Is workplace safety improvement rate starting to slow?
The latest Health and Safety Executive fatality figures show how far Great Britain has come. We explore why strong systems and past performance must not lead to complacency.
Great Britain continues to be one of the safest countries in the world in which to work. Yet during 2025/26, 126 workers were killed in work-related accidents. A further 104 members of the public lost their lives in incidents connected with work.
Every number represents a person who did not return home. The detrimental impact on the lives of families, colleagues and communities is profound.
The HSE figures demonstrate how far workplace safety has progressed. They also underline why progress must never be mistaken for completion.
The next stage of improvement
The long-term rate of fatal workplace injury has fallen significantly. However, HSE reports that the pace of that decline has slowed in recent years.
For organisations with established safety management systems, this raises an important question. Where will the next stage of improvement come from?
Most high-risk organisations already have policies, procedures, risk assessments and control measures in place. Their people generally understand the hazards associated with their work.
The persistent challenge is ensuring that this knowledge continues to shape decisions when working conditions become more complex.
HSE’s figures show that familiar hazards still take lives. Falls from height remain the most common type of fatal workplace accident, accounting for 31 deaths. This equates to around a quarter of all worker fatalities in 2025/26. Construction and agriculture, forestry and fishing continue to account for the highest numbers of fatalities. Manufacturing and transportation also remain prominent.
These are not unknown risks. The challenge is controlling them consistently, across every team, contractor, shift and working environment.
When pressure tests the culture
This matters particularly as organisations deliver increasingly complex programmes under intense scrutiny.
Highly visible infrastructure initiatives – including HS2, AMP8 investment across the water sector and major energy projects – face public, political and commercial pressure around cost, productivity and delivery. The Government’s May 2026 reset of the HS2 programme, for example, placed renewed emphasis on controlling costs, increasing productivity and completing the railway as quickly as reasonably possible.
The scale of delivery pressure is also visible across the water sector. Ofwat’s 2024 price review requires for quadruple investment between 2025–30. This has created a significant programme of work for water companies and their supply chains.
Pressure itself does not make a project unsafe. But it can test whether an organisation’s stated commitment to safety is consistently understood and trusted.
As deadlines tighten and workforces and supply chains expand, leaders need to consider:
- Do people still feel able to stop work?
- Can someone question an instruction without being viewed as an obstacle?
- Do contractors and subcontractors receive the same safety message as permanent employees?
- Are productivity expectations aligned with the way work can be completed safely?
These are cultural and leadership questions as much as procedural ones.
Safety leadership that reaches everyone
The Tideway ‘super sewer’ project provides evidence of what can happen when clear leadership from the top is reinforced throughout a major project workforce.
More than 26,000 Tideway workers and contractors took part in EPIC, the immersive safety leadership programme created for Tideway by ATT and delivered at ATT’s London Safety Leadership Centre in Vauxhall. Across more than 42 million working hours, the project recorded no fatalities or life-changing injuries.
Training alone did not produce that outcome. It formed part of a wider commitment in which leaders set clear expectations and the workforce experienced what personal responsibility, communication and intervention meant in practice.
Immersive learning allows people to explore the consequences of decisions before facing them in the real world. It helps make the connection between an individual choice, a team’s behaviour and the culture leaders create around them.
ATT Co-founder and Director Adam Christopher says:
“The HSE figures show why we cannot allow strong systems or past performance to create a false sense of security. Safety culture is revealed in the decisions people make when time, cost and operational pressures compete for their attention. Leaders have to create the conditions in which the safest decision remains the expected decision.”
A continuing responsibility
The latest figures also show that workers aged 60 and over accounted for approximately one-third of worker fatalities, despite representing only 12% of the workforce.
That finding should not lead to assumptions about older workers. It should prompt organisations to consider whether work design, supervision, health, fatigue and individual vulnerability are being understood properly across a changing workforce.
Creating a safer world requires organisations to keep listening, learning and adapting – even when their performance is already strong. This level of safety can’t be achieved simply by one campaign, one training programme or one set of procedures.
This brings a question for every safety leader. Is your organisation’s leadership, culture and workforce continuing to improve and not just resting on improved past standards?
If you’re looking at ways to ensure that your organisation’s approach to safety leadership is keeping pace with the pressures facing its workforce contact our team today.
Learn more about our UK Safety Leadership Centres here.
