Britain’s Working at Height Problem: Are We Normalising Risk?

Every year, the Health and Safety Executive publishes its annual fatality statistics and every year, the same category sits at the top: Falls from height.

In 2024/25, 35 workers died as a result of a fall from height – the most common cause of fatal workplace injury, accounting for over a quarter of all worker deaths in Great Britain. That figure is down from 50 the previous year, which should be encouraging. But look at the longer trajectory and it becomes harder to feel encouraged. Falls from height have been the leading cause of work-related fatal injuries in nearly every year since 2001/02. The industry has changed enormously in that time. Regulation has tightened. Technology has improved. Safety culture has become a boardroom priority in a way it simply wasn’t a generation ago.

And yet the same risk sits at the top of the same table, year after year.

More than half of all construction deaths over the five-year period from 2020 to 2025 were linked to falls from height – at an average of 21 deaths per year. That tells us this isn’t a cluster of isolated incidents. It’s a pattern. It repeats across different sites, different contractors, different regions. Something structural is sustaining it.

The uncomfortable question that raises – and one the industry rarely asks directly – is whether we have gradually, quietly, become comfortable with a level of risk that we shouldn’t be comfortable with at all.

The Progress That Obscures the Problem

It’s important to be accurate about what has improved, because something has.

Total workplace fatalities across all industries have declined from 495 in 1981 to 124 in 2024/25 – nearly four times fewer deaths over four decades. The fatal injury rate has similarly fallen from 2.1 deaths per 100,000 workers in 1981 to 0.37 in 2024/25, one of the lowest rates on record. That is genuine, hard-won progress, and it reflects the cumulative effect of better regulation, better equipment, better training and better site culture.

Construction’s fatal injury rate remains 4.8 times the all-industry average, largely due to work at height, which accounts for more than half of all fatalities in the sector. But the absolute number of construction deaths has also fallen substantially from historical peaks.

The problem with progress, though, is that it can create a false sense of arrival. When numbers improve over decades, it becomes psychologically easier to frame what remains as an irreducible baseline – an acceptable residual rather than a continuing failure. Safety messaging focuses on milestones. The gap between where we are and where we should be starts to feel normal.

This is precisely how risk normalisation operates. Not through dramatic complacency, but through incremental recalibration of what counts as acceptable.

The Psychology of Normalisation

There is a substantial body of academic research on why hazardous work becomes normalised, and the findings are consistent and sobering.

A 2025 study published in BMC Public Health, examining construction workers’ risk perception and height safety behaviour, found something that should give any safety professional pause. Construction workers did not necessarily agree they were at risk from falling from height – and were even less concerned about that risk than their stated beliefs would suggest. The study found that workers who had not personally experienced a negative outcome of unsafe work were significantly less likely to believe they would experience one in the future – a pattern well-documented in occupational risk literature. Familiarity with a task reduces perceived exposure, regardless of actual exposure.

IOSH Magazine’s analysis of the human factors involved in working at height framed this clearly. Risk normalisation can create the potential for complacency, and other issues may follow, such as omissions – people start forgetting to do things, to use safety equipment, to recall safety messages. The attitude becomes that accidents are something that happen to other people. But every time workers fail to take proper precautions, their odds are diminishing.

This is not a problem of bad actors or reckless employers. It is a problem of routine. The more often a task is completed without incident, the more the human brain interprets completion as evidence of safety, rather than evidence that the risk hasn’t materialised yet. In working at height, where the volume of tasks completed safely vastly outnumbers those that result in harm, this recalibration is almost inevitable without active countermeasures.

The consequences, when they arrive, are severe in a way that other occupational risks often are not. A fall from height is not an injury that scales gradually with the degree of non-compliance. It is, frequently, fatal. The gap between the frequency of the hazard and the severity of the outcome is one of the things that makes normalisation in this context so specifically dangerous.

Commercial Pressure and the Drift Toward “Good Enough”

Understanding risk normalisation as a psychological process is important. But it doesn’t fully explain why the pattern persists at an organisational level, in companies that have safety policies, RAMS documents, toolbox talks and compliance teams.

The answer lies partly in the operational pressures under which construction environments actually function. Margins are tight. Delays carry direct financial consequences. Equipment availability is a constant constraint. In that context, decisions that incrementally raise the risk profile of a site don’t typically happen dramatically – they accumulate through small adjustments that each appear reasonable in isolation.

A service interval is stretched by two weeks because the machine is needed on site. A minor defect is monitored rather than repaired because taking the platform out of service would delay the programme. An inspection becomes a calendar exercise rather than a genuine safety event because the last five produced no issues. Each decision has a rationale. None of them reads as reckless. Cumulatively, they can alter the effective risk profile of equipment that is lifting people several metres above the ground.

This is what safety researchers call standards creep – a gradual drift in what the organisation treats as the acceptable operating standard, driven not by policy change but by accumulated small deviations. It affected Deepwater Horizon, where the root cause of the fatal explosion was found to be a culture of complacency, with numerous warning signs ignored and risks systematically underestimated. The scale is different in construction, but the mechanism is the same.

The Equipment Dimension

One aspect of this that deserves more explicit attention than it usually receives is the condition of equipment in active use.

Mobile Elevating Work Platforms – scissor lifts, boom lifts, articulated platforms – are engineered with layered safety systems and can remain safe for many years with correct maintenance. The question is not whether older equipment is inherently unsafe. It is whether the inspection and maintenance discipline that ageing equipment requires is actually being applied.

Older machines introduce specific challenges that newer ones don’t: hydraulic wear, electrical and sensor degradation, greater likelihood of intermittent faults, and increasing difficulty sourcing parts for discontinued models. None of these characteristics make a machine unsafe in themselves. But they do mean that safety becomes more dependent on the inspection regime, not less. When the age of a fleet increases and servicing schedules are stretched simultaneously, the margin for error narrows in both directions at once.

Under LOLER, MEWPs used to lift people must be thoroughly examined at least every six months by a competent person. This is a legal requirement, clearly defined. But the British Safety Council has noted a persistent confusion in the industry between what constitutes a thorough examination and what constitutes routine servicing – and the two are not the same thing. Many inspection providers use a generic checklist when assessing MEWPs. That is not best practice and could leave employers exposed to accidents, damage, disruption and prosecution should things go wrong. A signed LOLER certificate confirms compliance at a single point in time. It says nothing about what happens between examinations, and it cannot substitute for the preventative maintenance that keeps a machine in the condition the examination is meant to verify.

Andy Bray, Managing Director of Access Platform Sales, sees this distinction misunderstood regularly.

“There is nothing inherently unsafe about older equipment if it is properly maintained and thoroughly examined,” he says. “The risk increases when ageing machines are combined with inconsistent servicing or inspection discipline. And the most dangerous version of that is when teams treat the certificate as the endpoint – as though compliance is achieved once the paperwork is signed. Compliance only works when it’s taken seriously as an ongoing operational safeguard, not as a box that gets ticked every six months.”

The Financial Illusion of Deferred Maintenance

There is a commercial logic to deferred servicing that feels real in the short term and costs considerably more in the longer term – and that’s before the human cost is considered at all.

Preventative maintenance has a visible, foreseeable cost. A breakdown feels hypothetical until it happens. But when it does happen, the costs are categorically different: emergency call-out rates, replacement hire at short notice, programme delays, insurance exposure and reputational damage. None of these are speculative – they are the documented consequences of reactive rather than planned maintenance. APS fixed-price service plans exist specifically to remove the decision-making friction around this – scheduled servicing at a fixed cost, with no hidden extras on labour, travel or consumables, and early fault detection before problems escalate.

HSE Chief Executive Sarah Albon, commenting on this year’s figures, stated that while Great Britain is one of the safest places in the world to work, each death represents a tragedy for families, friends and communities, and that fatal accidents cannot be accepted as an inevitable part of working life. The economic argument for preventative maintenance is compelling on its own terms. But the more important point is that planned servicing reduces the probability that an equipment fault escalates into something irreversible on a day when someone happens to be elevated in the basket.

Normalising Control Instead

The alternative to normalising risk is normalising control – and the distinction matters, because it shifts the frame from compliance as a burden to compliance as a discipline that actively reduces exposure.

What that looks like in practice is not complicated. Inspection schedules treated as immovable, regardless of programme pressure. Servicing embedded into fleet management planning as a fixed cost rather than a variable one. Defects were acted on decisively rather than monitored. Clear organisational separation between routine maintenance and thorough examination, with neither substituting for the other. Procurement decisions that account for lifecycle costs and compliance support, not just day-rate hire.

The fragmented nature of construction – with multiple contractors and supply chains – often makes it difficult to create a consistent safety culture, with responsibilities and training easily becoming blurred. That fragmentation is real, but it is not an excuse. It is an argument for more rigour in the areas that can be controlled, not less.

The HSE’s long-term data shows that the number of fatal workplace injuries has fallen substantially since the 1980s. That progress is real and it reflects the industry taking safety seriously in aggregate. But the persistence of falls from height at the top of the fatality table – year after year, across more than two decades – suggests that aggregate progress is not evenly distributed, and that the specific risk of working at height is not being managed consistently enough across the industry.

The campaigns matter. The messaging matters. But safety culture is declared in campaigns, and compliance culture is demonstrated in maintenance records and inspection dates. Both are visible. Only one directly governs the condition of the machine lifting someone several metres above the ground.

Access Platform Sales supplies, services and inspects a range of access platforms and MEWPs across the UK, with in-house engineering support and LOLER thorough examination services. 

Sources

Health and Safety Executive. Work-related fatal injuries in Great Britain 2024/25. hse.gov.uk/statistics

Health and Safety Executive. Thorough examination and inspection of lifting equipment (LOLER guidance). hse.gov.uk

Jansen T et al. Risk perception, barriers and working safely at height in construction: a psychological network approach. BMC Public Health, November 2025.

IOSH Magazine. The human factors of work at height. July 2023.

DWF Group. Workplace Fatalities in Great Britain 2024/25. September 2025.

British Safety Council. Let’s examine this – LOLER and MEWP inspection. 2024.