Phoenix Journal · LEV Testing
RIDDOR sounds like something only big factories need to worry about, but the rules apply to every employer, including a two-person kitchen. Here is what you actually have to report, by when, and how it connects to the fumes and dust your extraction and LEV systems are there to control.
Compliance, plainly
RIDDOR is one of those acronyms that gets mentioned in passing on a health & safety course and then quietly forgotten - right up until something goes wrong and you are trying to work out, after the fact, whether you were supposed to tell someone.
The full name is the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013, and it is enforced in Great Britain by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). The point of it is simple enough: certain serious workplace events have to be reported to the regulator so that patterns can be spotted and, where needed, investigated. The part that trips small employers up is the belief that it does not apply to them. It does. There is no headcount exemption written into RIDDOR. A cafe with three staff sits under exactly the same rules as a hotel chain - the only difference is that the chain has a health & safety team to handle it, and you have yourself.
The good news is that RIDDOR is far narrower than most people fear. The vast majority of minor cuts, slips and sprains are not reportable at all. What you need is a clear sense of the handful of things that cross the line, so you can act quickly when one does and get on with running your business the rest of the time.
RIDDOR splits into a small number of categories, and it helps to hold them separately in your head rather than treating it as one big vague duty.
The first is deaths and specified injuries to workers. A work-related death always has to be reported. So does a defined list of serious "specified" injuries - fractures other than to fingers, thumbs and toes, amputations, any injury likely to cause permanent loss of sight or reduction in sight, serious burns covering more than ten percent of the body, scalpings, loss of consciousness from a head injury or asphyxia, and injuries from working in an enclosed space that lead to hypothermia or require resuscitation or admittance to hospital for more than 24 hours. These are the ones you report fastest. For a fatality or a specified injury to a worker you can phone the HSE incident line on 0345 300 9923; specified injuries can also be reported online, and the online report must reach the HSE within ten days.
The second category is over-seven-day injuries. If a worker is off, or unable to do their full normal duties, for more than seven consecutive days as the result of a work-related accident, that has to be reported within fifteen days of the accident. You do not count the day of the accident itself, but you do count weekends and rest days even if the person was not rostered to work them. In practice "more than seven days" means the report is due once the eighth day is reached.
The third category is occupational diseases, which we will come back to because it is the one most closely tied to kitchen extraction and air quality. The fourth is dangerous occurrences - a defined list of near-miss events such as the collapse of scaffolding, the failure of a lifting device, or an explosion or fire that stops work for more than 24 hours. Most small kitchens will rarely if ever hit a dangerous occurrence, but it is worth knowing the category exists.
Injuries are visible and dramatic, so they tend to get reported. Diseases are slow, invisible, and easy to miss entirely - which is exactly why the disease category catches out small employers who otherwise think they are on top of RIDDOR.
Two conditions matter most in a food and hospitality setting. Occupational asthma is reportable where a worker’s job involves significant or regular exposure to a known respiratory sensitiser - flour and grain dust in a bakery, for example, or fumes and vapours from certain cleaning and degreasing chemicals. Occupational dermatitis is reportable where the work involves significant or regular exposure to a skin irritant or sensitiser, which in a busy kitchen very often means wet work and the constant contact with detergents, sanitisers and oven-cleaning products. Both are only reportable once a doctor has provided a written diagnosis that links the condition to the work - you are not expected to diagnose anyone yourself, but the moment you receive that diagnosis, the clock starts.
This is where RIDDOR stops being a paperwork exercise and starts pointing back at your controls. A reportable case of occupational asthma or dermatitis is, in effect, a signal that exposure was not being adequately controlled. Under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations (COSHH), if you cannot remove a hazardous substance you are expected to control exposure - and where that control relies on local exhaust ventilation, the LEV has to be kept working properly and tested. A thorough examination and test of an LEV system is normally required at least every fourteen months. When a canopy, capture hood or extraction system is not pulling contaminated air away as it should, exposure creeps back up, and a RIDDOR-reportable disease is one of the ways that failure eventually surfaces. Reporting and prevention are two ends of the same rope.
The HSE has also signalled it wants to broaden the disease side of RIDDOR in future, so treating the current list as a floor rather than a ceiling - and keeping exposure genuinely low - is the sensible posture rather than reporting the bare minimum and hoping.
Most reports are made through the HSE’s online forms at notifications.hse.gov.uk, where you choose the form that matches the event - injury, disease, or dangerous occurrence - and work through it. Once submitted, download the PDF copy the system offers you and file it, because that copy is your evidence that you reported and it feeds straight into your record-keeping duty. The "responsible person" who has to make the report is usually the employer when an employee is hurt; where someone who is not at work is injured, it falls to whoever is in control of the premises.
Reporting and recording are not the same thing, and the difference matters for a small employer. Some events have to be recorded even though they never have to be reported - most notably the over-three-day injury, where a worker is incapacitated for more than three days but not more than seven. That does not go to the HSE, but it does have to be written down, typically in an accident book. Every RIDDOR record, whether it triggered a report or not, has to be kept for at least three years. A simple, consistent accident book plus a folder of downloaded RIDDOR PDFs is genuinely enough for a business your size - you do not need a system, you need a habit.
Deciding what counts is easier when your underlying controls are deliberate rather than accidental. If you have already worked through how you eliminate, substitute or engineer out a hazard, you tend to know straight away whether an incident is a reportable failure or a genuine one-off - it is worth reading the hierarchy of control explained for real workplaces alongside this, because the same thinking that prevents incidents also makes reporting decisions obvious. Get the controls right and RIDDOR becomes a rare, orderly task rather than a panic.
Questions
Yes. RIDDOR 2013 applies to every employer in Great Britain, with no exemption for small businesses or low staff numbers. The difference for a small employer is only that you handle it yourself rather than through a health and safety department. The upside is that most minor injuries are not reportable, so in practice you may go years without ever needing to make a report.
An over-seven-day injury is where a worker is off or unable to do their normal duties for more than seven consecutive days after a work-related accident, and it must be reported to the HSE within fifteen days. An over-three-day injury, where someone is incapacitated for more than three days but not more than seven, does not have to be reported but must be recorded, usually in an accident book. Both types of record must be kept for at least three years.
It becomes reportable once a doctor gives a written diagnosis linking the condition to work involving significant or regular exposure to a known respiratory sensitiser, in the case of asthma, or a skin irritant or sensitiser, in the case of dermatitis. You are not expected to diagnose it yourself, but once you receive that diagnosis you must report it. A reportable case is usually a sign that exposure controls, such as local exhaust ventilation, were not working as they should.
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