I want to start with a number, because I think it gets lost. Falls from height accounted for around a quarter of all worker deaths in Great Britain during 2025/26. Not construction deaths. Not high-risk-industry deaths. A quarter of all worker deaths, across every sector, came from someone falling.
HSE's own inspectors have been direct about it. In a press release a couple of weeks ago, one HSE Inspector said plainly that falls from height remain the leading cause of workplace fatalities in Great Britain, with 31 people losing their lives in the past year alone. Thirty-one people. And that's before you count everyone who survived, because survival isn't the same as being okay.
Two cases, three weeks apart
On 6 August, HSE announced that Lowndes Lumb Construction Limited had been fined £60,000 after a worker fell through an unprotected roof light during refurbishment work in Fulham. He was passing materials through an open opening — no scaffolding, no guard rails, no crash deck, no harness. He fell onto the concrete floor below and suffered life-changing injuries. The company pleaded guilty to breaching the Work at Height Regulations 2005. HSE's inspector was direct about it too: this was entirely preventable, and shouldn't have happened.
Three weeks before that, on 22 July, HSE announced a £90,000 fine against South East Refurbishment Limited after a man named Aaron Back — 41 years old, a father of four — fell from a raised tipping bucket on a fork lift truck on a site in Kent. A scissor lift had actually been ordered for the job, but it was too tall to fit where the work was happening, so a fork lift bucket was used instead. There was no training on the equipment. No procedure. No supervision to stop it happening. HSE's investigation found the company had been warned about unsafe work at height going back to 2013.
Aaron gave a victim statement. I'm not going to reprint the whole thing here, because it's his to tell, not mine to lift wholesale — but he described what the fall actually cost him: his mobility, his ability to work, months in hospital, and the version of himself he used to be. In his own words, "I have been given a lifetime sentence." He's 41. He has four kids. He used to take them to football.
The fines are not the point
£60,000. £90,000. I'm not writing this to talk about money, and I don't think you should read it that way either. A fine doesn't undo a fall. It doesn't give Aaron Back his mobility back, and it doesn't give a family in Fulham their evening back the way it was before their dad or husband or brother went through a roof light. The fine is what happens after. What I actually care about is everything that happens before — the decisions, the shortcuts, the moments where someone could have said something and didn't.
Because in both of these cases, somebody knew. Somebody in that Kent site knew the scissor lift didn't fit and a fork lift bucket isn't the same thing. Somebody on that Fulham roof knew there was an open hole with nothing over it. The regulations weren't a mystery — Regulation 6(3) of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 has existed since 2005. This isn't a training gap in the sense of nobody knowing the rules. It's a gap in something else.
Training isn't enough on its own — and I say that as someone who delivers it
Here's the uncomfortable bit for someone in my position: you can sit a room full of people through a full day on the Work at Height Regulations, hand them a certificate, and still lose someone six months later, because knowing the rule isn't the same as having the confidence to stop the job when the rule is about to be broken in front of you.
That's genuinely what I think is missing more often than knowledge is. Not "do people know they should use a harness." Most people do. It's whether the labourer, the apprentice, the newest person on site, the person with the least power in the room, feels able to say "hang on a minute, this isn't right, someone is going to get hurt here" — and stop the job, to a supervisor, to a principal contractor, to whoever's in charge — before it happens, not after.
That takes more than a slide with the regulation number on it. It takes a workplace where stopping the job is genuinely, visibly supported, not just written in a policy document nobody reads. It takes people believing that raising a concern won't cost them the day's pay, or make them "difficult," or get them a reputation. Building that culture is harder than teaching the regulations, and it's the part I think gets skipped most often.
What this actually means for your business
If you've read this far, you already know work at height is a risk in your business — otherwise this wouldn't have held your attention. So here's the honest question worth asking yourself today: if someone on your team saw something unsafe happening at height right now, would they actually stop it? Not "could they, technically, in theory" — would they, genuinely, in the moment, with a supervisor stood right there?
If you're not certain the answer is yes, that's worth fixing before it becomes a statistic with your company's name on it.
This is exactly why I built our Working at Heights course the way I did — not just the regulations and the equipment, but the confidence piece too. It sits alongside our Permit to Work and Risk Assessment courses, because in both of these cases, a proper permit system or a risk assessment that actually got followed — not just filed — would very likely have changed the outcome.
Get in touch if you want to talk about what that would actually look like for your team.
Sources: HSE Media Centre, "Construction company fined £60,000 after worker seriously injured" (6 August 2026); HSE Media Centre, "Company fined after man left 'physically ruined' after fall from height" (22 July 2026).