What RIDDOR stands for, word by word
Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013. Six words and a year, and every one of them does a job.
Reporting is the point of the whole thing. RIDDOR 2013 doesn't tell you how to build a scaffold or which gloves to buy. It says that when certain things happen, somebody has to tell the enforcing authority, in a set way, within a set time. That's it. It's a notification duty, nothing more, which is why people who treat it as a safety management system end up disappointed.
Injuries covers deaths and a defined list of nastier injuries, plus injuries that keep a worker off their normal duties for more than seven days. Diseases covers a short list of conditions that a doctor has linked in writing to the work, dermatitis and hand-arm vibration syndrome among them. Dangerous Occurrences is the interesting one: a list of events that have to be reported even when nobody got a scratch, because next time the outcome would be different.
And 2013 matters because it replaced the older 1995 version. If somebody on site is still talking about over-three-day reporting, they're working from the old rules. The threshold for reporting a worker's absence injury moved to over seven days back in 2012, and the 2013 regulations consolidated everything around that.
The step-by-step procedure, forms, deadlines and who presses send is covered separately in our guides hub, so this page stops at what the words mean.
Why the regulations exist, and who enforces them
Nobody wrote RIDDOR to generate paperwork. The regulations exist so the enforcing authority finds out about serious incidents while the evidence is still there, and so the country has some idea of how people are actually being hurt at work.
HSE's annual injury statistics are built substantially on RIDDOR reports, and construction shows up in them year after year with more worker deaths than any other industry sector. Falls from height dominate. That pattern is only visible because someone filled in a form. Change the reporting rules and you change what the country can see, which is why the 2012 shift from over-three-day to over-seven-day absence caused so much argument at the time.
For construction work, the enforcing authority is the Health and Safety Executive. For offices, shops, warehouses and similar premises it's usually the local authority's environmental health team, and the Office of Rail and Road picks up railway work. If you're a contractor, assume HSE unless the job is genuinely a shop fit within a trading retail unit, and even then the construction work itself sits with HSE.
There's a second, less official reason the reports matter. A report going in the same day tells anyone looking later that you knew what had happened and dealt with it. A report going in three weeks late, after an insurer's letter prompted it, tells a very different story. Inspectors notice the gap.
If you're mixing up incident reporting with telling HSE that a project is starting, the F10 notification checker sorts out which duty you're actually looking at under CDM 2015.
Which injuries count
Four groups, and they behave differently. Death of any person from a work-related accident goes to HSE without delay. Then there's the list RIDDOR 2013 calls specified injuries, which replaced the old major injuries list. Then over-seven-day absence injuries to workers. Then injuries to members of the public.
The specified injuries in regulation 4 include any fracture other than to fingers, thumbs or toes; any amputation; permanent loss of sight or a reduction in sight; a crush injury 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; scalping requiring hospital treatment; loss of consciousness caused by head injury or asphyxia; and any injury from working in an enclosed space that leads to hypothermia or heat-induced illness, or needs resuscitation or admittance to hospital for more than 24 hours. Note what's missing. A broken finger isn't on that list. A broken wrist is.
Over-seven-day injuries are the ones people get wrong most often. If a worker can't do their normal duties for more than seven consecutive days after an accident at work, it's reportable. You don't count the day of the accident itself, but you do count weekends, bank holidays and days they weren't rostered to work anyway. A Friday afternoon trip on a trailing lead, back on light duties the following Monday week, is over seven days.
Members of the public are simpler and catch people out anyway. If a non-worker is injured by work activity and is taken directly from the scene to hospital for treatment, that's reportable. The passer-by hit by a dropped scaffold clip who goes to A&E in an ambulance counts, whatever the hospital ends up doing. Being checked over and sent home doesn't undo it.
Times, weather, ground conditions and who was on site all matter later, and a site diary written on the day beats a memory reconstructed six months on.
Which diseases count
The disease side of RIDDOR is narrow and specific, and it only bites once a doctor has put something in writing. Regulation 8 and Schedule 1 of RIDDOR 2013 list the reportable occupational diseases, and the trigger is a written diagnosis from a doctor connecting the condition to the person's work.
The list that matters on site: carpal tunnel syndrome where the work involves regular use of percussive or vibrating tools; cramp of the hand or forearm from prolonged repetitive movement; occupational dermatitis; hand-arm vibration syndrome; occupational asthma; tendonitis or tenosynovitis of the hand or forearm from repetitive work; any occupational cancer; and any disease attributed to an occupational exposure to a biological agent.
Read that again with a construction eye and you'll see the trades. Breakers and SDS drills all week, then a diagnosis of hand-arm vibration syndrome. Wet cement and no gloves, then dermatitis on the hands of a bricklayer's labourer. Silica dust and wood dust feeding occupational asthma. Old lagging and, decades on, mesothelioma, which is an occupational cancer and reportable.
The awkward bit is that the person diagnosed usually doesn't hand you the letter. They mention it in passing at break, or they don't mention it at all. If a worker tells you a GP or occupational health has written down that their condition is work-related, that written diagnosis is what starts the clock, and the duty to report sits with the employer, not with them.
Whether the gang knows to phone the office the same day is a briefing problem, which is exactly the sort of thing toolbox talks are for.
Dangerous occurrences: the near misses that still get reported
This is the part of the RIDDOR meaning that people miss entirely. A dangerous occurrence is reportable whether or not anybody was hurt. Nobody hurt, nobody off work, still a report.
Schedule 2 of RIDDOR 2013 sets out the categories, twenty-seven of them for general workplaces plus extra ones for mines, quarries and offshore. The construction-relevant ones come up more often than contractors think: collapse, overturning or failure of load-bearing parts of lifting equipment; plant or equipment coming into contact with overhead power lines, or causing an electrical discharge from one; an electrical short circuit or overload causing a fire or explosion that stops the plant involved for more than 24 hours; the unintentional collapse or partial collapse of any structure or falsework involving a fall of more than five tonnes of material; the collapse of a scaffold more than five metres high, or of any scaffold erected over water where someone could drown; and the accidental release of a substance that could cause serious injury or damage health.
Picture a wet Tuesday, a telehandler on soft ground, a part-loaded pallet of blocks going over sideways with the boom bent. Driver walks away, shaken, nothing broken. No injury report. But the collapse of load-bearing parts of lifting equipment is a Schedule 2 dangerous occurrence, so HSE gets told without delay all the same. Same with the tipper body that touches an 11kV line at the yard gate and everyone stands very still for a moment.
There are also separate reportable gas incidents under regulations 11 of RIDDOR 2013, which apply to people conveying or supplying gas and to registered gas fitters who find a dangerous appliance or installation. If you're a Gas Safe registered engineer condemning an appliance, that duty is yours, not the customer's.
Who actually has to make the report
The duty falls on what RIDDOR 2013 calls the responsible person, and on a construction site with four layers of subcontractors that phrase earns its keep.
For an employee, it's their employer. For a self-employed person working on premises under someone else's control, it's the person in control of those premises, which on a live construction site normally means the principal contractor or the contractor running that work. For a member of the public injured by work activity, it's again the person in control of the premises where the work was happening. A genuinely self-employed person hurt on their own job reports for themselves, or gets someone to do it for them.
In practice this means the labour-only bricklayer's mate who breaks an ankle on your scaffold is your report, not his gang leader's, if you're controlling the site. Sort that out on day one rather than at four o'clock on the day it happens, because the two most common failures are everyone assuming somebody else did it, and two people filing the same incident twice.
Records are a separate duty from reporting. Regulation 12 of RIDDOR 2013 requires the responsible person to keep a record of every reportable incident and of every over-three-day injury to a worker, and to keep it for at least three years. Over-three-day injuries are recorded but not reported, which is the distinction the 2012 change created and the one that still trips people up. If your accident book gets filled in properly, you've largely covered regulation 12.
What RIDDOR doesn't cover
Plenty of things that feel serious aren't reportable, and knowing the exclusions saves you filing noise.
The injury has to arise out of or in connection with work. Someone having a heart attack at work with no work-related trigger isn't a RIDDOR matter. Trip on a kerb in the car park on the way in, and the analysis depends on whether the workplace condition caused it, which is a judgement call worth writing down at the time either way.
Most road traffic accidents on a public highway are outside RIDDOR 2013, with exceptions: loading or unloading, work being done alongside the road such as construction or maintenance, and exposure to a substance being conveyed. So the van shunted on the A38 on the way to site normally isn't reportable, but the labourer struck while unloading kerbs from a part-loaded wagon at the verge is a different matter.
First aid cases, an eyewash, a plaster and back to work, are not reportable, though they still belong in your own records because that's where patterns show up before they turn into something worse. And RIDDOR says nothing about telling your client, your insurer or the principal designer. Those duties come from your contract, your policy wording and CDM 2015, and they run on their own clocks.
One more thing worth separating out. RIDDOR is not the same as notifying HSE that a project is starting. Notification of a project under regulation 6 of CDM 2015 (the F10) is about the size and duration of the job, not about anything going wrong.
How the reporting itself works, briefly
Almost everything goes through HSE's online forms, with a telephone service kept for fatalities and specified injuries during office hours.
The timings under RIDDOR 2013 split three ways. Deaths, specified injuries and dangerous occurrences go without delay, followed by a written report within ten days. Over-seven-day injuries have fifteen days from the accident. Diseases go as soon as the responsible person receives the written diagnosis. A death that follows on from a reported injury within a year has to be reported when you learn of it, even if the original accident was already dealt with.
What actually determines whether you meet those deadlines isn't the form. It's whether the site knows to tell the office the same day, and whether whoever picks up the phone knows the difference between a broken thumb and a broken wrist. That's a briefing job, not a paperwork job.
And do the boring thing afterwards: write down the times, the weather, who was there, what the ground was like, and take photographs before the area is cleared. The report asks for a short description. An investigation six months later asks for everything else.
Questions people ask
- What does RIDDOR stand for?
- Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013, statutory instrument SI 2013/1471. It replaced the earlier 1995 regulations of the same name. HSE's own guidance, What is RIDDOR?, uses the same full title.
- Is a broken finger reportable under RIDDOR?
- Not as a specified injury. Regulation 4 of RIDDOR 2013 lists any fracture other than to fingers, thumbs or toes, so a broken finger is excluded from that list. It can still become reportable if it keeps the worker off their normal duties for more than seven days, and it must be recorded if the absence is over three days.
- Do you have to report a near miss?
- Only if it falls into one of the dangerous occurrence categories in Schedule 2 of RIDDOR 2013, such as a lifting equipment failure, contact with an overhead power line, or a scaffold over five metres high collapsing. Those are reportable with nobody injured at all. Everyday near misses aren't reportable, but they're worth recording internally because that's where you see trouble coming.
- Who reports an accident to a self-employed subcontractor?
- If the self-employed person is working on premises under someone else's control, RIDDOR 2013 puts the duty on the person in control of those premises, which on a construction site usually means the contractor running the work. Agree who that is at the start of the job rather than on the day.
- How long do RIDDOR records have to be kept?
- Regulation 12 of RIDDOR 2013 requires records of reportable incidents, and of over-three-day injuries to workers, to be kept for at least three years. A properly completed accident book plus copies of submitted reports normally satisfies it. Keeping them longer does no harm, and civil claims can arrive years later.
- Who enforces RIDDOR on a construction site?
- The Health and Safety Executive. Local authority environmental health teams enforce in offices, shops and similar premises, and the Office of Rail and Road covers railway work, but construction work sits with HSE.
The short version
RIDDOR means the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013. It creates a duty to notify the enforcing authority, HSE for construction, about work-related deaths, the specified injuries listed in regulation 4, injuries keeping a worker off normal duties for more than seven days, injuries to members of the public taken straight to hospital, the occupational diseases in Schedule 1 once a doctor has diagnosed them in writing, and the dangerous occurrences in Schedule 2.
Two things to hold on to. Dangerous occurrences are reportable with nobody hurt. And over-three-day injuries are recorded under regulation 12, not reported.