Workplace inspections



The possibility of an unannounced visit from a safety enforcement body is one of the main ways of encouraging employers to meet the basic requirements of health and safety legislation before an accident happens. Unions and safety campaigners have long been concerned about the decline in the number of workplace safety inspections carried out by external regulators.


In 2017, Open University Professor of Criminology, Steve Tombs, reported that austerity cuts had reduced the number of front-line HSE inspectors from 1,483 in 2004 to just 980 by the end of 2016. The number of local authority health and safety inspectors fell from 1,140 to 711 over the same period. As a result, the vast majority of workplaces are now exempt from proactive enforcement visits.


The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which oversaw health and safety reforms including targeting and reducing inspections under the Coalition government, set out the decline in proactive inspections carried out by the HSE in its March 2015 report, A final progress report on implementation of health and safety reforms. This showed that the number had fallen from 33,000 in 2010-11 to 22,000 planned in 2014-15.
The current 2018-19 HSE business plan includes plans for just 20,000 proactive visits this year.


Proactive inspections are no longer likely in the following sectors: agriculture, quarries, and health and social care. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) explained that the reason for withdrawing unannounced inspections from these sectors is because they are “unlikely to be effective” at maintaining health and safety standards.


Proactive inspections have been abolished altogether in the following sectors, described by the DWP as “low risk”: textiles, clothing, footwear, light engineering, electrical engineering, the entire transport sector (including air, road, haulage and docks), local authority-administered education, electricity generation and postal and courier services.