RIDDOR is the regulation that turns some of the things that go wrong at work into a report to the regulator. Most incidents are not reportable and most people who look this up want to know which ones are, who has to make the report, and how long they have. The letters themselves are the least useful part of the answer, so this page spends one line on them and the rest on the decision you are actually making, which is whether the thing that happened on Tuesday is a report or a record.
What the regulation actually requires
RIDDOR places the reporting duty on the responsible person, which in most workplaces is the employer, and it is a duty to report specified categories of event rather than everything that happens. The regulator's own list separates deaths and specified injuries to workers, injuries that keep a worker off their normal work beyond a threshold, injuries to people who are not at work, occupational diseases where a doctor has made a written diagnosis, and dangerous occurrences, which are near-miss events named in the regulations because of what they could have caused. Anything outside those categories is not reportable, which does not make it unimportant: it still belongs in your own accident record.
The decision is a two-step one, and firms usually collapse it
First, is this a reportable category. Second, if it is, who reports it and by when. Firms get into trouble by collapsing the two into a single feeling that something serious happened. The safer habit is mechanical: record everything in your own book as it happens, then run the reportable test against the record rather than against a memory of the conversation. That is the whole reason this site keeps incidents as records with dates on them rather than as a form somebody fills in when they remember.
Reporting is a small part of the work and the smallest part of the risk
An outfit that reports the reportable and records nothing else is exposed twice over: it cannot show a pattern, and it cannot show that the unreportable things were dealt with. The value of the incident record is not the RIDDOR report at the end of it, it is the eight things that never became one because somebody spotted the third instance of the same near miss. Report what the regulations require, and keep everything, because those are different jobs and only one of them has a deadline.
Where the record has to live to be useful later
An enforcement question about an incident arrives months or years after it, usually from someone who was not there. What answers it is a record with a date, an author, what happened, what was decided and what changed as a result, held against the site and the activity it belongs to. The free risk assessment form worksheet on this site prices the assessment programme those incidents feed back into; keeping the incidents themselves against the assessments they belong to is what the paid plan does.
Questions people ask about riddor meaning
What does RIDDOR stand for?
The Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations. The current version is the 2013 regulations, and the name is a fair description of the four things it covers. Knowing the expansion tells you nothing about whether your incident is reportable, which is why the rest of this page is about the categories rather than the letters.
Who has to make the report?
The responsible person, which in most workplaces is the employer, and for self-employed people in someone else's premises is usually the person in control of those premises. It is not the injured person and it is not their line manager acting informally. Decide in advance who holds it in your firm and write the name into your arrangements, because the moment you need to know is a bad moment to work it out.
Does an unreportable incident need recording at all?
Yes, and separately from RIDDOR. Employers have their own accident recording duties and, more practically, an incident that is not reportable is the one most likely to repeat. A record that only contains reportable events is a record of your worst days with nothing to learn from in between.