Hi lisar
I think that it's one of those borderline cases and, in particular, that what is important is not whether the injured party is paid when off sick/injured but whether they would be paid whilst actually doing what they were doing at the time of the accident.
RIDDOR defines "work-related accident".
“work-related accident” means an accident arising out of or in connection with work.
From there you need to go to Section 52 of the parent legislation, HSWA to get the definitions of "work" and "at work".
(1) For the purposes of this Part—
(a) " work" means work as an employee or as a self-employed person;
(b) an employee is at work throughout the time when he is in the course of his employment, but not otherwise ; and
(c) a self-employed person is at work throughout such time as he devotes to workas a self-employed person;
and, subject to the following subsection, the expressions " work " and " at work", in whatever context, shall be construed accordingly.
....and if this person was doing something virtually identical to what they had been sent to do and HAD been given permission to a "homer" then I think that it is likely that a Court would include that they were "in the course of his employment" [noting that UK law assumes that a reference to the masculine gender includes the famine unless the context directs otherwise - Interpretation Act 1978].
Then you need to consider whether the accident resulted "out of or in connection" with the said "work".
....and at this point it is where you probably need to ignore HSE's guidance on RIDDOR and stick to reading the legislation.
If this was a postie, nobody would probably doubt that tripping on a pavement is an occupational risk, so why would it be any different for anybody else doing deliveries? We know from RIDDOR stats that a very significant proportion of all reports are for "slips, trips and falls" on the what is often described as "level".
Remember that RIDDOR is not about admission of liability nor even thinking about suing the local authority for a defect in the pavement!
RIDDOR is written as an administrative means of providing intelligence to the enforcing authorities on how many "reportable" and "recordable" incidents are happening.
Then you need to consider how business critical it is to keep the reported numbers down.
There might be good reasons for not WANTING to report - though usually with flawed rationale - e.g. a Contractor asked for incident statistics by a prospective Client who mistakenly makes an immediate correlation between numbers and performance as regards managing health and safety risks - when actually being given some numbers may be indicative of better performance than the competing Contractor who has a SUPPOSEDLY clean sheet.
I've always followed exactly the same mantra both when working for the HSE and since.
"If in doubt, report. You can NOT be prosecuted for reporting something that is not reportable. You CAN be prosecuted for NOT reporting something that turns out to be reportable".
Remember that the enforcing authorities only follow up a tiny fraction of what is reported.