Regional statistics - technical note

The injury statistics summarised in these regional pages are based on RIDDOR reports and exclude injuries reported to HSE’s Railways Inspectorate (and from April 2006 the Office of Rail Regulation [ORR]), and records where the Local Authority location is unknown.

The industry labelled ‘Agriculture’ comprises SIC codes 01, 02 & 05 (Agriculture, Hunting, Forestry and Fishing (excludes sea fishing); Extractive & Utility comprises SIC codes 10 - 14, 40 - 41; Manufacturing comprises SIC codes 15 - 37; Construction comprises SIC code 45 and Services comprises SIC codes 50 - 99.

p - provisional

Technical note on injury rates for counties and local authorities

Our RIDDOR injury data for counties and local authorities (LA) are presented as rates per 100 000 employees.

These rates permit some comparisons to be made between different areas. However the following points should be borne in mind:

• research shows that differences between injury rates at regional / local level are strongly influenced by variations in the mix of industries and occupations; for example, some LAs contain large employers in riskier industries.
• the local area rates will also be affected by different levels of reporting of RIDDOR (this effect is minimised by looking at employees only, i.e. excluding the self employed);
• the figures are also subject to uncertainty due to sampling error in the employment estimates (this is lessened by looking at data averaged over several years);
• the data only relate to injuries reported under RIDDOR, since our other sources - e.g. the Labour Force Survey - do not generally permit disaggregation to this level of detail.

A detailed table gives rates separately for fatal and major, over-3-day and total injuries, and showing each of the five years 2004/05 to 2008/09p.

These are summarised in a map, for each Government Office Region, Wales and Scotland, which shows the total employee injury rate averaged over the last 3 years (2006/07-2008/09p) for each LA district. The figures are colour-coded to show where they lie in the overall distribution of injury rates among the 408 LA districts in Great Britain.

The local area employee data (denominators) for the rates come from the Annual Business Inquiry (ABI), run by the Office for National Statistics; like the RIDDOR data, these relate to the areas where people work rather than where they live, although there may be some mis-match due to peripatetic workers. The ABI local area estimates for 2008/09 are not yet available and so the 2008/09p rates use 2007/08 employee numbers. Rates based on employee numbers less than 10 000 are suppressed on grounds of reliability and to preserve confidentiality.

• See: Annual Business Inquiry (ABI)