RIDDOR

RIDDOR is the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013. It places a legal duty on the responsible person, usually the employer, to report specified workplace events to the enforcing authority.

It is not a general accident-reporting duty. Most workplace injuries are not RIDDOR reportable. What RIDDOR captures is a defined list, and the practical skill is recognising which events on your site fall inside it.

What is reportable

Deaths arising from a work activity.

Specified injuries, which include fractures other than to fingers, thumbs and toes, amputations, permanent loss of sight, crush injuries to the head or torso, serious burns, scalpings, loss of consciousness from head injury or asphyxia, and injuries from working in an enclosed space requiring resuscitation or hospital admission.

Over-seven-day injuries, where someone is unable to perform their normal duties for more than seven consecutive days. The clock excludes the day of the accident but includes weekends. Separately, absences over three days must be recorded even though they are not reportable.

Occupational diseases diagnosed in writing by a doctor, including carpal tunnel syndrome, hand-arm vibration syndrome, occupational dermatitis, occupational asthma and certain cancers. These matter in construction because they often trace back to COSHH exposures years earlier.

Dangerous occurrences, a specified list of events that must be reported whether or not anyone was hurt. Scaffold collapse, the collapse or overturning of lifting equipment, and unintentional collapse of a structure all appear on it. This is where the line between an internal near miss and a legal duty sits.

Injuries to members of the public taken directly from the scene to hospital for treatment.

Timescales and records

Deaths and specified injuries must be reported without delay and confirmed within ten days. Over-seven-day injuries must be reported within fifteen days. Occupational disease reports go in as soon as a written diagnosis is received.

Records must be kept for at least three years. Given how long disease claims take to surface, keeping them longer is common sense.

Getting it right in practice

The failure is rarely refusal to report. It is that nobody at site level recognised the event was reportable, or the detail captured at the time was too thin to make the judgement later.

That argues for capturing incidents properly at the point they happen, with photographs, witnesses and the location, and reviewing them promptly against the reportable list. Where the event is reportable, the report goes to the HSE. Where it is not, it still tells you something worth acting on. Sync’s incident reporting is built to capture that detail from site.