HSE have updated guidance on RIDDOR: May 2024

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have issued an update that highlights the changes made when reporting under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR).

The regulations and their legal requirements remain unchanged, but several improvements have been made based on stakeholder feedback. The HSE information highlights these updates, including:

• More direct links to guidance on types of reportable incidents.
• Enhanced guidance on who should and should not report under RIDDOR.
• Clearer explanations of what constitutes a ‘work-related’ accident.
• Information on when an occupational disease is not reportable.
• Greater clarity on when an ‘over-7-day’ absence should be reported.

Additional changes to the reporting process include frontloading questions about the severity of injuries and pop-up messages redirecting users if the incident is not reportable.

Main changes to the online forms include:

• The questions have been reordered to prioritise those about the ‘severity of injuries’ at the beginning. This helps you quickly determine if your incident is reportable.
• Pop-up messages will now redirect you if the incident is not reportable.
• Guidance throughout the forms has been improved to make them easier to use.
• The gender field now offers an increased number of options for injured or affected individuals.

The primary goal of these changes is to help users quickly and easily determine if a RIDDOR report is needed and to make the forms easier to use. In 2022/23, over 60,000 non-fatal work-related injuries to employees were reported by employers under RIDDOR. However, it is unclear how many were wrongly reported or how many should have been reported but were not. These changes aim to bring greater clarity to the reporting process.