What RIDDOR reporting is, and what it is not
RIDDOR reporting is a legal duty to notify the enforcing authority, usually HSE on construction sites, about a defined list of work-related events. The list is set out in the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013 (SI 2013/1471). It is not everything that goes wrong. It is a narrow set of things Parliament decided the regulator needs to know about, and most of what happens on a busy site never reaches it.
It is also not an admission of anything. Filing a report does not mean you accept blame, and it does not trigger an automatic inspection. Plenty of people sit on a report because they think it invites trouble. That is backwards. A late or missing report under RIDDOR 2013 is itself a breach, and it looks far worse in a witness statement two years later than the incident ever did.
One more thing to be clear on. The event has to arise out of or in connection with work. A joiner who trips over his own feet in the car park at seven in the morning, before he has picked up a tool, may well not be reportable. A joiner who trips on a badly stacked pallet of plasterboard in the loading bay almost certainly is. The connection to the work activity, the plant, or the condition of the premises is what decides it.
A dated site diary entry made the same afternoon, naming who was there and what the weather was doing, is worth ten reconstructed accounts written six months later.
What to report, and by when
Three clocks matter, and mixing them up is the single most common error. Deaths and specified injuries must be notified without delay by the quickest practicable means under RIDDOR 2013, then followed by a written report within 10 days of the incident. Dangerous occurrences follow the same 10 day rule. Injuries that leave a worker unable to do their normal duties for more than seven consecutive days must be reported within 15 days of the accident.
Specified injuries are listed in regulation 4 of RIDDOR 2013 and the list is tighter than most site managers assume. Fractures other than to fingers, thumbs and toes. Amputations. Any injury likely to cause permanent loss of sight or a reduction in sight. Crush injuries to the head or torso causing damage to the brain or internal organs. Serious burns covering more than ten per cent of the body, or damaging the eyes, respiratory system or other vital organs. Scalpings requiring hospital treatment. Loss of consciousness from a head injury or asphyxia. And injuries from working in an enclosed space leading to hypothermia, heat-induced illness, or requiring resuscitation or a hospital stay of more than 24 hours.
Note what is not on that list. A broken little finger is not a specified injury. Stitches are not a specified injury. A night in A&E for observation is not automatically reportable either, for a worker. But if that same worker is then signed off and cannot do their normal job for more than seven consecutive days, counting weekends and days they were not rostered anyway but not counting the day of the accident itself, you have an over-seven-day injury and 15 days to report it.
Non-workers are treated differently. Under RIDDOR 2013, an injury to a member of the public or anyone not at work is reportable if they are taken from the scene to hospital for treatment of that injury. Not for a check-up, not because the ambulance crew wanted to be careful, but for treatment. On a footpath alongside a scaffold, that distinction gets tested more often than you would like.
Once you know the cause, put it in front of the gang who do that job as a toolbox talk and keep the signed sheet with the incident file.
How to report: the online forms and the phone line
Almost everything goes through the online forms on HSE's RIDDOR pages. There is a separate form for each category: injuries, dangerous occurrences, occupational diseases, gas incidents and so on. You complete it, you submit it, and you get a copy back. Save that copy. It is your evidence that the report went in and when.
The telephone route exists, but only for fatal accidents and specified injuries. HSE's incident contact centre takes those calls during office hours, and the number is published on HSE's RIDDOR pages. Everything else, including over-seven-day injuries, is online only. Ringing up about a strained back will get you politely redirected.
For a death or a specified injury, the practical sequence is this. Make the area safe and deal with the casualty first, obviously. Then notify by the quickest practicable means, which in daylight hours means the phone and out of hours means the online form submitted the same day. Then get the fuller report in inside 10 days once you actually know what happened, rather than guessing at the scene.
Have the details to hand before you start the form: the injured person's name, job and employer, the date, time and precise location, what they were doing, what went wrong, and the injury sustained. If a serious accident has happened, do not disturb the scene beyond what safety requires. HSE or the police may want it as they found it, and under CDM 2015 the principal contractor will need the same facts for their own investigation anyway.
Accident and incident records are one of the areas assessors probe hardest, and the CHAS and SSIP readiness checker will show you what else they ask for.
Who reports: the responsible person, and the subcontractor problem
RIDDOR 2013 puts the duty on the responsible person, and for an injured employee that is their employer. Not the principal contractor. Not the client. The firm whose name is on the wage slip. So when a groundworker employed by a two-man subbie breaks his wrist on your site, the subbie reports it, not you.
That surprises people, and on site it causes real friction. The principal contractor is running the job under CDM 2015, the accident happened inside their hoarding, and their name is on the gate. But the reporting duty follows employment. Where the injured person is self-employed and working on premises under someone else's control, the duty shifts to the person in control of those premises, which on a live construction site normally means the principal contractor. Same for injuries to members of the public and for most dangerous occurrences: it lands with whoever controls the premises or the work.
Which is why the sensible arrangement is written into the pre-construction information and repeated at induction. The subcontractor reports their own people. They copy the report to the principal contractor within 24 hours. The principal contractor keeps its own record regardless, and satisfies itself the report was actually made. I have seen a labour-only gang assume the main contractor had done it, and the main contractor assume the gang had, and nobody report anything for eleven weeks. That conversation with an inspector is not one you want.
There is one more trap here. Agency and labour-only workers are often treated as employees for RIDDOR purposes because of who actually controls and directs the work. If you are the one telling someone where to stand and what to lift, do not lean too hard on the paperwork saying they are self-employed.
RIDDOR is not the only thing you might owe HSE on a job, so if the project is running past 30 days or 500 person days, run it through the F10 notification checker before you start.
Dangerous occurrences and diseases: the reports nobody remembers
Nobody was hurt, so nobody reports. That is how most missed reports happen, and it is wrong. Schedule 2 of RIDDOR 2013 lists dangerous occurrences that must be reported within 10 days whether or not anyone was injured, and a good handful are pure construction. The collapse or partial collapse of a scaffold over five metres high. The unintentional collapse of any structure under construction involving more than five tonnes of material. Plant coming into contact with overhead power lines. The failure of lifting equipment under load. The accidental release of any substance that could injure health.
A telehandler that tips over with a load on. A section of falsework that goes over on a windy Thursday with the site already cleared. A dumper that snags a live 11kV line and everyone walks away shaking. All reportable, all routinely not reported, because the site treats a near miss as a lucky escape rather than a legal event.
Occupational diseases work on a different trigger entirely. Under RIDDOR 2013 the duty arises when the employer receives a written diagnosis from a doctor, and the person's work involves the relevant activity. The construction ones are hand-arm vibration syndrome, carpal tunnel syndrome where the work involves regular use of percussive or vibrating tools, occupational dermatitis, occupational asthma, tendonitis or tenosynovitis of the hand or forearm from repetitive work, occupational cancer and disease from a biological agent.
So the GP letter that lands on the office desk about a groundworker's HAVS is a reporting trigger, not just an HR matter. Health surveillance results are not, on their own, a written diagnosis. It has to come from a doctor and it has to be in writing.
What to record when it is not reportable
Recording and reporting are separate duties and they get muddled constantly. RIDDOR 2013 requires you to record any accident causing more than three consecutive days of incapacity, even though only the over-seven-day ones get reported. So the four-day back strain never reaches HSE, but it must sit in your records.
The accident book comes from a different piece of law again. Under the Social Security (Claims and Payments) Regulations 1979, employers with ten or more employees must keep an accident book, and the standard BI 510 book does the job. Its purpose is social security benefit claims, not health and safety enforcement. It is also personal data, so the current versions have detachable pages precisely so one worker cannot read another's details. If you are still using a bound book where everyone can flick back through injuries, you have a data protection problem sitting on the welfare unit table.
Then there is everything below the threshold. Near misses, first aid treatments, the plank that fell three metres and hit nobody. None of that is reportable under RIDDOR 2013 and none of it has to go in the accident book. Record it anyway. It is the cheapest safety data you will ever collect, and CHAS, SMAS and the other SSIP schemes will ask what you do with it.
On record-keeping duration: RIDDOR 2013 requires records of reportable incidents to be kept for at least three years from the date they were made. Current HSE guidance takes the same approach to accident book entries. My own view is three years is a floor, not a target. Civil claims can arrive years after the event, and a personal injury solicitor who requests your records in year four will draw their own conclusions from an empty file.
Late reports, over-reporting, and what HSE actually does with them
Missing a deadline does not mean you should give up and say nothing. Report it late, and say in the form that it is late and why. HSE would rather have the information. A prosecution purely for a late RIDDOR report is unusual, but the failure to report becomes an aggravating detail in any wider case about the incident itself, and it is exactly the sort of thing an inspector notes.
Over-reporting is the other habit, and it is less harmless than people think. Some firms report every A&E visit as a matter of policy. It clogs your own records, it makes your genuine incident data meaningless, and it means when the CHAS or SSIP assessor asks about your accident history you are explaining away six reports that never needed making. Report what the regulations require. Record the rest properly.
Most reports get read and filed, and nothing further happens. HSE selects incidents for investigation against published criteria, and the serious end of the specified injury list gets far more attention than a broken ankle. Where an inspector does attend and finds what they consider a material breach, HSE can recover its costs under Fee for Intervention at the hourly rate it publishes, which is a bill that arrives after the event and surprises people.
What actually protects you is not the form. It is what sits behind it: an investigation that found a cause, a change to the method statement, a toolbox talk delivered to the gang who do that job, and a record showing the date it all happened. Filing a report and changing nothing is the version everyone regrets.
Questions people ask
- Is a broken finger reportable under RIDDOR?
- Not as a specified injury. Regulation 4 of RIDDOR 2013 excludes fractures to fingers, thumbs and toes from the specified injury list. It can still become reportable as an over-seven-day injury if the worker cannot carry out their normal duties for more than seven consecutive days, in which case you have 15 days from the accident to report it online.
- Do I report a subcontractor's injury on my site?
- Usually no. Under RIDDOR 2013 the injured person's employer is the responsible person, so the subcontractor reports their own employee. If the injured person is genuinely self-employed and working on premises you control, the duty falls on you as the person in control. Either way, keep your own record and confirm the report was actually submitted.
- Can I report an over-seven-day injury by phone?
- No. HSE's telephone line is for fatal accidents and specified injuries only. Over-seven-day injuries, dangerous occurrences, occupational diseases and everything else must go through the relevant online form on HSE's RIDDOR pages, within 15 days of the accident for over-seven-day injuries.
- How long do I have to keep RIDDOR records?
- RIDDOR 2013 requires records of reportable incidents to be kept for at least three years from the date they were made. Given that civil injury claims can surface long after the event, most contractors keep them considerably longer, and there is nothing stopping you doing so provided the personal data is held securely.
- Are near misses reportable?
- Near misses to people are not reportable under RIDDOR 2013, but certain no-injury events are. Schedule 2 lists dangerous occurrences that must be reported within 10 days regardless of injury, including scaffold collapses over five metres, lifting equipment failure under load and plant contacting overhead power lines. Everything else should still be recorded internally.
The short version
RIDDOR reporting under the 2013 Regulations breaks down into three timings. Deaths and specified injuries go to HSE by the quickest practicable means, by phone if it is office hours, with a report inside 10 days. Dangerous occurrences follow the same 10 day rule. Injuries keeping a worker off normal duties for more than seven consecutive days are reported online within 15 days.
The duty sits with the responsible person: the employer for employees, the person in control of the premises for the self-employed and for non-workers. Record more than three days of incapacity even where no report is needed, keep records at least three years, and remember the accident book answers a different law entirely.