What is an accident book?

An accident book is a record of injuries sustained at work. In the UK, employers with ten or more employees must keep one under the Social Security (Claims and Payments) Regulations 1979. Entries must be kept for at least three years, each entry must be protected from being read by other staff, and keeping the book does not remove the separate duty to report serious events to the HSE under RIDDOR.

Who has to keep an accident book?

The duty sits in social security law rather than health and safety law, which is why it catches people out. Under the Social Security (Claims and Payments) Regulations 1979, an employer carrying on a business at premises where ten or more people are normally employed must keep a readily accessible means of recording accidents, and must preserve those records for three years from the date of the last entry.

Smaller employers are not caught by that specific threshold, but almost all of them keep one anyway, for two practical reasons. An injured employee has a right to record an accident so they can support a later benefit or compensation claim, and a contemporaneous record is the single most useful piece of evidence an employer has if a claim arrives two years later. An organisation that cannot show what happened is in a weak position regardless of how many people it employs.

What goes in an accident book?

The record needs enough detail to identify the event and the person, without turning into an investigation report. The HSE’s own BI 510 book asks for:

• About the person who had the accident: full name, address and occupation.
• About the person filling it in: their name, address and occupation, if different from the injured person.
• About the accident: the date and time, where it happened, what the person was doing at the time, and how the accident happened.
• The injury: what injury was sustained.
• Signature and date of the person making the entry.

Two things are worth adding beyond the legal minimum, because they are what make the record useful rather than merely compliant. The first is whether anyone witnessed the event and who they were. The second is what was done immediately afterwards, including first aid given and by whom. Both are difficult to reconstruct later and trivial to capture at the time.

Accident book or RIDDOR? The difference that matters

These are two separate duties and satisfying one does not satisfy the other. The accident book is an internal record of injuries, kept for every qualifying accident, however minor. RIDDOR is an external report to the enforcing authority, made only for defined categories of serious event, within set time limits.

In practice the accident book is the wider net. A cut finger goes in the book and nowhere else. A fracture, a specified injury, an over-seven-day absence, an occupational disease or a dangerous occurrence goes in the book and gets reported to the HSE. The book is often what tells you a RIDDOR report is due, which is a good argument for reviewing entries promptly rather than at the end of the month. For what actually triggers a report and the deadlines that apply, see RIDDOR explained.

The data protection problem with paper books

An accident book entry contains a named individual’s health information, which is special category personal data under UK GDPR. A bound paper book left on a wall means every person who writes an entry can read every entry before it. That has not been acceptable since data protection law caught up with the practice, and it is why the HSE redesigned BI 510 with perforated pages that are torn out and filed separately once completed.

If your organisation still uses a bound book with visible previous entries, that is a live compliance issue, not a stylistic one. The options are a perforated book with entries removed and stored securely, or a digital record with access controls, which solves the confidentiality problem by default and also makes the three-year retention requirement something the system enforces rather than something a filing cabinet is trusted to do.

Moving the accident book to a digital record

Nothing in the regulations requires paper. The duty is to keep a readily accessible record and preserve it for three years, and a digital system meets that as well as a book does, usually better. What changes is what becomes possible afterwards.

A paper book is a write-only archive. Nobody reads back through three years of entries looking for a pattern, because it is tedious and the categories are inconsistent. A digital record with consistent injury types, body parts and locations turns the same information into something you can trend. The question stops being “did we record it” and becomes “are the same three things injuring people every quarter, and what did we do about it”.

Two things to get right in any move. Access has to be restricted so an entry is visible to the person who made it and to those who need it, not to everyone. And the record has to be tamper-evident, because an accident record that can be quietly edited later is worth considerably less as evidence. See what an audit trail is for why that second point carries weight.

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