Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many people were (1) killed, or (2) seriously injured, due to accidents in the agriculture sector in each year since 2000.

The available data is published at https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/history/index.htm but reproduced in the tables below.

Table 1: Number of fatal injuries to both workers (employees and the self-employed) and members of the public in the agricultural sector (a), 2000/01-2018/19.

Source: Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR).

Table 2: Number of reported (c) non-fatal injuries to workers (employees and the self-employed) in the agricultural sector (a), 2000/01-2018/19.

Source: Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR).

Footnotes

(a) Agriculture defined as Section A, Agriculture, forestry and fishing, of the 2007 Standard Industrial Classification.

(b) Due to a major change in the RIDDOR reporting requirements in April 2012, injuries reported prior to 2012/13 are not directly comparable with later years.

(c) RIDDOR requires employers to report certain workplace non-fatal injuries to workers, generally the more serious (current reporting requirements are for those injuries that result in more than 7 days absence from work or specified on a pre-defined list of injuries). It is known that employers substantially under-report these non-fatal injuries.

(d) HSE does not publish estimates of reported non-fatal injuries to members of the public. Reporting of such incidents is highly variable by industry, with some sectors over-reporting and others under-reporting. Therefore, the count does not give a robust indication of risk to members of the public by industry sector. However, such reports continue to be received by the enforcing authorities and the decision for operational intervention is decided on a case-by-case basis.

r- revised; p- provisional