The accident book: what UK law actually requires, and what it doesn’t
Most workplaces have an accident book. Far fewer could say which law requires it, what belongs in an entry, or how long records must be kept. Here are the actual rules, including the one that says it doesn’t have to be a book at all.
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- The jobsafe team
- Published
- Reading time
- 7 min read
The accident book is one of the most familiar objects in British working life: a dog-eared pad in a drawer in the site office, half-filled in, rarely read. It is also one of the most misunderstood. The duty to keep it does not come from health and safety law at all, the rules about who needs one are more specific than most people think, and the regulation behind it explicitly allows something better than paper. This guide sets out what the law actually requires.
- 10+ employees at premises where an accident book is required
- 3 years minimum retention, from the date of the entry
- 1979 the regulations the duty comes from
- 2018 current BI 510 edition, revised for GDPR
Is an accident book a legal requirement?
Yes, for most employers of any size, though the duty comes from an unexpected place. It is not RIDDOR, and it is not the Health and Safety at Work Act. The accident book is required by regulation 25 of the Social Security (Claims and Payments) Regulations 1979: benefits law, not safety law. Its original purpose was to preserve the evidence an employee needs to claim industrial injuries benefit: an accident recorded at the time, in a form the Department for Work and Pensions will accept.
Regulation 25 applies to every owner or occupier of a mine or quarry, every employer at premises covered by the Factories Act 1961, and (the clause that catches nearly everyone else) every employer with ten or more people normally employed at the same time on or about the same premises.
Under ten employees?The regulation 25 duty may not bite, but you are not off the hook: RIDDOR separately requires you to keep records of reportable injuries and over-three-day injuries whatever your headcount, and an accident record is the first thing an insurer, a solicitor or an HSE inspector will ask for. In practice, every employer should keep one.
It doesn’t have to be a book
The regulation’s own wording is the part almost nobody quotes. Employers must keep readily accessible a means, “whether in a book or books or by electronic means”, by which employees can record the particulars of an accident. Electronic accident records are not a grey area or a workaround: they are named in the regulation itself. What matters is that the record is readily accessible to your workers, captures the required particulars, and is preserved.
What goes in an entry
The “appropriate particulars” an accident record must capture are:
- Who was hurt: the injured person’s full name, address and occupation.
- What happened: the date and time of the accident, where it happened, and the cause and nature of the injury.
- Who made the entry: the name, address and occupation of the person recording it, if it was not the injured person themselves.
Note who is allowed to make the entry: the injured employee or someone acting on their behalf. A worker cannot be required to fill it in personally, and an entry made by a colleague or supervisor on their behalf is equally valid.
How long must accident records be kept?
At least three years from the date the entry was made. Not three years from the end of the year, and not three years from the accident, but from the entry. In practice, keeping records for longer is often sensible: personal injury claims can be brought up to three years from the date of injury (longer in some circumstances), and patterns across years are exactly what a good safety review looks for.
The GDPR problem with the traditional book
An accident entry is personal data: a name, an address, and information about a person’s health. A traditional accident book, where every previous entry is visible to whoever fills in the next one, sits badly with UK GDPR. This is why the current BI 510 (2018 edition) was redesigned with perforated, tear-out pages: the entry is completed, removed and stored confidentially, leaving no personal data in the book itself.
If you are still using an older book where entries accumulate in full view, that is worth fixing this week, not this quarter. An electronic record with proper access controls solves the same problem more cleanly: each entry is visible only to the people who need it, and nothing is left in a drawer.
Accident book vs RIDDOR: recording is not reporting
The accident book and RIDDOR are separate duties that meet at the same incident. Every recordable accident goes in the book; only some of them must also be reported to the HSE. Deaths, specified injuries, over-seven-day incapacitation, certain occupational diseases and dangerous occurrences cross the reporting threshold, and the accident record is usually the evidence that starts the clock. If you are not confident where that threshold sits, read our plain-English guide to RIDDOR reporting, and note that RIDDOR itself is now changing.
Where paper falls down
The legal minimum is a book in a drawer. The practical problem is everything the minimum does not do: a paper entry cannot alert a supervisor, cannot attach the photo that shows the unguarded edge, cannot be found from head office at 6pm on a Friday, and cannot tell you that this is the third hand injury in the same workshop this quarter. For a field workforce it is worse: the book is in the office, and the accident is forty miles away.
That gap is what jobsafe closes. Workers record an incident in seconds from the phone in their pocket (photos, location and time captured automatically, online or off), supervisors are alerted instantly, every record is stored confidentially with a full audit trail, and the three-year retention takes care of itself. The regulation has allowed “electronic means” since before smartphones existed; the tools have finally caught up.
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