Work-related ill-health has hit a new high. Overall, 1.9 million working people were suffering from a work-related illness in 2024/25, a level of suffering never before witnessed. It is hurting workers and hurting the economy.

Latest statistics released by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in November 2025 show in Great Britain work-related ill-health and injuries resulted in an estimated 40.1 million working days lost in 2024/25. HSE estimated the annual cost of workplace injuries and new cases of work-related ill-health at £22.9 billion.

The regulator noted “mental health conditions remain the primary driver of work-related ill health, with 964,000 workers reporting stress, depression or anxiety caused or made worse by work in 2024/25.” It says this “is in line with the upward trend in recent years.” This is the highest figure on record, up 24 per cent on the previous year.

A second HSE report published simultaneously, the regulator’s annual report for 2024/25, reveals a possible reason for the “upward trend.” It noted HSE’s ‘deliverables’ included “completing over 13,200 inspections, including over 7,000 inspections focusing specifically on work-related health and undertaking more than 2,700 inspections following receipt of intelligence.”

What it didn’t say was that as work-related ill-health has gone up, HSE’s oversight of workplaces has gone down. The figure of 13,200 inspections in 2024/25 is down from 14,700 the previous year. A decade earlier, the 2014/15 figure was 20,200 (see: Flatlining, Hazards 168/169).This amounts to a 35 per cent drop in workplace safety oversight.

PROTECTING US? When it comes to your workplace health and safety, who is looking after the shop? HSE inspections have dropped by over a third in a decade. At the same time work-related ill-health has hit a record high, latest official statistics show, with work-related stress now seemingly out of control. more

The average worker is now unlikely to see an HSE inspector at their workplace even once in a working lifetime.

Three developments might explain this.

The regulator has struggled with a long-term erosion of its funding.

Successive government pushes to deregulate have undermined its regulatory function.

And HSE’s top managers have drunk the Kool-Aid.

Rather than defend its regulatory function, the watchdog is pre-emptively conservative and embracing voluntarily a hands-off, light-touch role.

Reluctant regulator

HSE is a diminishing regulator, with fewer inspectors and far less resolve. It scarcely ever takes enforcement action on stress at work, so we shouldn’t be surprised it tops the work-related sickness league. And when it comes to calls for it to enforce all workplace hazards or enforce them more vigorously, its stock response is ‘no’.

Sexual harassment at work is indisputably a form of violence, but HSE rejects all calls for it to investigate, inspect or act to prevent related risks.  The result is that there is no justice for the nearly 10 million women harassed at work each year and no regulator taking a preventive role (see: Justice gap).

WRONG DIRECTION HSE has turned its back on safety, reducing enforcement and refusing to protect workers adequately from silica and at all from sexual harassment, a slamdunk form of violence at work.

There is evidence that hundreds and possibly thousands of cases of silica-related disease are occurring out of sight of the regulator. At the existing silica exposure standard a third of workers develop life-wrecking disease

While other countries have introduced a silica exposure standard six times more protective than in the UK, HSE refuses point blank to follow suit.  The consequence could be hundreds and possibly thousands of additional preventable deaths each year (see: Stone deaf).

And HSE dismisses arguments for urgent action to eliminate the risks posed by the engineered stone responsible for the rapid onset silicosis now killing workers in their 20s after only a few years exposure.

The deregulator

Inevitably, the positions taken by HSE reflect the prevailing policy preferences of the government of the day. And these have had one constant for decades.

Successive governments have made removing ‘burdens on business’ and imposing a ‘growth duty’ on regulators a core policy principle (Hazards 167).

At a 24 February 2026 evidence session of the Industry and Regulators Committee on ‘regulators and growth’, the minister for employment rights, competition and markets, Blair McDougall, said among the “deep dives that are going on”,  one “is around the complexity of guidance, for example, in health and safety, and we are working with trade unions in that space.”

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) invited the TUC to participate in a related health and safety regulation taskforce, including an invitation for the TUC assistant general secretary to act as vice-chair.

But in a 9 March 2026 letter to the minister and committee chair Baroness Hayter, posted on the Committee’s website, TUC general secretary Paul Nowak explained: “We gave this proposal careful consideration and consulted with affiliated unions.

"However, we ultimately concluded that we could not participate based on the Terms of Reference that were presented.”

The TUC letter continued: “Our concerns arise from the wider deregulatory framework within which the taskforce was proposed, including the government’s stated ambition to reduce the regulatory ‘burden’ on business and the target of achieving a 25 per cent reduction in such burdens. In our view, it is not possible to credibly pursue the protection and improvement of occupational safety and health while operating within a framework whose stated objective is deregulatory.”

The letter concluded: “Should the government wish to pursue work in these areas on a basis that prioritises improving protections for workers, we would welcome the opportunity to contribute.”

The TUC confirmed to Hazards it had declined a seat on the taskforce.

But a TUC spokesperson added: “We're in ongoing discussions with ministers on the importance of enforceable health and safety regulation, supported by strong guidance and a properly resourced and independent regulator.”

Chemical dilution

When it comes to the regulation of chemicals, it appears HSE needed no prompting to push for deregulation.

Proposals condemned by unions, the Hazards Campaign and chemical safety thinktank ChemTrust, spelled out in a February 2026 HSE Response to Consultation on Chemicals Legislative Reform Proposals, would see the imminent use of powers under the Retained EU Law to make deregulatory changes across chemical regulation.

Unite is concerned several key protections included in a broad range of chemicals rules could be diluted.

One would distance the UK from the EU hazard classification system, with HSE free to adopt classifications from unspecified other countries around the world.

This is strikingly similar to proposals by the Trump administration to cherry pick the most chemical-friendly approvals from any OECD nation in reforms of the US Toxic Substances Control Act. The US proposal reflects directly the wishes expressed by the chemical industry lobby.

Unite says the UK has already diverged from the EU in approximately 15 per cent of cases, with measures that are generally less protective (See: Limitless, Hazards 165).

The union is also concerned “the proposals seemingly seek to remove the need to respond to four new hazard classifications under the Control Labelling and Packaging Regulations that have been adopted by the EU (including for endocrine disrupting chemicals, EDCs). Exposure to EDCs are connected to a vast array of health impacts and the annual health related societal costs in the EU have been estimated at between 48 and 266 billion euros.”

Unite warns that “HSE are doubling down on their decision not to adopt the new hazard classes and align with EU classifications of these substances which will trigger improved protection from these substances for workers in the EU but not in Great Britain.”

Principle problem

HSE itself admits that more than a decade of funding cuts have taken their toll. Appearing at a Work and Pensions Select Committee on 5 February 2025,  HSE chief executive Sarah Albon told MPs said HSE had been “under considerable financial pressure.”

Budget cuts since 2010 forced the regulator to find £100 million in savings over this period. “As with all parts of the public sector, there’s a lot more we’d like to do if we were able and funded to do that,” said Albon.

But all this has happened in a context where HSE has become less accountable to its constituencies. The influence of unions on the regulator has waned, with only two of the 11 non-executive board members now union nominees.  One, the chair Sarah Newton, is a former Conservative minister.

Until relatively recently the TUC always held a seat on the board. Not anymore.
But if unions can’t as easily hold HSE’s feet to the fire, that doesn’t mean HSE itself has to accept in silence funding cuts and deregulation, when the clear implication is that the health of the workforce would be the casualty.

Albon and Newton could resign on principle. It wouldn’t be unprecedented.

Exactly a hundred years ago, in 1926, Thomas Legge, the first UK Medical Inspector of Factories, resigned his post when the government refused to ratify the International Labour Organisation’s White Lead Convention.

Legge subsequently became the TUC’s first medical adviser.

Most ever work-related ill-health

Work-related ill-health has hit a record high, latest official statistics show, with work-related stress now seemingly out of control.

Latest statistics released by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in November 2025 show in Great Britain, 1.9 million working people were suffering from a work-related illness in 2024/25, put from the previous high of 1.8 million cases.

HSE says “mental health conditions remain the primary driver of work-related ill health, with 964,000 workers reporting stress, depression or anxiety caused or made worse by work in 2024/25.”

HSE adds this “is in line with the upward trend in recent years”.

This is some understatement. It is the highest figure on record, up 24 per cent on the previous year.

Work-related mental health problems came ahead of musculoskeletal disorders, which had over half a million cases.

There were 680,000 self-reported non-fatal injuries, up by over 12 per cent from 604,000 in 2023/24.

There were 124 fatal workplace injuries in 2024/25, down from 138 the previous year
Work-related ill-health and injuries resulted in an estimated 40.1 million working days lost in 2024/25, with HSE estimating the annual cost of workplace injuries and new cases of work-related ill-health at £22.9 billion.

HSE chief executive Sarah Albon said “these statistics demonstrate that workplace health challenges persist, particularly around mental health.”

www.hse.gov.uk/statistics

Top of the page

HSE IS BROKE

If the performance-related pay of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) leadership was based on improving the health of the workforce, they would all be broke. Hazards editor Rory O’Neill reveals instead of upping their game, bosses at the cash-strapped regulator are dramatically reducing enforcement and intend to weaken key safety rules.