Health and Safety
Executive / Commission
Statistics
The injury statistics are based on RIDDOR accident reports made by employers. Up until 2003/04, these reports were linked into an operational HSE system (FOCUS) which held specialised databases of employers by industry. From 2001/02, employers in most industries started to make reports directly to the Incident Contact Centre (ICC) which uses a market based database of employers. The ICC recording of industry is therefore different though mostly agreeing with the specialised databases previously used. The main field inspectorate continued to link injury reports from the ICC into FOCUS until 2003/04, and thus continued the same recording of industry. From 2003/04, all non-fatal injuries were coded using the ICC database. This change in employer database resulted in a change in the coding of industry and hence affected the publication of injury statistics by industry.
The largest effect on the statistics relates to the ICC coding of council workers. Between 2003/04 and 2007/08, these workers were generally coded to SIC 75 (public admin). However prior to 2003/04 these workers were coded to the activity they were engaged in, for example education, social care, refuse collection, etc. From the start of 2007/08, the ICC changed their coding practice for council workers to be more closely aligned with the previous practice (i.e. workers are now coded to the activity they are engaged in). This has introduced a further discontinuity. Using past data, HSE statisticians are working to recode the industry data to remove these known data discontinuities. This is a considerable task and will be combined with recoding to the new industry classification SIC 2007.