Historical data from incident reports and other sources such as the Labour Force Survey indicated that the three main causes of lost time injury in local authorities reflected the overall trend across all industry sectors. These are:
Slips trips and falls
Slips and trips can occur across all local authority activities and services. Many reported incidents involve members of the public, including pupils at local authority schools.
Manual handling
A proportion of reported manual handling injuries occur while moving and handling clients and equipment in social care. However, they also arise across other activities and services.
Collision with moving vehicles or objects
Pedestrian collisions with moving vehicles cause a number of serious injuries and even fatalities. These can occur at work sites but a number occur on the public highway when work activities such as refuse collection take place.
LAs are responsible for work activities across some of the industry sectors reporting the highest rates of injuries, reflecting the real risks these activities present. HSE guidance is available to help manage those risks in:
Self-reported sickness absence data also suggest that workers across local government suffer high levels of work-related stress.
Further information about general work-related sickness absence statistics is available on the HSE statistics pages.
RIDDOR data for local authorities
HSE is responsible for the collection and analysis of statistics relating to workplace injuries in Great Britain. The statistics are published each year to show injury trends and comparisons across industries, occupations and a number of other categories. However the industry breakdown does not include a separate classification for local authority workers or members of public injured on local authority premises.
In 2010 the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL) was commissioned to carry out an analysis and report to investigate the feasibility of producing reliable estimates for injury numbers and rates in this particular industry group.