An Ageing Workforce: Why the HSE Says Your Risk Assessments Need to Change

Britain is working later in life. The default retirement age is long gone, State Pension age is rising, and financial pressure means many people are staying in work well into their sixties and beyond. For most employers this is good news, experience, reliability and judgement are hard to recruit. However it does mean the workforce sitting behind your risk assessments may look quite different to the one those assessments were written for.

Speaking at the HSE's annual general meeting in July 2026, HSE director Rick Brunt told employers that safety strategies must reflect Britain's changing workforce demographics and, importantly, that age should not be treated as a hazard in itself. The HSE has since confirmed it will not introduce age-specific rules for older construction workers, taking the view that existing health and safety law already provides what's needed, provided employers properly adapt their site-specific risk assessments to the people actually doing the work.

That's a polite way of saying: the law isn't changing, but the expectation on you is.

What the numbers show

The picture in the statistics is consistent and uncomfortable. Workers aged 60 and over account for roughly a third of all workplace fatalities in Great Britain, despite making up around 12% of the workforce. The fatal injury rate for workers aged 65 and over runs at something like four times the all-worker average.

The reasons are layered rather than simple. Older workers are heavily represented in higher-risk sectors such as agriculture and construction, where the hazards are greater for everyone. Many are self-employed, with less oversight and fewer formal systems around them. And age-related changes such as reduced bone density, slower recovery, changes to balance, vision and hearing can make an incident more severe even where it is no more likely.

That last point matters enormously for how you interpret your own data. If you only track incident frequency, you may see no problem at all. The ageing workforce issue shows up in severity, in lost-time duration and in return-to-work outcomes.

Adapting without discriminating

Here's where employers get nervous, and rightly so. The Equality Act 2010 makes age a protected characteristic. You cannot remove someone from a task, reduce their hours or push them towards a different role simply because of their date of birth. Doing so risks a discrimination claim, and it would also be poor safety practice: capability varies far more between individuals than between age brackets. A fit 64-year-old may be better suited to a physical task than a sedentary 30-year-old.

The safe and lawful approach is to assess the demands of the job and the capability of the individual, not the number on their ID badge. That's exactly what Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 already asks of you, and what the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992 mean when they refer to the individual's capability.

Practical steps that work for everyone

Design for the widest range of capability. Better lighting under the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, higher-contrast signage, larger display screen text, anti-fatigue matting, mechanical lifting aids and adjustable workstations help everyone — and quietly remove the need for any awkward individual conversation.

Focus on task demands, not age. Build assessments around the specific physical and cognitive demands: sustained overhead work, repeated bending, night shifts, heat exposure, time pressure on novel tasks. Then ask whether anyone in the team is mismatched to those demands, for any reason.

Take fatigue and recovery seriously. Shift patterns designed decades ago may not allow adequate recovery. Reviewing rest breaks, night shift rotation and consecutive-day limits is one of the highest-value changes available.

Offer voluntary health surveillance and open conversations. Where health surveillance is already required (noise, vibration, respiratory hazards) the results are a useful early warning. Elsewhere, an open culture where someone can say “that task is getting harder for me” is worth more than any questionnaire.

Consider medication and health conditions in context. Some medications affect alertness, balance or heat tolerance. This should never be a blanket exclusion, but it is a legitimate factor in occupational health assessment for safety-critical roles.

Review your assumptions about lone working and work at height. These two activities combine badly with anything affecting balance, recovery or response time for any worker.

The takeaway

The message from the HSE is not “treat older workers as a problem.” It's the opposite: age itself isn't the risk, and mismatching job demands to individual capability is. Employers who design work around real people rather than an imagined average worker will find their assessments are more accurate, their controls more effective, and their teams a great deal more willing to speak up.

If your assessments haven't been revisited in a few years, they're probably describing a workforce you no longer have.