RIDDOR is changing in 2026 — here's what's being proposed

On 7 April 2026, the HSE published a consultation proposing changes to RIDDOR reporting — the first significant review since the regulations were last overhauled in 2013. The consultation closed for responses on 30 June 2026, and the proposals specifically include changes relevant to construction.

What's being proposed

Among the changes under consultation: shifting the injury threshold for construction workers from over-three-days off work to over-two-days, which would bring more injuries into reportable territory than the current rule does. There's also a proposal to extend near-miss reporting to cover any unplanned fall arrest activation on scaffolding or rope access systems — treating a fall arrest system doing its job as a reportable near miss in its own right, not just a successful catch.

Why the threshold shift matters for construction specifically

Moving from an over-three-day to an over-two-day threshold sounds like a small technical adjustment, but it changes the practical judgement call site teams make constantly. An injury that keeps someone off work for three days currently sits right on the edge of reportable; under the proposed threshold, that same injury would clearly be reportable. Construction has a higher rate of the kind of soft-tissue and minor fracture injuries that tend to land in that two-to-three-day range than many other sectors, which is presumably why this proposal singles construction out rather than applying a blanket change — though the reasoning behind the specific proposal is a matter for the consultation itself, not something to take as settled from a summary like this one.

The fall-arrest proposal, in more detail

The fall-arrest proposal is a genuinely different kind of change, because it's not adjusting an existing threshold — it's proposing a new reportable category. Under current RIDDOR, a fall that's successfully arrested by a harness or rope access system, with no injury resulting, generally wouldn't itself be a reportable event. The proposal would treat the fact that the fall-arrest system activated at all as worth reporting, on the logic that an unplanned activation is evidence a fall very nearly happened, whether or not the system caught it. That's a meaningful shift in what counts as reportable — from "did someone get hurt" to "did the safety system have to do its job unexpectedly."

What happens next

The consultation closed on 30 June 2026. What happens after a consultation closes — how HSE weighs responses, whether proposals are adopted as written, amended, or dropped, and on what timeline any change would actually take effect — is genuinely not something this post can tell you, because it hasn't happened yet at the time of writing. Anyone making operational decisions based on these proposals should check HSE's own published outcome directly rather than treating a consultation proposal as if it were already the rule.

How to prepare now without overreacting

Even before any changes are confirmed, it's worth reviewing how incident thresholds are currently tracked on site — if a threshold change does land, the sites best placed to adapt will be the ones already recording incident duration and near misses accurately, rather than starting that discipline from scratch once a new rule takes effect. That doesn't mean pre-emptively reporting things to HSE that aren't currently reportable — it means making sure your own internal records are detailed enough that reclassifying past incidents against a new threshold, if it ever comes to that, would be straightforward rather than requiring reconstruction from memory.

Who's likely to feel this first if it lands

If the proposed threshold and fall-arrest changes are adopted, the sites that notice first will be the ones running higher-risk activities day to day — working at height, groundworks, anything involving fall-arrest systems as a routine control measure — simply because that's where the new categories bite hardest. It's worth thinking now about which of your current activities would be affected if these specific proposals became the rule, rather than treating the change as a uniform shift that affects every site equally. A site doing mostly low-risk internal fit-out work has a very different exposure to these particular proposals than one doing structural steel erection at height.

Why speculating on the outcome doesn't help

It's tempting to try to guess how a consultation will land — whether HSE will adopt the proposals as written, soften them, or drop them — but that guessing doesn't actually change what's useful to do now. The genuinely useful preparation, reviewing incident-tracking discipline and understanding which activities would be most affected, holds up regardless of the eventual outcome. Betting operational decisions on a predicted outcome, rather than on the proposals as they're actually written and the current state of the consultation, is the kind of speculation this post is deliberately avoiding.

Where to actually check for the outcome

When HSE does publish an outcome to the consultation, it's worth going directly to HSE's own published announcement rather than relying on secondhand summaries, including this one, once that happens. A consultation response can adopt proposals with modifications that materially change how they apply in practice, and a summary written before the outcome was known — like this post — is necessarily describing what was proposed, not what was ultimately decided.

Common mistakes

• –Treating the proposed over-two-day threshold as if it's already in force
• –Assuming the fall-arrest proposal only applies to specific niche activities like rope access, rather than reading it as written
• –Not tracking near misses now on the assumption that only currently-reportable categories are worth recording
• –Waiting for the consultation outcome before reviewing internal incident-tracking discipline at all
• –Repeating consultation proposals as confirmed fact to clients, insurers or subcontractors
• –Guessing at the eventual outcome rather than focusing preparation on what's actually useful regardless of how it lands

These are consultation proposals, not confirmed law at the time of writing — check current HSE announcements for the outcome before treating any of this as settled.