Cases reported by them are included in the estimated annual totals without any scaling up. The estimated annual totals are generally based on smaller (often considerably smaller) numbers of actual reported cases, and are subject to random variation due to sampling error. Decisions as to whether particular cases of ill health are work-related are a matter for the professional judgement of the reporters, who are asked to decide on the balance of probabilities.
The THOR schemes only cover a subset of the total cases of work-related disease. This is because quite a proportion of cases will either never come to the attention of a doctor or will be dealt with by a general practitioner. Moreover, many workers will not have access to an occupational physician at their place of work. Therefore, the subset of cases that are recorded within the THOR schemes will largely consist of either the serious or difficult-to-resolve cases that are referred to specialists by general practitioners or the more general cases from industrial sectors that are well covered by occupational physicians. Given this the numbers of cases recorded in the THOR schemes clearly underestimate the total burden of work-related ill health. Nevertheless the subset of cases that are recorded should be identified by reasonably consistent process each year thereby making it possible to measure trends over time.
Figures published by HSE relate to Great Britain only, although the THOR schemes do collect reports from doctors throughout the UK.
The incidence rates for THOR cases, per 100 000 workers in each occupation or industry, are calculated using denominators from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). The analyses by occupation use the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC)2000.
The fact that in many industries few, or even no, sufferers will have access to occupational physicians means that incidence rates based on or including OPRA reports cannot be used as a fair basis of comparisons between industries or occupations which have different degrees of coverage by such doctors. Comparisons between industries or occupations are best made by using rates based only on reports by 'disease specialists' (e.g. dermatologists, chest physicians, etc). Such specialists are accessible via the NHS to patients with all kinds of employer (including small businesses and the self-employed).
Any analysis of the raw THOR data currently presented on the HSE website in order to identify trends over time should be undertaken with caution. Those wishing to draw inferences regarding apparent changes in reported numbers of cases should be aware that there can be several potential explanations for differences between one year and the next. For example, participation by specialist doctors in the schemes is voluntary and so the number of reporters may vary with time. In addition, there is evidence that some reporters may be less inclined to report as time goes on.
A more sophisticated longer term statistical analysis is being undertaken to take account of the kinds of factors identified above which complicate the measurement of trends. This has involved the use of a multi-level statistical model (see report on ‘Trends in ill health data from THOR [417KB]
’). Within this model data is analysed in a process which effectively calculates the trends over time in the level of reporting by individual reporters and then summates these individual trends as part of the process of calculating the overall trend. This modeling approach takes full account of changes in the number of reporters over time. It also enables some allowance to be made for the fact that individual reporters may vary in factors such as the density of cases they see and the stringency of the criteria which they apply when deciding whether particular cases are work-related.
For more information on THOR, please visit the University of Manchester website.
THOR GP is a surveillance scheme in which general practitioners (GPs) are asked to report new cases of work-related ill health. It was initiated in 2005. Participating GPs report anonymised information about newly diagnosed cases to a multidisciplinary team at the Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health (COEH), Manchester University.
The pool of voluntary reporters currently participating in this project consists of around 270 GPs already trained at a postgraduate level in Occupational Medicine by the University of Manchester. The specific course is offered by distance learning and COEH is one of only a very few sites in the UK that offers this type of specialist GP training. Consequently volunteer GPs reporters practice in areas widely distributed across the UK. The GPs reporters are instructed to make their decisions as to whether a new case should be identified as being attributable to work on the balance of probabilities (i.e. whether it is more likely than not). Reports are collected via web forms each month. When reporting a case the GPs are asked to classify it into a broad disease category and to provide information on age, gender, job, industry, type of exposure, and absence from work.
An audit of the accuracy of the recording of sickness absence within the surveillance scheme revealed that there was a considerable level of underreporting. This was primarily because some reporters tended to forget to arrange for updating of the database on occasions when they signed off patients for further sickness absence over-and-above the initial period of sickness absence.
Since the scheme only covers a small fraction of the total number of GPs, there are plans to obtain detailed demographic information about the patient make-up in the practices of the participating GPs. To this end, detailed information is being obtained from the ONS area classification system to give the industrial and occupational breakdown in the geographical regions corresponding to each practice. Once this data has been collated together , estimates will be made to determine how the employment mix of the sample of the population covered by THOR-GP compares to that of the country as a whole.
For more information on THOR GP, Splease visit the University of Manchester website - THOR GP.
The Industrial Injuries Scheme, administered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), compensates workers who have been disabled by a prescribed occupational disease. The self-employed are not covered by this scheme. Diseases are prescribed in connection with defined occupations or occupational conditions. They are only prescribed if an occupational cause is well established, and if terms of prescription can be framed in such a way that the majority of cases falling within the terms of prescription will be of genuine occupational origin.
Where there is a long delay (latency) between the cause of a disease and its appearance, it may be difficult both to identify and prove occupational causes, and to frame satisfactory terms of prescription. Even when this is done, the numbers of awards probably understate the disease's incidence, because individuals may be unaware of the possible occupational origin of their disease or the availability of compensation; this applies to shorter latency diseases as well.
Respiratory diseases are assessed by Special Medical Boards, and there are also separate arrangements for assessing occupational deafness. Figures for these diseases are published on a calendar year basis. Figures for other prescribed diseases (PDs) are published for years starting 1 October. For most diseases, benefit is payable if the extent of disability (from a single PD or from a number of PDs together) is assessed at 14% or more. However, figures are available for all newly assessed cases including those assessed at 1-13% disability. This so called '14% rule' was introduced for all claims lodged after 1 October 1986, for all diseases except pneumoconiosis, mesothelioma, and byssinosis (where benefit is still payable for lesser degrees of disability) and deafness (where the benefit threshold is 20% disability). For pneumoconiosis, byssinosis and mesothelioma, benefit continues to be paid and statistics are collected for all cases assessed at 1% or more disability. For deafness the available figures do not identify those assessed at less than 20% disability, who do not qualify for benefit.
In April 2002 a new method of collecting statistical information on claims and assessments was introduced by DWP, making the data more accurate. The apparent increase in some figures is believed to be largely due to this rather than reflecting a true rise in claims and assessments. It will also reflect the fact that, as of April 2002, the data include cases where the assessment results in "0%" disability being recorded, i.e. where the condition is accepted but where there is no loss of faculty. This category also includes cases where the percentage disability is missing (not coded at the time of publication) due to the provisional nature of the data.
Care needs to be taken in interpreting the annual totals for all prescribed diseases and their trend. Prescribed diseases are a mixture of different types of disease, and they do not represent the full spectrum of work-related illness. Individual components of the total are liable to be strongly affected by changes in prescription and factors affecting the take-up of claims (e.g. the contraction of traditional industries where the availability of compensation is well known, and the shift in employment to newer industries where it may be less well known). Much of the total is accounted for by lung diseases, vibration white finger, and deafness, and many such cases are a legacy of past working conditions which would be judged inadequate or in some cases illegal by today's standards.
The current set of data have been rounded to the nearest 5 cases, or to "-" if less than 5 cases. This has been done to maintain the anonymity of DWP customers.
For more information on the IIDB, please visit the website of the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council.
Mesothelioma and asbestosis death statistics for Great Britain are derived from the two registers of deaths due to asbestos related disease maintained by HSE:
The mesothelioma register comprises deaths where the cause of death on the death certificate mentioned the word 'mesothelioma'. For a substantial proportion of cases, it also contains information about whether the site of the mesothelioma was pleural (affecting the external lining of the lungs), peritoneal (affecting the external lining of the lower digestive tract) or both.
The asbestosis register comprises deaths where the cause of death on the death certificate mentioned the word 'asbestosis'. The information on the registers from the death records includes date of birth, date of death, sex, last occupation and postcode of residence at death.
Mesothelioma and asbestosis death records are supplied to HSE electronically by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) - for deaths in England and Wales - and the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS) - for Scottish deaths. Records are currently selected by ONS and GROS from their data collection systems via the mesothelioma cause of death code. ONS also search for strings 'meso', 'mesa' and 'asb' within the cause of death text descriptions. This combined approach helps to ensure that any deaths in England and Wales that may have been miscoded are identified. In addition, processing within HSE of asbestosis deaths is carried out before the mesotheliomas to enable identification of a small number of additional mesotheliomas via the string 'asb'. This is for situations where mesothelioma was spelt incorrectly on death certificates.
Some death certificates mention both asbestosis and mesothelioma. Such deaths are included on both registers in order to keep track of cases where both diseases were present. The mesothelioma and asbestosis mortality statistics are updated annually to include figures for the year two years behind the current year. The delay is a result of the substantial time periods that can be involved in the death certification process. When we publish a figure for the latest available year it will include deaths for that year, which are registered up to 15 months after the year end. This means that the data will be approximately complete when first published. However, there may eventually be a small number of further registrations after this 15-month period, in which case figures are updated during subsequent annual updates.
A series of validation checks are carried out on the annual death data before their incorporation into the registers. Validation includes checking for important missing information, such as date of birth or death, and checking for duplicates. Any queries are followed up with ONS and GROS. Coding of mesothelioma site is also carried out at this stage along with categorisation of asbestosis deaths according to the diseases mentioned on the death certificate.
As a further check on the completeness of the mesothelioma register, HSE has periodically carried out checks of mesothelioma deaths against details of cancer registrations in Great Britain with morphology codes associated with mesothelioma. However, over the last five years this process has yielded relatively few additional deaths.
Before 1993, if there was insufficient information on a death certificate to accurately classify the death, the ONS sent a 'medical enquiry' to the certifying doctor for further information. This procedure was discontinued for deaths registered from 1993 onwards, but ONS hope to reintroduce it sometime in the future. This discontinuation has affected the site coding of mesothelioma deaths: the proportion coded as 'site not specified' was typically around 10-20% before 1993 and over 45% thereafter.Under the Control of Lead at Work Regulations (CLAW) 2002 and the former 1980 and 1998 Regulations, all workers with significant exposure to lead are required to be under medical surveillance by an appointed doctor or one of HSE's medical inspectors. The surveillance includes measurement of each worker's 'blood-lead level', the amount of lead in samples of their blood, expressed in micrograms per 100 millilitres (µg/100ml). Annual returns give summary statistics for each workplace based on the maximum blood-lead level recorded for each worker under surveillance.
The Approved Code of Practice issued with the Regulations lays down levels of blood-lead concentration above which the appointed doctor is required to decide whether to certify that the worker should no longer be exposed to lead. If a worker's blood lead level reaches or exceeds this 'suspension level' a repeat measurement must be made, and if this is still at or over the level the worker should be suspended from working with lead. The number of such workers suspended is also recorded annually and analysed in the statistics. Under the 1980 Regulations the suspension levels were 70µg/100ml for males (80µg/100ml up to 1986) and 40µg/100ml for females of reproductive capacity (to protect the health of any developing foetus). The suspension levels were lowered in the 1998 Regulations (and remain unchanged in the 2002 Regulations) to 60 and 30 µg/100ml respectively, with new 'action levels' of 50 and 25 µg/100ml. The 1998 Regulations also introduced suspension and action levels for young persons aged under 18 years of 50 and 40 µg/100ml respectively.
Because of the time required to collate and validate the returns from all the appointed doctors and medical inspectors, the latest year for which data are available is 2007/08.
Enforcement notices cover improvement (requiring employers to put right a contravention of health and safety legislation within a specified time limit); prohibition (stopping work activity that gives, or will give, rise to a risk of serious personal injury); and deferred (stopping a work activity within a specified time) prohibition notices, as issued by all enforcing authorities, namely HSE, local authorities (LAs) and the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR). Offences prosecuted refer to individual breaches of health and safety legislation; a prosecution case may include more than one offence.
Where enforcement statistics are allocated against a particular year, for notices this refers to the date the notice was issued; for prosecutions this relates to the date of the final hearing and where an outcome is known. As each years’ statistics are updated, within the HSE ‘offences prosecuted’ figure, the latest year will always include some cases that have been adjourned.
Since April 2002 inspectors from HSE’s Field Operations Directorate (FOD) have, as part of routine inspections, provided a rating of a workplaces’ level of risk control against various ‘Risk Control Indicators (RCIs).Recent movements in these RCI ratings have been analysed (see ‘Trends in risk control [PDF 390KB]’) with a view to providing supporting information for the judgement of progress against the Revitalising target.
There are a number of HSE surveys that measure aspects of working conditions and potential precursors of adverse health and safety events.
The Workplace Health and Safety surveys included separate cross sectional worker and employer surveys. These surveys included a broad range of questions, on risk control, health and safety management and other precursors of health and safety outcome. They drew probability samples that were representative of all British workers, for the worker survey, and workplaces, for the employer survey.
The 2005 WHASS employer survey, used a random probability sample of workplaces drawn from the Inter Departmental Business register. From selected workplaces just under one thousand employers with responsibility for health and safety management at this workplace completed the survey. This represented a response rate of 63%.
The 2005 WHASS worker survey, was based on responses from 10 016 British workers, a response rate of 26%. The survey was administered by telephone, with households selected by random digit dialing and a respondent selected randomly from household members who worked at some time in the last 12 months prior to interview.
A series of three annual employer and employee surveys, commissioned to support progress monitoring of HSE’s FIT3 strategic delivery programme. These Fit3 surveys measured outcome precursors, risk control and other aspects that this strategic programme hoped to influence.
The employer survey was a cross-sectional quota telephone survey of those responsible for health and safety management at approx. 6000 British workplaces. These surveys ran from 2005 to 2007. All broad industry sectors were sampled, with sample numbers boosted for specific industries within sectors where monitoring of Fit3 activity was required. The survey questionnaire had a modular design with a random sample of eligible respondents selected for each module of questions.
The employee survey was a face to face panel survey; starting with a panel of around 10,000 workers in 2006. These surveys ran from 2006 to 2008. The panel was selected from a random probability sample of working householders. The survey questionnaire had a modular design with a random sample of eligible respondents selected for each module of questions.
This ongoing annual series of surveys provides data on selected psychosocial working conditions from face to face interviews with a random probability sample of British working households. The series, beginning in 2004, has been delivered through modules in the ONS Omnibus survey series. Response rates for the surveys are around 60-70%, and the number of eligible workers interviewed per month ranged between 500 and 900. The survey is designed to monitor key working conditions on the areas underpinning HSE’s Management Standards for Work-Related Stress, namely demand, control, support, role, relationships and change.