A forklift clips a pedestrian in the yard; a driver fractures a wrist on the tail lift; an agency worker is scalded in the wash bay. In the scramble of the day, someone eventually asks: “do we have to report this?” RIDDOR - the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations - answers that question with a list, and transport workplaces trip over it constantly. Here is the list, translated.
Not every accident needs reporting. A RIDDOR report is required only when the accident is work-related AND it results in a reportable injury. Both halves matter: a death or injury with no connection to the work activity stays out of scope, and a work-related accident with only a minor injury stays out too. The judgment is in the definitions below.
With the exception of suicides, the death of any person must be reported if it resulted from a work-related accident - workers and non-workers alike. One long tail: if someone suffers a reportable work-related injury and dies of that injury within one year (365 days), that must be reported as a work-related fatality, however much time has passed since the accident itself. The one exemption: the death of a self-employed person in premises they solely own or occupy need not be reported.
Regulation 4 lists the injuries serious enough to report immediately - in a depot, the relevant ones come up more often than anyone admits:
The fracture rule is the one to memorise: a broken wrist loading a pallet is reportable; broken fingers are not.
Where a work-related injury keeps an employee or self-employed person off work - or off their normal duties - for more than 7 consecutive days, the accident must be reported. The counting rules: the day of the accident does not count, but weekends and rest days do; and the report must be made within 15 days of the accident. Injuries that only surface later are reported once they have kept the person off normal duties for more than 7 consecutive days.
Over 3 days changes the duty rather than removing it: those accidents must be RECORDED, not reported - an entry in the accident book is enough.
Non-workers get their own trigger: an accident involving work activity that injures a member of the public and takes them directly from the scene to hospital for treatment must be reported. In a transport business that covers the customer at the collection point, the visitor crossing the yard, the passer-by at the kerbside delivery.
Beyond injuries, RIDDOR also names dangerous occurrences - specified near-miss events serious enough that they must be reported even when nobody was hurt - plus occupational diseases and gas incidents. For a transport business the near-miss category matters more than people expect: the load that falls off a crane, the collapse that misses the picker by a metre. These sit on the same reporting duty as injuries, which is the regulator’s way of saying that luck is not a control measure. Occupational disease reporting catches the slow harms too - the conditions the work causes over years rather than in one bad afternoon.
RIDDOR’s purpose is not paperwork: it is how the regulator learns where people are actually getting hurt. A fleet that reports properly is not admitting failure - it is demonstrating that its safety system has a working nervous system.