The safety gap that no-one tracks

By David Picton, SVP, Safety and Sustainability at EcoOnline 

As summer turns to autumn, a familiar pattern shows up in work sites across the country – regular staff return from holidays, releasing temporary agency or contract workers. In other teams, staff might have been covering for absent colleagues by doing longer shifts. Workforce levels stabilise until the next holiday peaks of school half-terms and (of course) Christmas, but the ebb and flow of permanent and temporary workers – alongside lean shift cover – can mask a potentially deadly safety gap.

A contractor covering a role for six weeks does not have the same instinct for what ‘normal’ looks like on that site, so they might miss familiar checks. Permanent workers covering longer shifts to plug gaps are vulnerable to skipping safety steps when tired and short on time. None of these tend to show up in audits, but these insidious ‘small calls’ made under pressure can leave sites running very differently from the way they should.

Whilst sites and facilities services might appear the same, the way that work gets done changes when the people change. Gaps open between what a policy says should happen and what really happens on the frontline – we call that ‘Safety Drift’ and it can be a major blindspot.

Recognising Safety Drift 

Safety drift builds slowly but steadily. Workarounds become normalised as shortcuts become ingrained into work processes and built into habits that aren’t questioned. The trouble is that a shortcut which works ninety-nine times does not mean it is safe – it simply means that the people taking it were lucky. The one-hundredth time could lead to a serious incident.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recently confirmed that 126 workers died in Great Britain between April 2025 and March 2026. Every fatality represented a devastating loss for families, colleagues and communities, but this was provisionally the lowest annual total on record – down from 217 two decades ago and 495 at the start of the 1980s.

However, this longer-term picture of significant progress masks deeper concerns. There is mounting evidence to suggest that temporary workers face significantly higher injury rates compared to permanent staff. The HSE notes that – over a five-year rolling average – the fatal injury rate for self-employed workers was approximately three times higher than that of standard employees. Data suggests that newly-hired workers face a higher injury risk of injury – and temporary staff can be ‘trapped’ in this perpetual state of being a ‘new starter’ as they switch jobs or sites frequently.

Holiday periods exacerbate this challenge. Staffing pressures push businesses toward greater use of agency and casual workers, but the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 mandate that employers must brief them on the specific risks they face. They must confirm that contract staff can do a given job safely. Under pressure, that duty can often ‘drift’ towards being a signature on an induction sheet.

A Hidden Problem

Safety drift is not usually immediately apparent. The HSE estimates that there are roughly 90 near misses for every reported accident, yet most go unreported because logging them feels like admin that will just slow the job down. By the time it shows up as a serious incident, it has usually been building for months. HSE figures put transport and storage workers at a non-fatal injury rate of around 2,430 per 100,000 and manufacturing at around 2,110. Both are worryingly above the national average of roughly 1,780, highlighting the elevated risks in fast-paced, high-turnover sectors that are most likely to rely on temporary staff during holiday periods.

Across the UK, work-related injury and ill health wipe out more than 40 million working days a year, costing the economy nearly £23 billion. Some of that bill might be safety drift that no one caught in time – the warning signs may be hidden in blindspots, reporting gaps and disconnected data. A lack of near miss reports is not the same as a lack of problems, and a dashboard showing no red flags is not necessarily evidence of a safe workplace. It might just mean that no one is saying anything.

Safety Drift Needs a Twin-Track Approach

When drift is spotted, the instinct is to reinforce what already exists: conduct another audit, refresh training or restate existing procedures. While these have their place, they may simply reinforce the areas that are already being monitored, while structural blind spots – contractors, lone workers, seasonal staff or other groups operating outside established reporting processes – remain invisible.

A more effective starting point is what we’d call a twin-track approach. First, organisations need to extend the boundaries of their safety data so that existing controls reach areas that were hidden rather than just the obvious ones. In practical terms, this might mean giving contractors, lone workers and seasonal staff straightforward ways to report hazards and observations in real time. A contractor who can flag a hazard from a mobile device in under a minute is more likely to do so than someone who has to navigate a lengthy reporting process.

Second, organisations should take an honest look at the technology underpinning their safety management systems: 

• How connected are the different elements?
• Can information from different applications be brought together to identify patterns that would otherwise remain invisible? Can safety data be considered alongside learning records, workforce information and other relevant indicators?
• And, perhaps most importantly, what uncomfortable truths might be hiding in the corners of the organisation?

Closing The Gap 

As workforce levels stabilise after the summer, this is the time for action rather than complacency or ‘sweeping things under the carpet’ of procrastination. Preventing drift should not start with more paperwork, it should start with asking honest questions:

• Which activities, people or locations are not properly represented in our safety data – and what are we doing to bring them into view before the next holiday peak?
• How effectively are we connecting the information we already have to identify emerging risks?

No organisation can fully avoid the staffing pressures of holiday peaks. What they can – and must – avoid is the silence around it. Closing the ‘safety drift gap’ means bringing temporary workers fully into mainstream safety systems, connecting the dots across the organisation and turning information into insight. The goal is not simply to respond when safety drift becomes a noisy reality. It is to recognise the drift while there is still time to correct it.