What an HSE investigation actually asks a director to show

The letter came six weeks after the accident, addressed to him by name, and it did not mention the accident once. It asked for twelve months of board minutes. It wanted the safety policy and the date somebody last reviewed it, a chart of who reported to whom, his own job description and those of the two managers below him, and the training record of every person on the shift, signed and dated. He had a fortnight, and the letter quoted a section of an Act he had never read.

So he went to the file, because he had a file. In it were the policy, a consultant's audit eighteen months old, twelve monthly safety reports with his initials on each, and the insurance schedule. And reading it with the letter beside him, he could see that every page answered a question about the business. None of them answered the question the letter was asking, which was about him.

I have watched several managing directors reach that page. The accident is what everyone talks about, and it turns out to be the smaller part of what follows. The larger part is a sequence that runs for months, follows rules most owners have never seen written down, and asks a director for things in an order he does not expect. That sequence is what this article sets out. The records that prove oversight were covered in the companion piece published in August, so this one is about what happens, when, and under what power.

How a reported accident becomes an investigation

It starts with the report you sent. A death, or an injury on the specified list, has to be notified to HSE without delay and reported within ten days. That report is read against HSE's incident selection criteria, which are published and short. Every work-related death is investigated. So are the gravest specified injuries on HSE's list, which include fractures of more than one bone (wrists and ankles excepted), most amputations, crush injuries that damage internal organs and loss of consciousness from a head injury. Beyond those, HSE investigates anything that "indicates a likelihood of a serious breach of health and safety law", judged by whether its Enforcement Management Model would point at a notice or a prosecution.

In a business of forty, a single broken wrist from a fall still has to be reported. On its own, it does not meet those criteria. A fall that breaks both legs does, and so does a wrist broken in a fall from a mezzanine edge that had been left unguarded for months, because that points at a serious breach. Nobody rings to say the criteria have been met. The first you learn of it is an inspector at reception, sometimes within days and sometimes after weeks, carrying powers under section 20 of the 1974 Act to enter, to direct that part of the premises be left undisturbed, to take photographs and measurements, and to require the production of documents.

Where someone has died the order is different. The police lead under the Work-related Deaths Protocol while any question of manslaughter is open, and primacy usually passes to HSE after that. That handover has its own timetable, and the director's paperwork is being read throughout it.

One more thing starts at the first visit. If the inspector finds what HSE calls a material breach, serious enough to be put in writing, the business is charged for the inspector's time from that point at £188 an hour. That covers site visits, interviews and statement-taking, the writing of letters, and the checking of whether you have done what the letters said. It runs until the intervention is concluded or a prosecution is started. Which means the invoice arrives whether or not anyone is ever charged.

Three different ways an inspector asks a question

This is the part directors get wrong most often, because the same inspector, on the same afternoon, can ask a question in three legally different ways.

The first is under section 20 itself. An inspector can require any person to answer questions and sign a declaration that the answers are true. Refusing is an offence. But an answer compelled that way cannot be used in evidence against the person who gave it. Which makes it a tool for finding out what happened.

The second is a voluntary witness statement, the ordinary kind, which the inspector will ask for first and which most people give without thinking about the difference. Everything in it can be used. The third is the interview under caution, which is aimed at a suspect, comes later, and has a section of its own below.

Your managers and your staff will be asked, in one of the first two forms, which decisions were yours in practice, what you used to ask them about and what you left to them. HSE's guidance on prosecuting individuals values that evidence when it comes from first-hand knowledge: instructions personally received, actions personally observed. But nobody has to be disloyal for this to be damaging. A supervisor who says, truthfully, that the boss left safety to the operations manager and never asked about it has described neglect without meaning to.

Nor is the payroll the boundary. If the injured person worked for a contractor, the same statements are taken from that firm's people, and the questions about who controlled the work go to whoever engaged them, which is why a contractor's accident so often ends up as the hiring business's liability.

The document request, and the question underneath it

The letter in the opening scene follows HSE's operational guidance almost line by line. Inspectors weighing whether to prosecute a director alongside the company are told that job descriptions, contracts, organisation charts, safety policies and minutes of meetings "all provide good evidence", with one condition attached: their status and meaning have to be confirmed by the people who wrote and used them.

Then comes the sentence I would ask every director to read twice. A document that assigns responsibility to an individual "should not be taken at face value". The inspector is told to check that it is a current, established and true working document in the business, and to notice where it hands a manager duties he had neither the competence nor the authority to carry.

The request list is the raw material for three questions about you. Whether the matters under investigation fall within the true scope of your office. Whether you were aware, or should have been aware, of the risk and the need for action. And whether the offence is attributable to steps you failed to take. The documents answer the first. Your people's statements, checked against the documents, answer the second. The third comes from setting the two side by side.

That is the reading the director in the opening scene was doing with the letter beside him. Twelve initialled reports make a strong case that a system existed. Read against the scope-of-office questions, the same folder says that the system reported upwards for a year and nothing came back down. The handful of records that would have answered differently are set out in the August article, and I will not repeat them here. But what matters for this piece is the timing. By the time the letter arrives those records either exist with dates on them or they do not, and the fortnight is for finding them.

How the decision gets made

Almost nobody outside HSE talks about the Enforcement Management Model, and it decides what happens to you.

It works like this. The inspector identifies the gap between the risk you were running and the risk you should have been running, and grades it from nominal to extreme. Then the standard you fell short of is weighed by its authority. A duty defined in regulations counts for more than established guidance, which in turn outweighs the inspector's own interpretation. Those two together give an initial enforcement expectation, so an extreme gap against a defined standard means an improvement notice with prosecution considered, while a moderate gap against an interpretative standard may mean a letter.

Then the expectation is adjusted for what HSE calls dutyholder factors, and these are where a director's year of paperwork comes back. The model asks whether there is a relevant incident history, whether there has been enforcement before, how the inspection history and the general standard of the premises read, and whether the business was cutting corners for money. And it asks for the inspector's own assessment of confidence: whether the dutyholder is "fully capable of, and is strongly committed to" compliance and "can be trusted to put the matter(s) right", or whether there is concern that it has neither the capability nor the commitment. A business that responds to the first visit with a clear account of what it did and why moves that factor one way. A business that produces a policy nobody can explain moves it the other.

Five outcomes come out of the model. The inspector can give advice, verbally or in writing, or issue a notification of contravention, which is the letter that starts the fee. He can serve an improvement notice, which carries at least 21 days to comply and a right of appeal to an employment tribunal inside the same 21 days, or a prohibition notice, which stops the activity now. Or he can recommend prosecution.

The Enforcement Policy Statement lists when HSE expects to prosecute: where a death resulted from the breach, where the gravity of the offence warrants it, where there has been reckless disregard, where breaches have been repeated, and where the standards of management are far below what is required. It then says separately that HSE will consider the role played by individual directors and managers, and take action against them where the offence was committed with the consent, connivance or neglect of the person concerned, and will seek disqualification where appropriate.

That makes two decisions, one about the business and one about you, made on the same file. This is the point in the sequence where an owner without a safety manager needs someone who has read one of these files before. Whether the response holds together across the site visit, the statements and the document request is what practical support when an inspector's letter has just arrived exists to settle, before the model has finished being applied.

The interview under caution, and the letter that comes before it

If the second decision is going against you, the sign is a letter inviting you to an interview under caution. HSE's guidance on questioning suspects says the letter must specify the offence you are suspected of, give a factual summary of the case against you, and set out the issues the interview will cover. It offers two dates and lets you propose a third. You have the right to consult a solicitor privately and to have one present, and you are told that before you arrive.

The interview is conducted under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, with the caution everyone recognises from television. And where you are the company's representative as well as a suspect in your own right, there are two separate interviews, on separate recordings, with the capacity made clear at the start of each. HSE's own rule is that the interview comes in the final stages, after the documents and the statements are in, so that questions arrive with exhibits attached. You can decline to attend. If you do, you are invited to make written representations instead, and HSE says an interview by correspondence is agreed only in very exceptional circumstances.

What is being tested at that table is section 37, and what consent, connivance and neglect mean for a director in practice was the subject of our first article on this. One thing about it belongs here. For most of the duties involved, section 40 reverses the burden: once the prosecution shows the duty and the failure, it is for the defendant to prove that it was not reasonably practicable to do more. So the question across that table is "show me what you did", with a year of records already laid out, and a director who cannot point at anything is answering from memory against paper.

How long it runs, and what it costs before anyone is charged

There is no published average for the length of an HSE investigation, and anyone who quotes one is guessing. What HSE does publish is a target. In its 2024 to 2025 annual report it completed 95 per cent of non-fatal investigations within twelve months and 86 per cent of fatal ones within twelve months of taking primacy, against targets of 90 and 80. So a year is the working assumption for a serious injury, and for a death the clock does not start until the police have handed over.

In that year HSE also completed 246 prosecutions with a 96 per cent conviction rate and issued more than 4,400 notices. The conviction rate is the figure to hold onto. Cases reach court after the model has been applied, the documents read and the interview held, and by then the file has usually decided the outcome.

For a director convicted personally, the sentencing guideline for individuals runs up to two years' custody. Culpability is graded from very high, for flagrant disregard, down to low. Where the harm risked was death and the likelihood of it was high, even the medium band starts at custody. The recent pattern for smaller firms has been suspended sentences: a St Helens director given sixteen weeks suspended after an employee was crushed in 2024, an Anglesey director given four months suspended after a fall through a fragile roof, a Hampshire director three months suspended in December 2025 after a subcontractor fell fifteen feet. In March 2026 a site manager who pleaded guilty through section 37 was banned from acting as a company director for five years. Every one of those press releases describes work that was never planned and people who were never trained or supervised, and none of them describes a director who could show what he had asked.

What to do in the week the letter arrives

The letter is the moment the sequence becomes visible, and the response to it is the last thing in the whole process a director still controls.

Name one person to deal with the inspector, and put everything through them. Then keep a log of every request, the date it came, what was supplied and when. That log is your record of cooperation. Cooperation is part of what the inspector's confidence in management is built on, and the model weighs that confidence as a factor in its own right. Supply what is asked for and nothing written afterwards to cover a gap. A minute drafted in September about a meeting in March reads as exactly that to someone who spends his working life reading minutes, and it converts a weak file into a dishonest one.

Decide about privilege in the first week, because it cannot be applied later. If you commission an internal investigation, the report is protected only where it is prepared with lawyers for the dominant purpose of legal advice, or for the dominant purpose of a prosecution that is already reasonably in contemplation, and lawyers now advise triaging that decision at the specified-injury level. A report that qualifies is shielded from an inspector's document request by section 20(8) of the 1974 Act, which preserves legal professional privilege against the production powers. A candid report written for the board and then disclosed to the inspector is an admission with your letterhead on it.

Take advice for yourself as well as for the company. Because the two are being decided separately, the interests can part. Then minute the incident at the next board meeting, with what was found, what was decided and who owns it. That minute is the first page of the twelve months an inspector reads next time.

The file is built now, in a quiet month, or it is built later, under investigation, by an inspector reading your managers' statements against your own signature. Nobody chooses the second option. It arrives, six weeks after the report, addressed by name.

If you could not lay your hands today on twelve months of the records that letter asks for, a short message about how oversight currently runs in your business gets a direct view on which three matter most and how to start closing the gap. It comes back from me, usually the same day.

Common questions

Does HSE investigate every reported accident?

No. Every reported work-related death is investigated, and so are the gravest specified injuries in HSE's incident selection criteria, including fractures of more than one bone (other than wrists and ankles), most amputations and crush injuries that damage internal organs. A single broken wrist or ankle has to be reported but is not selected on that ground alone. Other reports are investigated where they indicate a likelihood of a serious breach, judged by whether the Enforcement Management Model would point at a notice or a prosecution. A report that is not investigated stays on record, and it counts as incident history the next time an inspector applies the model to your business.

Can I refuse to answer an HSE inspector's questions?

It depends on how the question is asked. Under section 20 an inspector can require you to answer and to sign a declaration that your answers are true, and refusing is an offence, but those answers cannot be used in evidence against you. A voluntary statement can be used, and you can decline to give one. HSE cannot compel you to attend an interview under caution; if you decline, you are invited to make written representations, and the decision whether to prosecute is then made on the file without your account in it unless you put one in writing.

How long does an HSE investigation take?

There is no official average. HSE's own target is to complete 90 per cent of non-fatal investigations and 80 per cent of fatal ones within twelve months, and in 2024 to 2025 it beat both. For a death, the twelve months run from the point HSE takes primacy from the police, which can itself take months. Where a prosecution follows, the court process adds further time, and the Fee for Intervention runs until the intervention is concluded or the prosecution is started.