RIDDOR 2013:
Reporting Deadlines, Categories, and Investigation

RIDDOR stands for the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013. It is the UK regulation that requires employers, the self-employed, and certain others in control of premises to report specific workplace incidents to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

RIDDOR replaced the 1995 regulations and took effect on 1 October 2013. It applies across Great Britain. Northern Ireland operates a parallel system under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (Northern Ireland) 1997.

RIDDOR is not about reporting every workplace accident. It specifically covers the categories of incident that Parliament has determined warrant notification to the regulator: deaths, specified injuries, over-seven-day absences, reportable diseases, and dangerous occurrences (near-misses that could have caused serious harm).

For broader context on UK employer duties, see our health and safety audit guide.

The responsible person cannot delegate the legal duty. They can appoint a competent person (often a health and safety consultant or internal safety officer) to handle the day-to-day reporting and investigation, but the legal responsibility for ensuring reports are made correctly and on time stays with the responsible person.

For multi-employer workplaces, the responsible person is usually the immediate employer of the affected worker, not the site principal. For contractor incidents, the contractor's employer reports, not the client. Getting this wrong is a common source of RIDDOR compliance failure.

Beyond the notification to the HSE, the responsible person must keep records of all reportable incidents for at least three years. The record must include the date and time of the incident, personal details of those involved, a brief description of what happened, and confirmation of how and when the incident was reported.

Many employers maintain RIDDOR records within a wider accident reporting system. The accident book (often referred to by reference to HSE publication BI 510) is the standard record of all workplace accidents, regardless of whether they meet the RIDDOR threshold. Not every accident book entry is reportable; every RIDDOR-reportable incident must have a corresponding accident book entry.

Effective incident reporting and record-keeping serves several purposes: legal compliance with RIDDOR, evidence base for accident investigation and prevention, input to insurance claims, and demonstration of active health and safety management during HSE inspections or client audits.

RIDDOR reporting is a notification duty. Accident investigation is a separate but equally important obligation under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. Every reportable incident should trigger an investigation proportionate to the severity and complexity of the event.

A proper accident investigation establishes what happened, how it happened, and why it happened, then identifies the immediate and underlying causes and the actions required to prevent recurrence. For serious incidents, root cause analysis techniques such as the Five Whys, fishbone diagrams, or formal event trees are used.

The output of an investigation is a written report setting out the findings, the root causes identified, and the corrective and preventive actions planned. Actions must be assigned to named owners with deadlines, tracked to completion, and reviewed for effectiveness.

For serious or complex incidents (particularly fatalities and serious specified injuries), the HSE may open its own investigation. In those circumstances employers should expect formal interviews, document requests, and potentially prosecution if evidence of breach emerges. Legal advice should be sought early.

Failure to comply with RIDDOR is a criminal offence. Penalties include:

In 2024, the HSE reported hundreds of RIDDOR-related prosecutions resulting in fines ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of pounds. Serious under-reporting combined with fatalities or multiple injuries has resulted in custodial sentences for individuals.