Executive summary: Health and Safety Executive Annual Report and Accounts 2025 to 2026
Published 4 November 2026
Applies to England, Scotland and Wales
© Crown copyright 2026
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This is an executive summary of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) annual report 2025 to 2026, covering the period 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026.
HSE is a crown non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Performance
What we do matters. It matters to everyone in Great Britain. We are dedicated to protecting people and places and helping everyone lead safer and healthier lives.
In 2025 to 2026 we have continued to ensure that our organisational resources are deployed effectively, dynamically and in accordance with our strategic objectives and goals in our Business Plan for 2025 to 2026.
As a proportionate regulator we play our role in the government’s growth mission. We develop policies, being mindful of the impact on growth wherever possible, with any potential negative growth impacts mitigated or avoided.
Changing how we deliver our work
We have invested significant effort in evolving our regulatory processes and structures to ensure our focus remains on tackling higher-risk activities efficiently and effectively.
This year we have delivered significant programmes of work that build upon that positive foundation. This is helping us to evolve into a more flexible, resilient and impactful regulator, one that continues to effectively protect people and places in a changing world.
Transformation works best when there is commitment from all levels of an organisation. It has been particularly pleasing to see so many colleagues from across HSE engaged in changing how we deliver our work. We are committed to making further improvements.
During the year we began a review of our land use planning service to improve processes and replace technologies that support end-to-end delivery across digital and manual channels. This will be critical in supporting the delivery of our statutory duty to provide advice that safeguards public safety around major hazard sites.
Continuing to modernise the tools our people use to deliver critical work ensures that we maximise our reach, impact and productivity to achieve our mission.
Meeting our Business Plan objectives
In addition to changes to our internal structure, we delivered the majority of our Business Plan objectives and deliverables.
Establishing the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) through the Building Safety Act 2022 has seen us take on a distinct and challenging role. We are proud that we successfully set up a new regulator to give effect to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s (MHCLG’s) legislation. We have developed a regulatory regime to ensure the safety of residents of all higher-risk buildings (HRBs) in England and successfully driven a crucial cultural shift toward safer homes.
In June 2025 the UK government announced a machinery of government change that created BSR as a separate arm’s length body sponsored by MHCLG. On 27 January 2026, BSR moved into the next phase of creating a single construction regulator in England, as recommended in the Grenfell Tower Inquiry.
As part of our ongoing commitment to resident safety, we agreed with MHCLG to support the establishment of BSR as their new arm’s length body and to deliver critical corporate functions for a period of up to 3 years.
This year, we have also continued to deliver robust regulation of chemicals within the UK as well as supporting the UK-EU negotiations in delivering a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement.
We have contributed significantly to the safe development of net zero technologies by enabling innovation through research and safety assessments, including new areas of repurposing offshore installations for carbon capture utilisation and storage, and floating wind energy. In addition to supporting these new innovative areas, we will maintain our critical role in regulating major hazards in existing and other energy industries.
The latest health and safety statistics reinforce our investment to increase proactive interventions that address work-related health risks, including areas such as significant infrastructure projects. Our goal is for Great Britain to be among the healthiest countries in which to work; sharing knowledge, building expertise and reducing exposure to risk.
Focus on collaboration
We’re a leading voice, but it is important to recognise that we do not act alone. This year we renewed our focus on collaboration with partners in trade unions, industry, wider government and other stakeholders. It included our second Prevention Programme workshop which brought together business leaders, trade unions, professional bodies and trade associations to collaborate on solutions for preventing work-related health issues.
In major hazard sectors, we have applied the learning from our Process Safety Leadership Principles programme with industry. This has meant focusing on areas of improvement, particularly the effectiveness of dutyholders’ safety management system auditing and assurance arrangements. We are now planning to expand this to onshore health risks.
As we look to the future, we are confident that whatever changes we face, we will draw on our values and our collective expertise. Acting as one HSE, we will rise to the challenge.
Financial performance
HSE’s total operating expenditure was £345 million which is shown in the table ‘Our costs across the past 5 years by main categories of spend’, with comparators for the previous 4 financial years. Total expenditure is the sum of operating expenditure of £335 million and finance expense of £10 million, which is included in the Statement of Comprehensive Net Expenditure on page 99 in the Annual Report and Accounts.
This expenditure was partly funded through income of £155 million, with the balance of funding provided by government.
We have delivered our objectives for the year, as measured by the milestones in our Business Plan, within the budget we agreed with DWP. Our financial results include the costs of the Building Safety Regulator until 26 January 2026, as BSR remained part of HSE until that date. BSR continued to grow until that point, which explains the increased staff costs during the year.
Our costs across the past 5 years by main categories of spend
| 2021/22 £m | 2022/23 £m | 2023/24 £m | 2024/25 £m | 2025/26 £m | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Staff costs | 170 | 170 | 192 | 200 | 225 | |
| Estates and accommodation | 35 | 33 | 35 | 37 | 36 | |
| IS/IT | 12 | 15 | 25 | 19 | 15 | |
| Depreciation and amortisation | 7 | 9 | 9 | 10 | 10 | |
| Other | 46 | 34 | 52 | 44 | 59 | |
| Total | 270 | 261 | 313 | 310 | 345 |
The increase in our expenditure across the five-year period reflects investment in development of BSR, particularly in the recruitment of its workforce. HSE continues to provide corporate services to BSR which means some of the costs remain and we charge for the provision of services.
We continue to participate in the programme to replace the Single Operating Platform (SOP), which covers our human resources, finance and procurement shared service platforms. This will involve building a new operating model to replace SOP and Business Process Outsourcing, as well as developing a commercial strategy. It will require significant HR and finance support, working with DWP to support the SOP replacement solution.
During 2025/26, Executive Committee took the decision to fully impair one of the intangible assets on our balance sheet. The Biocides and Pesticides Transformation (BPT) digital asset was created to deliver biocides and pesticides services, following the UK exit from the European Union (EU). The environment in which the BPT asset was developed has changed with greater co-operation and potential alignment between the UK and EU on chemicals.
Supporting the UK-EU negotiations in delivering a Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement is a priority for HSE in 2026/27, together with ensuring that we can deliver the required outcomes of this in practical terms. The decision was taken to continue to pause this development until there is further clarity on how arrangements will work.
Continuing uncertainty and potential changes to the regulatory model and operations mean that the systems we have developed will not deliver any imminent economic benefit to HSE. The capitalised value of the BPT intangible asset that has been impaired is £3.062 million.
Financial outlook
We recognise that there are considerable financial constraints and we set a Business
Plan for 2026/27 that reflects our financial challenges including:
- efficiency challenges set as part of prior-year spending reviews (SRs) and the impact of real-terms reductions in SR 2025 funding
- inflationary pressures across all services, including 2 Public Finance Initiatives
- agreements, which increase annually by inflation
- loss of sub-tenants within the estate
- supporting effort and response to the COVID pandemic and Lampard inquiries
- the financial de-coupling of BSR from the rest of HSE, which will lead to a loss of economies of scale and a reduction in overhead recovery through the charging regime
Our medium-term financial plan will reflect this and seek to manage known cost pressures through a combination of:
- cost recovery income (both new and existing regimes)
- productivity efficiencies delivered through the strategic effort we have invested in transforming key processes
Previous restructuring of our operations has delivered benefits, including improved visibility of demand and control of resourcing. As part of the planning process, expectations have been agreed for time spent on regulating in the new divisions to deliver improved efficiency and impact.
This year’s projects, outlined in our Business Plan, demonstrate our continued commitment to operating efficiently, effectively and economically. We will deliver government priorities in a cost-effective manner and seek to increase our partner collaboration to enhance our reach, influence and impact through low-cost channels. Our corporate services functions perform well when benchmarked against relevant comparators. Investment in new and improved systems will drive further improvement against these measures.
A benchmarking exercise, led by the Cabinet Office across government arm’s length bodies, concluded that HSE is a strong performer. In all areas, including finance, HR, digital and IT, estates and internal communications, our running costs are below the average when compared to similar regulators.
Overall, we recognise the challenge of continuing to try to drive efficiencies across our operations while still delivering similar outcomes and impact, and we will need to continue to prioritise within increasingly constrained resources.