Falls from height have been the leading cause of workplace fatalities in Great Britain in almost every year since 2001. The Work at Height Regulations have been in force for over two decades. Awareness campaigns run annually. Standards have been updated. Fines have increased substantially.
And yet in 2024/25, 35 workers were killed in falls from height. The year before, 49 people died, the highest figure in a decade. Over the past five years, 188 people have been killed falling from height at work in Great Britain.
The Access Industry Forum has noted something that deserves wider attention: since the mid-2000s, the number of fatal falls from height has shown no sustained improvement. It reduces for a year or two, then rises again. The proportion of all workplace deaths attributable to falls from height has actually increased in recent years, even as the total fatality count has fallen across other causes.
This is not a problem that is getting better. It is a problem that has plateaued at an unacceptable level, and the industry needs to be honest about why.
The Regulations Have Not Changed. The Enforcement Has.
The Work at Height Regulations 2005 remain fully in force and unchanged in their core requirements. What has changed is the enforcement landscape around them.
In April 2026, Construction News reported that HSE enforcement notices in construction hit a five-year low in 2025, with just 573 immediate prohibitions and 568 improvement notices issued across the entire sector. Peter Bennett, chair of the No Falls Foundation, noted that in 2023/24, 62 falls from height that would normally have triggered a mandatory HSE investigation were not investigated at all, compared with just one such incident in 2019/20. The HSE cited inadequate resources.
The direction of travel is deeply concerning. Fewer unannounced inspections, investigations and fewer enforcement notices. At precisely the moment when the fatality figures are at their worst in years.
The No Falls Foundation has been clear: falls from height remain by far the biggest killer in construction, and the reduction in enforcement activity sends the wrong signal to an industry that needs regulatory pressure to maintain discipline on basic safety controls.
This is not an argument for blame, it is an observation about a system under strain. When enforcement weakens, the pressure on individual companies and site managers to maintain standards without external accountability increases. And the evidence suggests that, for a significant portion of the industry, that internal pressure is not sufficient.
The Pattern of Failure Is Stubbornly Consistent
When you look at HSE prosecution records and investigation findings over the past decade, the same failures appear again and again. This is not a list of exotic or technically complex hazards. It is a list of basic breakdowns.
Missing or inadequate collective fall protection is the single most common failure identified. Guardrails absent where they should be present. Edge protection removed and not reinstated. Barriers that do not meet the required standard installed by teams who do not know what the required standard is.
Alongside this: inadequate risk assessment or none at all. Insufficient supervision of workers carrying out height work. Workers placed in situations requiring competence they have not been given. And equipment that is present but not properly installed, not maintained, or not appropriate for the specific application.
None of these are new problems. None of them require new regulations to address. The framework to prevent every one of these failures already exists. The issue is not the law. It is the gap between the law and what actually happens on site.
The Underreporting Problem
The 35 fatalities recorded in 2024/25 are, in all likelihood, not the full picture.
RIDDOR, the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations, requires employers to report specified workplace injuries to the HSE. But self-employed workers are not covered by employer reporting obligations, and research consistently shows substantial underreporting across the industry, particularly among subcontractors and sole traders.
The HSE estimates, based on the Labour Force Survey, that the true number of workplace falls from height over the decade to 2024 may be as high as 425,000. The gap between that figure and the RIDDOR-reported total is enormous.
The practical implication is that the official statistics, concerning as they are, almost certainly understate the true scale of the problem. Non-fatal falls from height result in serious and life-changing injuries at a volume that the annual fatality count does not begin to capture. Almost 5,000 non-fatal fall from height incidents were reported in 2024/25, and even that figure is widely considered an undercount.
Why the Progress Has Stalled
The long-term trend in construction fatalities is genuinely positive. In 1981, 495 workers were killed in construction in Great Britain. In 2024/25, that figure was 35. Decades of regulation, improved equipment, and cultural change have produced real results.
But the recent flattening of that trend is a serious warning signal. The HSE’s own analysis notes that further improvements may become harder to achieve without new approaches to managing risk. The easy wins, legislating for the obvious hazards, improving basic awareness, removing the most egregious practices, have largely been achieved. What remains is harder.
Several factors explain why progress has stalled.
The labour shortage discussed widely across the industry in 2026 is a genuine contributing factor. As experienced workers retire and are replaced by those with less time on site, the competence baseline shifts. Research has consistently shown that workers with less than one year of experience account for a disproportionate share of serious incidents. An industry that is increasingly reliant on newer workers, under greater programme pressure, with less supervision per operative, is an industry where the risk profile is moving in the wrong direction regardless of what the regulations say.
The nature of the remaining problem is also more diffuse. The fatal incidents that still occur are not predominantly happening on large, well-managed principal contractor sites with sophisticated safety management systems. They are happening on smaller sites, on maintenance and refurbishment projects, among subcontractors and self-employed workers where oversight is weaker and compliance is less consistent. These are the hardest environments to reach through regulation, enforcement, or awareness campaigns.
And the procurement system, which ultimately determines which equipment is on site, still too often prioritises day rate over system quality. A decision made in a procurement office to save money on edge protection will play out weeks later on a slab edge, managed by a team who did not make that decision and cannot change it.
What Would Actually Make a Difference
There is no single intervention that will close this gap. But there are things that would help, and they are worth saying plainly.
Enforcement needs to be resourced adequately. The reduction in HSE inspections and investigations is not a neutral development. Unannounced site inspections create accountability that voluntary compliance does not. The No Falls Foundation’s data on uninvestigated falls is a serious indictment of a system operating below the level required to deter the most persistent failures.
Procurement decisions need to account for whole-life safety, not just day rate. Edge protection that installs faster, requires no specialist knowledge, and provides a visible confirmation of correct installation reduces the human error window at every floor cycle on every project. That is a safety outcome, not just a commercial one. Specifying on price alone systematically selects against these properties.
The hierarchy of control needs to be applied, not acknowledged. Collective protection, physical barriers that prevent falls without relying on individual behaviour, sits at the top of that hierarchy for a reason. It does not depend on a worker remembering to clip on a harness in the right anchor point at the right moment under programme pressure. It simply works. The industry has known this for twenty years. The fatality statistics suggest it is still not being applied consistently enough.
Training and competence need to be treated as operational requirements, not compliance administration. As the workforce gets younger and less experienced, the standard of safety briefing, site induction, and supervision of work at height needs to increase proportionally. In practice, the evidence suggests the opposite is happening.
This Is Solvable
Thirty-five people died in falls from height in Great Britain in 2024/25. The No Falls Foundation is right to refuse to treat that as acceptable simply because it is lower than the previous year’s figure. The benchmark should not be how bad things were twelve months ago. It should be zero.
That is not naivety. It is the only standard that takes the problem seriously. Every one of those 35 deaths was preventable. The regulations that should have prevented them existed. The equipment that could have prevented them existed. What failed was the application.
The industry has the knowledge, the tools, and the regulatory framework to make construction sites in the UK among the safest in the world. In many respects, they already are. But the plateau in falls from height fatalities is telling us something important: the current approach is not enough, and the trend will not improve on its own.
That is worth saying out loud, and it is worth the industry taking seriously.
Sources
- HSE Work-related Fatal Injuries in Great Britain 2024/25: hse.gov.uk
- No Falls Foundation: nofallsfoundation.org
- Construction News: HSE Enforcement Notices Slump to Five-Year Low, April 2026: constructionnews.co.uk
- Access Industry Forum: Falls from Height Statistics commentary
- HSE Construction Industry Statistics 2024/25, published November 2025
- RIDDOR non-fatal fall from height data 2024/25: hse.gov.uk
- Work at Height Regulations 2005: legislation.gov.uk
Rapid-EPS designs and manufactures edge protection systems that are independently tested to BS EN 13374:2025 Class A and Class B, install without tools, and leave no mark on the slab. If you would like to discuss edge protection for your project, contact the team.
0113 252 8883 | sales@rapideps.com
