News release, 16 May 2025 [No embargo]
The UK’s national Hazards Campaign is shocked to find that the person who has led the Health and Safety Executive through the most disastrous decline in performance in the organisation’s 50-year history has been reappointed by the government as chair of the safety regulator.
A government news release announcing the decision to give a second term to Sarah Newton – a former Conservative minister appointed by the previous Conservative government – claimed she had ‘driven strategic improvements, strengthened regulatory frameworks and championed HSE’s mission to protect people and places’. This say the national Hazards Campaign is disingenuous.
“Newton’s tenure since 2020 has seen over 17,000 workers killed or serious injured each year. And while the long-term decline in workplace major injuries has stalled on her watch, work-related ill-health is stuck at an all-time high,” says the campaign’s coordinator Janet Newsham.
“As the same time, dangerous employers can now expect to harm their workers with impunity.
“Prosecutions for safety crimes are in freefall and the chances of a workplace being a visited by an HSE inspector are now much less than once in a working lifetime.”
The Hazards Campaign points out that on Sarah Newton’s watch HSE abandoned workplace prosecutions throughout the Covid epidemic, with not a single prosecution despite thousands of often preventable work-related deaths.
It adds the regulator has adopted an advisory only role on work-related stress – the top cause of work-related sickness absence in the UK – refuses to investigate work-related suicides or sexual harassment at work, and defends dangerous exposure limits on deadly substances like cancer-causing and lung-wrecking silica.
“Keeping Sarah Newton in place speaks volumes,” says Janet Newsham. “It says that the HSE will continue to tolerate the enormous human cost of work-related injuries and ill-health and give a get-out-jail-free card to rogue employers. It says workers are disposable and safety is not a priority.”
Notes to editors
1. Work related ill-health is stuck at an all-time high of 1.7-1.8 million workers, an increase of almost 40 per cent since 2010. In 2003/4 HSE conducted 67,987 proactive inspections. In 2023/24, the most recent figures available, HSE conducted fewer than 15,000 inspections. There were 963 successful HSE prosecutions for criminal workplace safety offences in 2003/4, compared to 246 in 2023/24.
Further information
Hazards magazine, number 168/169 double issue, 2025 – Flatlining | Work hurts more, but bosses have never been less accountable. https://www.hazards.org/deadlybusiness/flatlining.htm
Hazards magazine, number 95, 2006. Come clean: HSE enforcement crisis.
https://www.hazards.org/commissionimpossible/comeclean.htm