The Health and Safety Executive completed just over 13,200 inspections in 2024/25 on total operating expenditure of £310 million, while its frontline inspector headcount fell to 975 — down roughly 7% in five years. This page pulls together the numbers behind the question every duty-holder eventually asks: how much does the HSE spend, how many people and inspectors does it field, and how many inspections does it actually carry out each year?

The figures come from the HSE Annual Report and Accounts 2024/25, the HSE’s annual health and safety statistics for Great Britain, a House of Commons Library research briefing, and union and trade analysis of the long funding decline since 2010 (British Safety Council reporting Prospect’s figures, and a Unite Freedom of Information request on construction). Every number is linked to its source at the foot of the page. This page covers regulator inputs — money, staff and inspection volumes; for prosecutions, fines and notices, see our separate HSE enforcement statistics page.

Key facts and figures

  • 13,200+ inspections were completed by the HSE in 2024/25, including 7,000+ focused on work-related health.
  • £310m was the HSE’s total operating expenditure in 2024/25 — of which staff costs were around £200m.
  • £126m of that came from HSE’s own income in 2024/25, with the balance funded by government grant-in-aid.
  • 2,986 full-time-equivalent staff worked across the HSE in 2024/25, a net rise of 64 FTE over the year.
  • 975 frontline inspectors were in post per the November 2025 report — down from 1,045 in 2021, a fall of about 7%.
  • ~45% real-terms cut to core grant-in-aid between 2010 and 2019 (£228m to £126m), per Prospect’s analysis.
  • 2,700+ intelligence-led inspections followed specific concerns or reports in 2024/25.
  • ~16,000–17,000 proactive inspections a year now, versus 25,000+ before 2010 — roughly half the earlier rate.

Figures are the latest available as of July 2026. This page is refreshed each November, when the HSE Annual Report and Accounts and the Great Britain health and safety statistics suite are released together.

How many HSE inspectors are there in the UK?

Around 975 frontline inspectors were in post according to the HSE’s annual report published in November 2025 — down from 1,045 in 2021, a fall of roughly 7% in five years. Inspectors are the warranted regulatory staff who carry out proactive visits, investigate incidents and, where necessary, take enforcement action; they are a small subset of the HSE’s total workforce, and their number is the single figure that most directly shapes how likely any given workplace is to see an inspector.

The five-year slide sits on top of a much longer decline. Analysis by the Prospect union, reported by the British Safety Council, put the reduction in HSE inspector numbers at around 18% since 2010 on a like-for-like basis, with overall staff down by roughly 35% over the same period. The recent stabilisation — and the modest overall headcount growth described below — reflects recruitment into new functions such as the Building Safety Regulator rather than a rebuilding of the traditional inspectorate.

Two caveats matter when comparing figures across years. First, the HSE has periodically reorganised how it counts and deploys regulatory staff, so a headline “inspector” number in one year is not always defined identically to another. Second, warranted inspectors are supported by visiting officers, specialist inspectors and band-specific regulatory roles, so the frontline capacity available for inspection work is broader than the single 975 figure suggests — but that number remains the clearest year-on-year benchmark.

How many workplaces does the HSE inspect each year?

The HSE completed just over 13,200 inspections in 2024/25. Of those, more than 7,000 focused specifically on work-related health — targeting hazards such as dust, fumes, noise and musculoskeletal risk rather than immediate safety failures — and more than 2,700 were intelligence-led, triggered by concerns, complaints, reports or incident data rather than a routine schedule.

The sector breakdown gives a sense of how targeted the programme is. In 2024/25 the HSE carried out over 600 duty-to-manage inspections focused on asbestos, plus 713 inspections of licensed asbestos removal contractors — a reminder that a large share of proactive inspection effort is directed at specific, well-evidenced high-harm risks rather than spread evenly across all workplaces. Health-focused visits, intelligence-led visits and targeted campaigns together account for most of the annual total.

Inspection type (2024/25)VolumeDetail
Total inspections completed13,200+All proactive and reactive inspection work
Work-related health inspections7,000+Dust, fumes, noise, musculoskeletal and other health risks
Intelligence-led inspections2,700+Triggered by concerns, reports and incident data
Duty-to-manage asbestos inspections600+Checking asbestos management arrangements
Licensed asbestos removal contractor inspections713Inspections of licensed removal work

An inspection is not the same as an enforcement outcome. A visit that finds a compliant workplace closes without further action; a visit that finds a material breach may generate advice, a notice, a Fee for Intervention invoice or, rarely, a prosecution. Those enforcement outputs are covered on our HSE enforcement statistics page — here the focus is on the volume of inspection activity itself.

What is the HSE’s annual budget?

The HSE’s total operating expenditure was £310 million in 2024/25. Of that, staff costs accounted for around £200 million — comfortably the largest single line — with roughly £37 million on estates and around £19 million on IT, and the balance spread across other running costs. On the income side, the HSE generated about £126 million of its own funding in 2024/25, chiefly through cost-recovery schemes, permissioning and services, with the remainder met by government grant-in-aid.

That funding mix is central to understanding inspection capacity. Grant-in-aid — the core money voted to the HSE by government — is the part most exposed to spending decisions, and it is the figure at the heart of the long-running “watchdog cuts” debate. Staff costs dominate the budget, so any sustained squeeze on grant-in-aid feeds fairly directly into how many inspectors and support staff the regulator can afford to field, and therefore into how many inspections it can complete.

How many people work at the HSE?

The HSE employed 2,986 full-time-equivalent staff in 2024/25, a net increase of 64 FTE across the year. That headline growth is driven largely by recruitment into newer functions — most notably the Building Safety Regulator, established in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire — rather than by an expansion of the traditional field inspectorate covered above.

The distinction between total staff and frontline inspectors is important. A rising overall headcount can sit alongside a flat or falling number of warranted inspectors, because much of the growth is in specialist regulatory, scientific, building-safety and corporate roles. So the picture is not a straightforward “the HSE is growing” story: the organisation is being reshaped, with new statutory duties absorbing recruitment while the classic proactive-inspection workforce remains materially smaller than it was in 2010.

How much has the HSE’s funding been cut since 2010?

Core grant-in-aid to the HSE was cut by around 45% in cash terms between 2010 and 2019, falling from about £228 million to £126 million before recovering to roughly £185 million by 2022, according to Prospect union analysis reported by the British Safety Council. Trade coverage of the 2024/25 annual report frames the government grant as down by about a third since 2010 — from around £240 million to roughly £172 million — depending on which years and definitions are compared. However it is measured, the direction is the same: a substantial real-terms reduction in the core public money underpinning the regulator.

Over the same period, Prospect’s figures put the fall in overall HSE staff at around 35% and inspector numbers at around 18% (like-for-like since 2010). One striking indicator of the resourcing strain: the number of mandatory HSE investigations not carried out for resourcing reasons rose nearly 200-fold, from 2 in 2016/17 to 389 in 2021/22, per the same analysis. These figures are drawn from union and trade sources rather than the annual accounts, and the precise numbers vary with the baseline chosen, so they are best read as a consistent directional picture rather than exact official series.

IndicatorFigureSource
Core grant-in-aid, 2010 → 2019~£228m → £126m (~45% cut)British Safety Council / Prospect
Grant-in-aid recovery by 2022~£185mBritish Safety Council / Prospect
Government grant since 2010~£240m → ~£172m (down ~one third)Construction News (on 2024/25 report)
Overall HSE staff since 2010Down ~35%British Safety Council / Prospect
Inspector numbers since 2010Down ~18% (like-for-like)British Safety Council / Prospect
Mandatory investigations not done (resourcing), 2016/17 → 2021/222 → 389British Safety Council / Prospect

How far have proactive inspections fallen?

Proactive inspections have roughly halved. Prospect’s analysis indicates the HSE carried out more than 25,000 proactive (unannounced, non-incident-driven) inspections a year before 2010, against around 16,000 to 17,000 now, with a 2022/23 business-plan target of just 14,000. Proactive inspection is the mechanism by which a compliant-looking business that has never had an incident can still be checked — so its decline is the number that most directly changes the answer to “will I get inspected?”

Construction shows the trend sharply at sector level. A Unite Freedom of Information request, reported by New Civil Engineer, found unannounced HSE construction inspections fell about 32% — from 11,303 in 2013/14 to 7,647 in 2022/23. Construction remains one of the HSE’s priority sectors, so a decline of that scale in one of the most closely watched industries illustrates how thinly proactive coverage is now spread across the economy as a whole.

The counterpoint is that inspection has become more targeted rather than simply less frequent. A larger share of the shrinking proactive programme is now aimed at specific health risks and intelligence-led priorities — the 7,000+ health inspections and 2,700+ intelligence-led visits noted above — so the businesses most likely to be visited are those in higher-risk sectors or those the HSE already has reason to look at.

How likely is it that the HSE will inspect my business?

For most low-risk workplaces, an unannounced proactive HSE inspection is statistically unlikely in any given year. With something in the order of 16,000–17,000 proactive inspections a year spread across the whole of Great Britain’s many millions of workplaces, the raw probability for a typical office-based or lower-risk business is low. But that headline understates the real exposure, because inspection is not random.

Your likelihood rises sharply if any of the following apply: you operate in a priority sector (construction, agriculture, manufacturing, waste and recycling, or work involving asbestos or hazardous substances); the HSE receives a concern or complaint about your workplace; you have a reportable incident under RIDDOR; or you are drawn into an intelligence-led or campaign-based programme. In those situations the abstract “low probability” becomes largely irrelevant — a specific trigger has put you in scope.

The practical takeaway for duty-holders is that inspection likelihood is the wrong thing to plan around. Whether or not an inspector ever calls, the legal duty to assess and control risk is the same, and an inspector who does arrive — proactively or after an incident — will ask for the documents the law already requires: current risk assessments, training records and evidence that controls are maintained. The five-step method the HSE itself publishes is the standard those documents are expected to meet. For the compliance side of the picture — how many businesses actually have assessments in place — see our risk assessment statistics page.

Why does inspection capacity matter?

The backdrop to all of this is the human and economic cost of workplace harm. In Great Britain, 124 workers were killed at work in 2024/25, down from 138 the year before, and around 40.1 million working days were lost to work-related ill health and injury, with the total estimated cost of workplace injury and ill health put at about £22.9 billion a year (HSE key figures, 2024/25). Those totals set the stakes: a smaller, more thinly stretched inspectorate is regulating a workload that has not shrunk to match.

Fatality and ill-health figures are context here, not this page’s subject — the detailed injury and health series are covered on the HSE’s own statistics pages and our related guides. The point for inspection statistics is simply that the decline in proactive inspection capacity is happening against a backdrop of harm that remains significant, which is why unions, parliamentary researchers and safety bodies keep returning to the “can the regulator still regulate?” question each year.

Frequently asked questions

How many HSE inspectors are there in the UK?

Around 975 frontline inspectors were in post according to the HSE’s annual report published in November 2025 — down from 1,045 in 2021, a fall of roughly 7% in five years. On a longer view, Prospect union analysis puts the reduction in inspector numbers at around 18% since 2010, with overall HSE staff down by about 35% over the same period.

How many workplaces does the HSE inspect each year?

The HSE completed just over 13,200 inspections in 2024/25, including more than 7,000 focused on work-related health and over 2,700 that were intelligence-led. Proactive (unannounced) inspections now run at roughly 16,000–17,000 a year across Great Britain, down from 25,000+ before 2010.

What is the HSE’s annual budget?

The HSE’s total operating expenditure was £310 million in 2024/25, with staff costs of around £200 million. It generated about £126 million of its own income, with the balance funded by government grant-in-aid. Core grant-in-aid was cut by roughly 45% between 2010 and 2019 before partially recovering.

How likely is it that the HSE will inspect my business?

For a typical low-risk workplace, an unannounced proactive inspection in any given year is statistically unlikely, because 16,000–17,000 proactive inspections are spread across millions of workplaces. Your likelihood rises sharply if you are in a priority sector, if the HSE receives a concern about your workplace, or if you have a RIDDOR-reportable incident — and the legal duty to assess and control risk applies whether or not you are ever inspected.

Is the HSE’s workforce growing or shrinking?

Both, in different places. Total full-time-equivalent staff rose by 64 to 2,986 in 2024/25, largely through recruitment into new functions such as the Building Safety Regulator. The traditional frontline inspectorate, however, remains materially smaller than in 2010, so overall growth sits alongside a long-term decline in proactive-inspection capacity.

Sources & references

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Mark McShane
Mark McShane
Health & Safety Training Specialist, Online CPD Academy

Mark writes about workplace health & safety, risk assessment and accredited online training for Risk Assessment Training, part of Online CPD Academy.