Safety record: 50 years of the HSE

Fifty years after the Health and Safety Executive was created, is it still fit for purpose today?

When a pile of coal waste crashed down a hill onto a school and row of houses killing 116 children and 28 adults at Aberfan in October 1966, no one was prosecuted. Industrial safety at the time was covered by a patchwork of different laws, and none were broken in the South Wales mining village.

Half a century later, the legal framework looks completely different – largely thanks to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), which started overseeing construction in January 1975. However, 50 years on, how much has it helped the industry’s safety record?

“It was felt there ought to be a carrot and stick. The stick is that the HSE will prosecute if you don’t do the right thing”

Duncan Spencer, IOSH

The Aberfan disaster, along with other events that decade, illuminated failings within UK legislation, according to Duncan Spencer, head of advice and practice at the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH). “Basically, if the law didn’t say ‘you can’t put a slag heap in the wettest part of the country, on springs, uphill from a school and residential property’, you could get away with it,” he says. At the time, Spencer says, it was a case of waiting for “public outrage to force politicians into the process of writing legislation”.

Creating health and safety laws one at a time started to be seen as a drag on parliamentary time, and questions were raised about whether MPs were the right people to devise workplace rules.

In 1969, Lord Alfred Robens, chair of the National Coal Board, the organisation responsible for the Aberfan disaster, was chosen to run
a parliamentary committee on workplace health and safety.

“Informal but helpful regulator discussions are less opportune with the current system”

Clare Forshaw, Ex-HSE

His 1972 report recommended moving the responsibility for health and safety from parliament to employers, on the basis that those who create risks are best placed to manage them. He proposed having general, rather than just specific, duties on employers. The Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 was modelled on the report. It also created the HSE, an advisory, monitoring and enforcement body, which came into being in January 1975.

“Robens said there were too many different inspectorates and none of them collaborated with one another – it was a disjointed approach,” Spencer adds. “It was felt that there ought to be a carrot and stick. The stick is that the HSE will prosecute you if you don’t do the right thing. The carrot is that the HSE was made responsible for providing free information to help to raise standards of safety.” This included creating codes of practice and carrying out awareness campaigns.

Industries the HSE has regulated have changed over the years but construction work, widely seen as a dangerous activity, came under its watch from the start.

A downward trend in fatal injuries had already begun before the HSE was created, with annual deaths in the industry falling from 276 in 1964 to 166 in 1974. Even before the new legal framework came into effect, advances in clothing and protective equipment, such as the increased use of hard hats, were helping to make building work safer.

The trend continued in the next decade as the new safety regime bedded in, falling to 100 deaths by 1984. Numbers continued to improve until the early 1990s before rising towards the end of the decade and beyond, with 105 fatalities on construction sites in the 2000/01 financial year.

Lawrence Waterman, a consultant at Park Health & Safety, credits two events with driving down site deaths after 2021. A European Union directive had been adapted by the HSE into the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 1994 (CDM), placing heavier duties on employers to control construction risks. These were revised in 2007 and 2015 to clarify that main contractors and clients have responsibilities for the safety of their supply chains. And, in 2001, then deputy prime minister John Prescott held a summit on construction safety where industry representatives agreed to target a 40 per cent reduction in deaths and serious injuries by 2005. The watchdog worked alongside the industry to achieve this.

“That summit marked the beginning of a real change,” Waterman says. “And that was consolidated by the HSE being given the extra tools from the CDM regulations.

“CDM was needed in a way that the Health and Safety at Work Act had never really envisaged, in an environment in which it wasn’t crystal clear who the employer was. Section 2 of the act says if you’re an employer, these are the things you’ve got to do, but when you go to a construction site, who’s the employer?”

Site deaths fell to 42 by 2009/10. They have hovered around this level since, although the past two years have seen upwards movement – 47 in 2022/23 and 51 in 2023/24.

In 2010, the coalition government introduced its austerity programme. Since then, the government has cut grants to the HSE by a third, from £240m to £172m. Adjusted for inflation, it’s a drop of nearly half.

Around that time, it also introduced a cost recovery scheme called the ‘fee for intervention’. This means
that if HSE inspectors find safety breaches on sites, the company responsible must pay an hourly rate for the time spent identifying the issue and advising on how to correct it. The fee is now £174 per hour, up from £124 in October 2012. Many commentators see this as a fundamental change in the relationship between the watchdog and business.

“I know many people valued the ability to call the HSE helpline to get advice on particular subjects, but they won’t do it anymore, because they are afraid of the fee for intervention,” says Phil Pinnington, head of audit and consultancy at the British Safety Council. “Most of us argued at the time that this was going to be seen as a cash cow.”

Clare Forshaw, a former senior health specialist who worked for the HSE for 23 years and is now the founding director of the UK Hearing Conservation Association, says inspectors themselves took some time to get used to their new “policing” role.

“We used to be able to go out and have conversations, pick up immediate concerns and address them with the dutyholder, and then have conversations around the human factors around welfare or housekeeping issues, [… but] fee for intervention has taken that opportunity away,” she says. “I think informal but helpful regulator discussions are less opportune with the current system.”

The HSE declined to be interviewed for this feature. In an emailed statement, it said it does not recognise the concerns that the fee for intervention has changed its relationship with the sector. “If an inspection finds you are not in breach, you are not charged a fee,” a spokesperson said. “We have maintained an open dialogue with industry, for example through influential representative bodies such as the Construction Industry Advisory Committee. We have remained an enabling regulator, with some of the most comprehensive, free-to-use and easy to apply guidance in the world.”

Overall, Forshaw says there has been huge progress on safety in the 50 years since the HSE was created, but she questions whether enough has been done to improve health, and calls for an approach that integrates both.

Impact of cuts

In 1976, the HSE initiated 1,200 prosecutions of businesses or individuals in all industries. In 2008/09 it completed 1,090 prosecutions, resulting in 846 convictions. Its latest annual report, for 2023/24, shows that it secured just 228 convictions from 248 prosecutions.

The number of HSE inspectors, covering all businesses the organisation regulates in Britain, fell from 1,464 in 2010 to 976 in 2024. Its work has been adversely affected by budget cuts, says Waterman, who oversaw health and safety on the London 2012 Olympic Park build.

“I think that we’ve now got to the stage where, especially on the smaller projects with smaller companies, you need more boots on the ground to get around and engage with those people on sites, and the HSE doesn’t have the resources,” he says. “It could be that we’re looking at a bit of a plateau of health and safety on site and getting it to the next level requires a bit of extra resource.”

The HSE spokesperson insisted that “Britain continues to be one of the safest places to work
in the world”.

In its latest business plan, published last November, the regulator confirmed that it was splitting its construction division into three branches, covering investigation, inspection and specialist work.

The Prospect union, which represents HSE inspectors, has been critical of budget cuts for years. “A well-resourced Health and Safety Executive is vital to a strong economy where people are safe at work,” says Jez Stewart, Prospect national secretary. “HSE has been faced with challenges to its funding that date back more than a decade. Until the new government makes clear its detailed spending plans this will continue to be a real challenge.”

With the recent rise in site deaths and a new government in place, could we see 2001-style action to boost the HSE once again?