Health and safety

The Health and Safety Executive is Great Britain’s national regulator for workplace health and safety. It is an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Work and Pensions, established under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.

Its remit is Great Britain - England, Wales and Scotland. Health and safety is a reserved matter in Scotland and Wales, so the same law and the same regulator apply. Northern Ireland has its own regulator and its own statute book; see the devolved section below.

HSE enforces through inspection and through two statutory notices. An improvement notice is served where an inspector considers a statutory provision is being contravened, and specifies a period for remedy. A prohibition notice is served where an activity involves or will involve a risk of serious personal injury, can direct that the activity stop, and can take immediate effect. Both are appealable to an employment tribunal. Beyond notices, HSE inspectors may prosecute in England and Wales; in Scotland prosecution is brought by the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. Directors and managers can be personally liable where an offence was committed with their consent, connivance or neglect.

HSE also runs public registers of enforcement notices and of convictions. Those are worth knowing about: they are open, searchable, and they cover Great Britain. Sentencing in England and Wales follows the Sentencing Council’s definitive guideline for health and safety offences, which introduced turnover-based fine bands in 2016.

One scope change worth noting. HSE’s building safety pages now direct readers to the Building Safety Regulator on GOV.UK, because that regulator is no longer part of HSE. HSE retains guidance on health and safety topics within buildings - ventilation, asbestos, legionella, reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete - but no longer regulates higher-risk buildings.

The 1974 Act is the framework statute for the whole occupational health and safety system in Great Britain. Almost every regulation described further down this page is made under it.

Its general duties are the foundation. Section 2 places general duties on employers toward their own employees. Section 3 places duties on employers and the self-employed toward people who are not their employees - which on a construction site means everyone else’s operatives, visitors and the public. Section 4 covers those in control of premises. Section 6 covers designers, manufacturers, importers and suppliers of articles and substances for use at work. Section 7 places duties on employees themselves, and section 8 makes it an offence to interfere with or misuse anything provided in the interests of health and safety.

The structural feature that distinguishes British health and safety law from prescriptive regimes elsewhere is the qualifier "so far as is reasonably practicable". Duties are goal-setting rather than a checklist, which puts the burden of judgement on the duty holder and is precisely why competent advice matters.

Separately, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 creates a distinct corporate offence where a gross breach of a duty of care causes death and the way senior management organised activities was a substantial element of the breach.

The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 came into force on 6 April 2015 and apply across Great Britain to all construction projects, including domestic ones. They are the regulations that define who is responsible for what on a construction project.

HSE lists seven duty holders. The commercial client makes suitable arrangements for managing the project, appoints the other duty holders, allocates sufficient time and resource, provides pre-construction information and ensures welfare facilities. A domestic client’s duties normally pass to the contractor or principal contractor unless there is a written agreement with the principal designer. The principal designer, appointed where there is more than one contractor, plans, manages, monitors and coordinates health and safety in the pre-construction phase and prepares the health and safety file. The principal contractor does the same for the construction phase, draws up the construction phase plan, runs site inductions and prevents unauthorised access. Designers must eliminate, reduce or control foreseeable risks arising in construction and in later maintenance and use. Contractors plan, manage and monitor their own work. Workers must be consulted, must report hazards and must cooperate.

Notification. A project is notifiable if the construction work is scheduled to last longer than thirty working days and have more than twenty workers working simultaneously at any point, or to exceed five hundred person days. The client gives notice in writing to HSE, using the F10 form, as soon as is practicable before the construction phase begins, and the notice is displayed at the site office.

Three documents run through every project and are worth learning by name. The pre-construction information is what the client provides to every designer and contractor appointed or being considered. The construction phase plan is drawn up by the principal contractor before the site is set up and sets out the health and safety arrangements, site rules and specific measures for the higher-risk work. The health and safety file is prepared by the principal designer and handed to the client at the end, containing what will be needed on any subsequent project touching the asset.

On currency: CDM 2015 has not been substantively amended. HSE completed a second post-implementation review dated 26 March 2026 which concluded the regulations remain fit for purpose and should be retained, and recommended better guidance rather than regulatory change. No replacement or amendment was in consultation at the time of writing. The official guidance remains HSE publication L153, still in its 2015 first edition and free to download.

One point of genuine confusion worth flagging: the CDM principal designer and the Building Regulations principal designer are different legal roles under different regimes with different competence tests, even though the titles are identical. HSE’s own material and the March 2026 review both identify this as a source of friction.

The most important thing to know about the Building Safety Regulator in 2026 is that it is no longer part of the Health and Safety Executive. On 27 January 2026 it became a standalone executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, under the Building Safety Regulator (Establishment of New Body and Transfer of Functions etc.) Regulations 2026. The name is unchanged. Any guidance, article or training material published before that date which says the regulator sits inside HSE is out of date on that point.

The regulator has no standalone website; its home is its GOV.UK organisation page. Government has also consulted on a single construction regulator that would consolidate the Building Safety Regulator, the National Regulator for Construction Products and oversight of built-environment professions, following the Grenfell Tower Inquiry recommendation. That consultation has closed. At the time of writing no statutory commencement date has been set, so it should be treated as announced intent rather than an existing body.

Higher-risk buildings are defined twice, and the two definitions are not the same. For the design and construction phase, a building is higher-risk if it is at least 18 metres or at least 7 storeys, contains at least two residential units or is a care home or hospital, and is not in an excluded category. For the occupation phase the height test is the same but the building must contain at least two residential units, and hospitals and care homes are excluded. The practical consequence is that hospitals and care homes are in scope while being built and out of scope once occupied.

The gateway regime has three points. Gateway 1 sits at planning: a fire statement must accompany relevant planning applications and the regulator is a statutory consultee. Gateway 2 is building control approval, which must be obtained before higher-risk building work starts, with the regulator acting as building control authority. Gateway 3 is the completion certificate. Change control provisions cover notifiable and major changes during construction.

The golden thread is the digital record of information about the building - described in the official guidance as its single source of truth. It is held by the client, principal designer and principal contractor during design and construction, and by the accountable person and principal accountable person during occupation. It must be digital, secure, accessible, available when needed, in plain English and compliant with data protection law. Mandatory occurrence reporting sits alongside it.

The accountable person is whoever owns or has a legal obligation to repair common parts of a higher-risk building. Where there are several, the principal accountable person is the one responsible for the structure and exterior, and carries the duties to register the building, prepare the safety case report, run mandatory occurrence and complaints systems, prepare a resident engagement strategy and apply for a building assessment certificate.

Separately from the higher-risk regime, the Building Regulations etc. (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2023 introduced a dutyholder and competence regime into the Building Regulations from 1 October 2023, creating client, principal designer, principal contractor, designer and contractor roles for all building work in England - not just higher-risk buildings. These deliberately mirror the CDM names and are legally distinct from them.

These are the regulations that come up on an ordinary construction project. All are Great Britain-wide and all are made under the 1974 Act. The list below gives what each one covers and where to read it; it is deliberately not a summary of the duties, because the duties are the part you should read at source.

The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 sit underneath all of them and provide the general risk assessment framework.

Construction health and safety has an unusually crowded institutional landscape, and people routinely assume that anything with a formal-sounding name is a regulator. Almost none of them are. Of the bodies most often named, only two are statutory, and only one of those is a health and safety regulator.

The distinction matters practically. Membership of a professional institution, or registration with a scheme, has no legal standing under CDM 2015. It may be evidence of competence, and clients frequently make it a contractual requirement, but it is not the same thing as regulatory approval.

HSE publishes provisional fatal injury figures each July and the fuller industry sets each November, which means the fatal and the non-fatal construction data are usually a year apart. They should not be quoted as a single set of "latest figures". The reporting year is given against every number below.

Fatal injuries, reporting year 2025/26, provisional, published 1 July 2026: 126 workers were killed in work-related accidents across all industries in Great Britain, of which 25 were in construction - the largest single-sector share. A further 104 members of the public were killed in work-related accidents. Falls from a height accounted for 31 worker deaths across all industries, roughly a quarter of the total, followed by being struck by a moving vehicle (24) and struck by a moving object (21). HSE describes 2025/26 as provisionally the lowest single-year figure on record excluding the pandemic years.

The construction industry set, reporting year 2024/25 and three-year averages, published 20 November 2025: 35 construction workers were fatally injured plus four members of the public, against a five-year average of 40 worker deaths a year. The fatal injury rate was 1.92 per 100,000 workers, around 4.8 times the all-industry rate. RIDDOR-reportable non-fatal injuries totalled 3,726. Self-reported non-fatal injuries from the Labour Force Survey ran at about 50,000 a year, a rate of 2.5% of the construction workforce against 1.8% across all industries - a statistically significant difference. Work-related ill health affected around 79,000 workers, of which musculoskeletal disorders were 41,000 and stress, depression or anxiety 15,000. Around 2.2 million working days were lost, roughly 1.1 days per worker.

Two things are worth taking from those numbers rather than the headline. The first is that the fatality rate, not the count, is the meaningful comparator, and construction’s rate remains several times the average. The second is that ill health is by far the larger burden by volume, and that the ill-health rate in construction is not significantly different from other industries - the difference construction owns is the injury rate.

Occupational health and safety is reserved to Westminster in Scotland and Wales, so the 1974 Act, CDM 2015 and every regulation listed above apply unchanged, enforced by HSE. Building standards are a different matter entirely.

Scotland operates its own building standards system under the Building (Scotland) Act 2003 and the Building (Scotland) Regulations 2004, administered by local authorities appointed as verifiers, who grant building warrants and accept completion certificates. The Scottish Government publishes its own technical handbooks. The Building Safety Act higher-risk regime, the gateways and the Building Safety Regulator do not apply in Scotland. Health and safety prosecutions in Scotland are brought by the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service rather than by HSE inspectors.

In Wales, health and safety is reserved and HSE applies. Parts of the Building Safety Act apply with functions exercised by Welsh Ministers rather than the Building Safety Regulator, and Wales has its own instrument describing higher-risk buildings. The English gateway machinery and the English Building Regulations dutyholder regime are England-only.

Northern Ireland is genuinely separate. Health and safety is transferred rather than reserved, so there is a different regulator and a different statute book. The Health and Safety Executive for Northern Ireland is sponsored by the Department for the Economy, and HSE’s Great Britain registers of notices and convictions do not cover Northern Ireland. The primary legislation is the Health and Safety at Work (Northern Ireland) Order 1978, and the CDM equivalent is the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2016 - note the year and the different numbering. Project notification uses form NI10 rather than F10, and there is a separate CITB Northern Ireland.

Where the published record is stale, contradictory or silent, this page says so rather than smoothing it over.