Summary
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is consulting on reforms to the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR) 2013. The Civil Engineering Contractors Association (CECA) has now responded, broadly backing the direction of travel while pressing for rules that are clear, proportionate and practical for the sector. For contractors, the headline is simple: how you report incidents is about to change. What is less obvious, but more important, is that the organisations best placed to adapt will be the ones who already hold clean, accessible information on their people, their sites and their supply chains. That data groundwork has to be in place before the reforms land, not scrambled together afterwards.
What the reforms are likely to change
CECA's response supports several of the proposals: clarifying definitions, improving occupational health reporting, broadening the range of professionals who can diagnose occupational diseases and reviewing which dangerous occurrences are reportable. The stated aim is to reduce both under-reporting and over-reporting, so that national data is more reliable and prevention can be better targeted.
Those are sensible goals. But they raise the bar on the quality of information a contractor needs to hand. Clearer definitions only help if you can match an incident to them quickly and accurately. Better occupational health reporting only works if the underlying health and exposure records exist in the first place.
Reporting is a data problem, not a paperwork problem
CECA is right to stress that a RIDDOR-triggering event is far more than the time it takes to complete a form. As the association points out, reportable incidents can pull in investigation, legal, insurance, commercial and client consequences. Civil engineering and construction projects make this harder still: multiple duty holders, a deep supply chain, and site conditions that change from one week to the next.
When something happens, the pressure is on to establish fast who was on site, which subcontractor they worked for, what their competence and training records show, what controls were in place and whether the incident actually meets the reporting threshold. If that information is scattered across emails, spreadsheets and individual subcontractors' filing cabinets, the cost and delay multiply. If it sits in one place, already verified, the picture is far easier to assemble.
The occupational disease challenge
One point in CECA's response deserves particular attention. The association has asked HSE to clarify how reporting duties will work when a current employer identifies an occupational disease, but the relevant exposure may have occurred while the worker was with a previous employer.
This is precisely where supply chain data becomes critical. Occupational disease is a long-tail problem, exposure and diagnosis can be separated by years. Answering the question "where and when was this person exposed?" depends on records that follow the worker and the work, across employers and across projects. Contractors who capture and retain that history now will be in a far stronger position than those trying to reconstruct it later.
Why build the system before the rules change
Proportionate reporting , the thing CECA is asking for, only works if the data behind it is accurate. You cannot report proportionately on information you do not hold. Waiting for the final regulations before getting your house in order is the wrong way round: by then you are reacting to reportable events with incomplete records, which is exactly how both under-reporting and over-reporting happen.
The better approach is to treat the consultation as a prompt. The reforms are coming and the direction is clear. The work that pays off is the unglamorous groundwork, knowing your supply chain, holding current compliance and competence records and being able to trace exposure and controls back through the chain. Do that now, and the reforms become an administrative change rather than a fire drill.
Where Mobilize fits
This is the problem Mobilize is built to solve. It gives contractors a single, verified view of their supply chain pre-qualification, compliance status, competence and certification records, held centrally and kept current, rather than gathered in a panic after an incident. When reporting rules change, the information you need to respond is already there: structured, retained and auditable.
It also asks the right questions at the point of onboarding. Mobilize includes a specific RIDDOR questions that captures the number and detail of a supplier's reportable incidents over a defined period, so incident history is gathered from every supply chain partner up front, not chased down after the fact. That is exactly the kind of record the RIDDOR reforms will reward: a consistent, comparable baseline across your supply chain, the kind of record that supports both supplier compliance and supplier performance, ready to draw on the moment a reporting duty arises.
RIDDOR reform is a good moment to ask whether your supply chain data would stand up to scrutiny under new, clearer definitions. If the honest answer is "not easily", the time to fix it is now, while it is a project, not an emergency.
Posted on 06 Jul 2026
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Supply Chain Management
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