Who actually has to keep an accident book
Ten or more employees is the trigger. Regulation 25 of the Social Security (Claims and Payments) Regulations 1979 puts the duty on employers at or above that headcount to keep a readily accessible accident book at any premises where people are employed, and to record the particulars of accidents in it. The reason it sits in social security law rather than health and safety law is historic: the book exists partly so an injured worker can later claim Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefit and prove the accident happened at work.
So a five-man groundworks outfit is technically outside the regulation. Keep a book anyway. When a labourer turns up eighteen months later with a solicitor's letter about a shoulder he says he hurt lifting kerbs on your job, the only thing standing between you and a paid-out claim is a contemporaneous record saying what was reported at the time, or a credible record system showing nothing was. Insurers ask for it early. So do main contractors, at the point where they're vetting you.
There's a second layer people miss. If you're the principal contractor under CDM 2015, the people on your site include subbies, agency lads and the odd self-employed plasterer who is nobody's employee. Their employers keep their own books, in theory. In practice you want everything that happens on your site recorded on your site, because the site is where the evidence lives and the welfare unit is where the injured person walked in bleeding.
An entry gains a lot of weight when the site diary for the same day records the weather, the gang on site and what work was going on in that part of the building.
What one entry has to contain
Five things carry an entry: who was hurt, when it happened, where it happened, what happened, and who recorded it. That's the spine of the statutory accident book form and it's what HSE accident and incident recording guidance expects to see. Everything else is useful detail sitting on top.
Take them one at a time, because the failures are always in the detail. Who means full name, home address and occupation, not "Dave, brickie". When means date and time of the accident, not the date somebody got round to writing it up. Where means a location a stranger could find eighteen months later: "Block C, second floor, east stair core", not "upstairs". What happened means a factual account in plain words, including what the person was doing and what caused the injury, plus the injury itself and what part of the body. And if the entry is being written by a supervisor rather than the injured person, the book needs the recorder's name and address too, because that's the person who'll be asked about it.
Write what was said, not what you'd prefer to have happened. If the fitter says he was standing on a bucket, the entry says he was standing on a bucket. Sanitised entries get destroyed in cross-examination, and a book full of tidy prose that never once mentions anything embarrassing reads as a book somebody has been curating.
Two habits worth building. Get the injured person to check and sign the entry where they're able to, because an unsigned account written by the supervisor is worth much less when it's disputed. And note what treatment was given and by whom: first aider's name, whether they went to A&E, whether they went back to work or went home. That single line answers half the questions an insurer will ask.
After any injury worth learning from, the fastest way to close the loop is a briefing to the gang, and our free toolbox talks give you a ready-made record of who was told what and when.
Why the pages tear out, and what data protection has to do with it
The old hardbound book with everything visible on one page was killed off by data protection law. When the Data Protection Act 1998 came in, HSE redesigned the statutory accident book, BI 510, with perforated pages precisely so each completed entry could be torn out and stored securely, away from everyone else's. That design carried over into the current UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 regime, and the logic hasn't changed.
Think about what's actually on a completed page. A named individual's home address, their occupation, and an account of a physical injury. Health information is special category personal data under UK GDPR, which means it needs a lawful basis and a higher standard of protection than a name on a delivery note. Leave the book open on the welfare unit table and every visiting subbie can read the personal medical details of your scaffolder. That's a breach, and it's an entirely avoidable one.
So the routine is simple. Entry gets written, entry gets removed, entry goes into a locked drawer or an access-controlled folder, and the book itself carries only blanks. Nobody who doesn't need to see it, sees it. If you've inherited a legacy hardback book where everything is on view, stop using it for new entries and store the old one securely rather than binning it, because those entries may still be live for claims.
Digital records don't dodge the problem, they move it. An accident log in a shared spreadsheet that half the office can open is the same breach with better formatting. Restrict access to the people who genuinely need it: the person managing safety, the person handling insurance, and whoever's covering when they're on holiday.
Notification and reporting get muddled all the time, so if you're unsure whether the job itself needed telling to the regulator before work started, run it through do I need to notify HSE? and settle it.
How long you keep the records
Three years from the date of entry is the standard retention period for accident book records, and RIDDOR 2013 separately requires records of reportable incidents and of over-three-day injuries to be kept for at least three years. Note the wording: three years from the date of the entry, not three years from the end of the job or the end of the tax year. Every entry runs its own clock.
Three years is the floor, and there are good reasons to sit well above it. Personal injury claims in England and Wales generally have a three year limitation period under the Limitation Act 1980, but that period runs from the date of knowledge, which for a disease can be years after the exposure. For someone injured under eighteen it doesn't start until their eighteenth birthday. Anything involving noise, dust, vibration or solvents can surface decades later, and the file you destroyed in year four is the file you needed.
My honest view: keep injury records for as long as you keep your employers' liability insurance certificates, and keep anything involving hazardous substance exposure far longer. Health records tied to health surveillance under COSHH 2002 have their own long retention requirement, and if a claim lands with nothing on your side of the table, the insurer settles and your premium wears it.
Practical bit. Whatever period you set, write it down as a policy and apply it, because UK GDPR expects you not to keep personal data longer than you need it for the purpose. "We keep everything forever in a shed" is not a retention policy, and neither is "we shred whatever the office is short of space for".
For the wider paperwork that sits around an incident, from COSHH assessments to construction phase plans, the guides hub covers each one in the same level of detail.
The book records, RIDDOR reports, and one does not cover the other
This is the single most common mix-up on site. Writing an accident in the book is not reporting it to HSE. Reporting it to HSE does not remove the duty to record it. They're two different obligations with two different legal sources, and a firm can be fully compliant with one while sitting on a breach of the other.
The Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013 sets out what has to go to the enforcing authority: deaths, a defined list of specified injuries such as fractures other than to fingers, thumbs and toes, amputations and serious burns, injuries to non-workers that mean they're taken from the scene to hospital for treatment, certain dangerous occurrences, occupational diseases, and injuries that leave a worker unable to do their normal duties for more than seven consecutive days. That last one catches people out because the seven days exclude the day of the accident but include weekends and rest days. Over-seven-day injuries must be reported within fifteen days. Deaths and specified injuries need reporting without delay, followed by a report within ten days.
And there's a middle tier. An injury that keeps someone off their normal work for more than three consecutive days must be recorded under RIDDOR 2013 even though it doesn't have to be reported. In most firms that record is the accident book entry, which is fine, provided the entry actually contains the required particulars rather than three words in biro.
So the sequence on a bad Tuesday is: first aid, then make the entry, then work out within the fifteen day window whether it's reportable, then report if it is. Don't wait to see how the injury develops before writing anything down. The entry captures what was known at the time, which is exactly what makes it valuable later.
Near misses, and the entries nobody makes
Nothing in the Social Security (Claims and Payments) Regulations 1979 requires you to record a near miss, and RIDDOR 2013 only bites on a defined list of dangerous occurrences such as a scaffold collapse or an unintentional collapse of a structure over five metres. Everything else that nearly killed somebody sits outside both. Which is daft, because those are the events that tell you what's coming.
A scaffold board dropped from the third lift and hit nothing. Nobody hurt, nothing to record, back to work. Two weeks later the same gap in the same handover pattern drops another one and there's a lad underneath. The first event was free information and you binned it.
Keep near misses out of the statutory accident book though, or at least in a clearly separate part of your system. The book is a record of injuries to persons, and mixing in a hundred entries about a dropped spanner makes it harder to find the entry that matters when a solicitor asks. A separate near miss log, reviewed monthly, does the job better and gives you something concrete to talk about on a Monday morning.
The other missing entries are the ones people choose not to make. Lads don't report cuts because they think it's soft, or because a subbie is worried about being off the job, or because the book lives in a locked office and the foreman has the key and he's on another site. Every one of those is a system problem, not an attitude problem. Fix the access and the tone and the entries appear.
Making it work on a live site
Decide where the book lives and tell everybody, at induction, on day one. Welfare unit, first aid station, site office wall: it doesn't matter which, as long as it's the same place every day and it isn't behind a locked door that goes home in somebody's van at four o'clock. An accident book nobody can reach at half six on a Saturday is a book that stays empty.
Name the person who owns it. On a small job that's the site manager, on a bigger one it's whoever holds the safety file. Their job is to check it weekly, chase up the entries with three words in them, decide on the RIDDOR question, and move completed pages into secure storage. Fifteen minutes a week, and it's the fifteen minutes that saves you when a claim lands.
Cross-reference it with the rest of your paperwork. The site diary should note the same event, the toolbox talk register shows what was briefed and when, and if the accident touched a substance then your COSHH assessment and safety data sheet are part of the picture. When those documents agree with each other and with the accident book entry, a claim looks very different from one where the diary is blank and nobody can find the induction record.
One last thing about the writing itself. Legible, dated, in ink, no gaps left to fill in later. If you make a mistake, strike it through with a single line, initial it and write the correction alongside. Never use correction fluid on a statutory record. Anything that looks tampered with is worth less than nothing, because now the argument is about your honesty rather than about the accident.
Questions people ask
- Do I need an accident book if I've only got four employees?
- Not as a legal duty. Regulation 25 of the Social Security (Claims and Payments) Regulations 1979 applies to employers with ten or more employees. Keep one anyway, because employers' liability insurers, main contractors and SSIP assessors all expect to see a record of injuries, and without one you're defending a claim on memory alone.
- Can I use a spreadsheet instead of the paper BI 510 book?
- Yes, as long as the record captures the same particulars and is kept securely. The regulation is about the record, not the format. Restrict access, because the entries contain health data which UK GDPR treats as special category personal data, and make sure entries can't be quietly edited after the fact.
- Is writing it in the accident book the same as reporting it to HSE?
- No. They are separate duties. The accident book satisfies the recording requirement, while RIDDOR 2013 sets out what must be reported to the enforcing authority and by when, including deaths and specified injuries without delay and over-seven-day injuries within fifteen days. Doing one does not discharge the other.
- How long should accident book entries be kept?
- Three years from the date of the entry is the standard period, and RIDDOR 2013 requires records of reportable and over-three-day injuries to be kept at least three years. Many firms keep longer, because the limitation period for personal injury claims under the Limitation Act 1980 runs from the date of knowledge, which for a disease can be many years after the work.
- Who should fill in the entry, the injured person or the supervisor?
- Either can, and the form allows for both. If somebody else writes it up, their name and address go on the entry too. Best practice is for the injured person to read and sign what has been written, because an unsigned account written by a manager carries far less weight when the facts are later disputed.
- Do I record accidents to subcontractors and visitors?
- Yes. Their own employer keeps their statutory record, but the accident happened on your site and you'll be the one asked about it. Record everything that happens on site in your own system, and note that RIDDOR 2013 makes injuries to non-workers reportable where the person is taken from the scene to hospital for treatment.
The short version
The accident book is a legal record of injuries at work. Employers with ten or more employees must keep one under regulation 25 of the Social Security (Claims and Payments) Regulations 1979, and every firm below that should keep one anyway for the sake of defending claims.
Each entry needs the injured person, the date and time, the place, a factual account, and who wrote it. Completed pages tear out and go into secure storage, because health data is special category personal data under UK GDPR. Keep entries three years from the date of entry, longer where disease or young workers are involved.
Recording is not reporting. RIDDOR 2013 decides what goes to HSE, and the book doesn't cover it.