1.  I don't see how HSE could include this in their stats as they don't collect the data.

2(a). Regulation 14 of RIDDOR specifically excludes most road injuries and deaths from scope.  HSE is not the regulator for road safety; instead it's a police matter.

2(b). There is no legal requirement for an employer to investigate any work-related injury or death.  Investigation falls in the realm of good practice.

Hi Argyll

The exclusion from scope of most work-related transportation accidents (that would otherwise be reportable or recordable) in RIDDOR has long been a subject of debate with calls for change from e.g. RoSPA.

Perhaps not quite so pertinent post Brexit, but EU Member States are required to provide statistical information to Eurostat to help establish benchmarks, with the criteria being broadly similar to those in RIDDOR.

This has meant that HSE has had to guestimate how many road traffic accidents should be included in date provided to Eurostat.

Which has been problematic as there is nothing like a consensus as to how many road traffic accidents in the UK are work-related.

At one point, HSE guessed 10%, RoSPA (who probably know more about the subject than HSE) went for 25% whilst Devon and Cornwall Police reckoned it was about 40% in their part of the country.

As for your question about whether employers have to investigate accidents etc,, I think it's an implicit requirement of Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999.

(3) Any assessment such as is referred to in paragraph (1) or (2) shall be reviewed by the employer or self-employed person who made it if—

(a) there is reason to suspect that it is no longer valid; or

(b) there has been a significant change in the matters to which it relates; and where as a result of any such review changes to an assessment are required, the employer or self-employed person concerned shall make them.

I can't see how the duty holder could possibly conclude that there is NOT a "reason to suspect" that their risk assessment "is no longer valid" UNLESS they do at least a cursory investigation when an unintended incident occurs.

Hi Kate

That line of argument brought a smile to my face and I entirely accept that it would be far from a rare way of doing business!

Of course, as soon as some regulatory Inspector has the feeling that the duty holder is trying to avoid doing what they should, the result is likely to be that they starting digging into all sorts, not just that accident that the employer couldn't be bothered to investigate!

Probability of enforcement action would go up, as would the likely scope of the enforcement.

When I worked for HSE in the days of pen and paper the longest statements I ever took ran to 16 pages (twice). One was from the foreman steel erector after a fatal accident. 

I heard about this incident on a Monday morning while I was sitting in the witness room waiting to give evidence in the trial arising from another fatality and the trial was scheduled to take a week.

So, my boss came to see me and to tell me that he had directed that the scene of the accident be left "undisturbed" and my boss had a reputation that meant that it was unlikely that anyone would ignore his direction even if it wasn't backed up with the power of an Inspector under Section 20(2)(e) of HSWA.

Now the trial ended earlier than expected so I was on site on the Thursday morning. You would have thought that whilst they might have left the scene of the accident "undisturbed" they might have taken the time of a delay in HSE turning up to clean up their act across the rest of the site.

However, turned out not to be the case.

Fitter's mate had apparently fallen 26 feet when a floor grid had given way. Two polis had taken possession of said grid and I duly gave the site agent the necessary paperwork to make sure that I could then relieve them of it.

But then, after taking a few photos from ground level, I decided that I wasn't going to start investigating the accident until safe access was provided to both the 26 feet level but also the 48 feet level of the structure + some edge protection for each floor level. Not atypical story - the components of the permanent access staircase and floor handrails hadn't arrived but the steel erection had continued anyway with nobody thinking that a temporary staircase and edge protection would be a good idea.

So, while they put up some scaffolding I had 4 hours to tour the rest of the site and the scope of my investigation was getting ever wider. 

Hence by the time I got round to interviewing the foreman my focus was on a much wider geography than just the scene of the accident AND going back to what had been happening 8 MONTHS before the accident. Foreman didn't seem to appreciate that it was relevant to establish that very similar unsafe practices had been repeated time after time, structure after structure. 

In all probability, if the main contractor and subbie had got their act together (with some rapid learning from their own investigations of what had happened) by the time I arrived on site, the prosecution report would have been MUCH thinner with a shorter list of charges. 

Whatever the legalities not investigating incidents is a recipe for problems!