Why Are We Still Seeing the Same Accidents?

Posted on August 12, 2026

Recently I was reading through a number of HSE enforcement cases.

A worker paralysed after falling through an unprotected skylight; a worker killed by a reversing vehicle; a worker struck because pedestrians and vehicles weren’t properly segregated; a worker falling into an unprotected excavation.

Different companies, different sites and different circumstances.

But I found myself thinking that none of these risks are new, the controls aren’t particularly complicated, and the failures are hardly surprising.

So why are we still seeing the same accidents?

My first thought was to ask whether there’s something we’re missing. More guidance? More legislation? More awareness?

But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I became. After all, we already know people fall from height. We already know people are struck by vehicles. We already know the dangers of unprotected excavations. These aren’t emerging risks, but some of the oldest workplace hazards there are.

Perhaps the issue isn’t a lack of knowledge, but something else.

When work moves away from the plan

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that accidents rarely happen because somebody deliberately decides to work unsafely. More often, work gradually drifts away from the original plan.

Conditions change. Priorities change. Deliveries arrive. Routes become blocked. Temporary arrangements become permanent. Before long, the controls that were appropriate when a job started no longer reflect the reality of what’s happening on site.

The question isn’t always whether the original risk assessment was wrong. Sometimes the question is simply: Has anything changed?

Good people become distracted

I think it’s also important to avoid immediately blaming workers, supervisors or managers. Most people I meet are trying to do a good job. Over the years I’ve worked with some excellent supervisors and managers, but sometimes they become distracted.

I remember one manager in particular who was overseeing a refurbishment project in Manchester city centre. He’s very capable and someone whose judgement I trust.

The HSE visited the site one cold winter morning and asked about the welfare facilities. He pointed them out. Then he stopped and really looked.

His workers were sitting there huddled together and you could see their breath in the air – like something out of a Charles Dickens novel.

Now this wasn’t a poor manager.

Within a week the site was back to the standard I’d expect from him.

The lesson wasn’t that he was incompetent, but that he was human. He’d come off one project, landed on another, had a hundred competing priorities and, for a short period, took his eye off the ball.

That can happen to any of us, which is why inspections, audits, site tours and management visits remain so important. It’s not through lack of trust, but because people become focused on the task in front of them.

The things we stop seeing

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve pointed out an exposed skylight, poor vehicle segregation or some other obvious hazard and received exactly the same response: “Oh my goodness, yeah.”

They’d simply stopped seeing the risk and were concentrating on getting the job done and the hazard had faded into the background.

That’s why organisations need safeguards, why we need supervision and why we need checks. Not to catch people out, but to catch the things that inevitably get missed.

In my experience, most people don’t become defensive when a problem is pointed out. More often than not, the response is simply: “Yes, you’re right.” And then they put it right.

The challenge is not around understanding risk, but recognising when conditions have changed and acting before somebody is hurt.

When nobody notices the change

When I look at those recent HSE cases, I don’t see unusual hazards or complicated solutions; I see familiar risks and well-understood controls.

Which brings me back to the question I started with: why are we still seeing the same accidents?

I don’t think it’s because we need more legislation, guidance or awareness, nor do I think it’s because people don’t care.

More often, I suspect it’s because work moves on. Conditions change. Priorities shift. Good people become busy. And somewhere along the way, nobody notices that the controls no longer match the reality of the job.

That’s why so many of these incidents feel depressingly familiar. Not because we don’t know the risks or the controls, but because recognising that something has changed is often much harder than recognising a hazard that’s been there all along.

Perhaps that’s the uncomfortable truth behind many enforcement cases. We already know how people get hurt. The challenge is making sure we continue applying that knowledge when the job no longer looks quite like the one we planned for.