Injuries and fatalities at work fall but more work to be done to protect workers' health

New figures released by the HSE today confirm that Britain has the lowest rate of fatal occupational injuries in Europe and one of the lowest levels of work-related ill health.

The statistics published by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) show that in Britain between April 2009 and March 2010:

• There were 152 workers fatally injured - down from 179 the previous year. This is the lowest level on record in Britain, with 0.5 deaths per 100,000 workers.
• There were 26,061 major injuries, such as amputations and burns, to employees - a rate of 101.5 per 100,000 - compared with 27,894 in 2008/09.
• There were 95,369 injuries serious enough to keep people off work for three or more days - a rate of 371.5 per 100,000 - down from 105,261 the previous year.
• An estimated 1.3 million people said they were suffering from an illness caused or made worse by their work, up from 1.2 million in 2008/09. Of this, 555,000 of these were new illnesses occurring in-year.
• A further 800,000 former workers claim they are still suffering from an illness caused or made worse by work.

Judith Hackitt, Chair of HSE commented: “It is encouraging to see further reduction in the number of people being killed and seriously injured at work. We now need to ensure that the improvements which are being made continue. Every statistic represents an individual or a family which is now suffering as a result of health and safety failings at work.

“Britain remains one of the safest places to work in the EU and we are rightly proud of this record. The challenge now is to focus on those areas where improvement is slow to emerge.

“We know what good practice looks like but there remain significant areas of poor practice which still result in serious harm to people at work. These statistics also remind us yet again of the significant gains which are yet to be made in reducing the harm caused to people's health by work.”

The construction and agricultural industries continue to report the highest levels of work-related injuries and ill-health, with disproportionately high numbers of incidents.

The toll of injury and ill-health resulted in 28.5 million working days being lost, an average of 1.2 days per worker - 23.4 million to ill-health and 5.1 million to injury.