Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many notifications the Health and Safety Executive has received on health and safety matters related to multi-storey buildings in each region of the UK and in each year since 2005; and what the principal reason was for each of those notifications.

The ‘Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013’ (RIDDOR) puts duties on employers, some self-employed and people in control of work premises (the Responsible Person) to report certain serious workplace accidents, occupational diseases and specified dangerous occurrences (near misses). Generally, such notifications are made in relation to workplace incidents and do not provide for the reporting of general health and safety concerns in relation to buildings.

There are two specific exceptions to this, firstly in Regulation 11 of RIDDOR which covers the reporting of gas related incidents in buildings, not just workplaces and secondly, in Schedule 2 of RIDDOR, which concerns itself with ‘Dangerous Occurrences’ in relation to structural collapse.

Where required under Regulation 11, reports are made to Health and Safety Executive (HSE) via an online form which asks for details of the incident and in what type of building it occurred (i.e. house, flat up to 4 stories, flat over 4 stories, bungalow, maisonette, other). HSE reviews all reports received against its own regulatory model to assess where further enforcement action is appropriate.

The information is not held in a readily accessible format and to extract and collate it would incur disproportionate costs.

Dangerous Occurrence reports (Schedule 2 of RIDDOR) require that the responsible person reports the unintentional collapse or partial collapse of any structure, which involves a fall of more than 5 tonnes of material; or any floor or wall of any place of work, arising from, or in connection with, ongoing construction work (including demolition, refurbishment and maintenance). The RIDDOR notification system does not provide for the reporting of building type in this case.