Monthly Register — May 2025

The bunting was still up on a hoarding I walked past this week, sun-bleached and sagging at one end, three weeks after the pause it was printed for. No criticism intended; that is simply what happens to a campaign week once the programme picks up again. The banner outlives the conversation, and by the last working day of the month the only durable trace is whatever somebody wrote down.

Construction Safety Week ran from 5 to 9 May — the annual United States and Canada campaign for worker safety and wellness, themed All in Together, built around three published components: Plan, Own and Commit. It partnered again with the OSHA National Safety Stand-Down to Prevent Falls, and asked companies to pause sites on Wednesday 7 May, or whenever in the week they could manage it. The question worth asking three weeks later isn't whether anyone remembers the theme. It is what the week asked people to hold, and how that sits against tables that were already in print before the first briefing.

What moved

What the campaign asked for, in materials dated before the week, was modest and specific. A week of attention. Activities, conversations and demonstrations that companies were expected to plan. A collective recommitment to sending people home safe. Free discussion topics, with materials translated into Spanish and French. And a mid-week pause aimed at falls, named by the campaign itself as a leading cause of injury.

Plan, Own and Commit are verbs, which is the part worth dwelling on. Each one assumes an object. Somebody already holds a plan. Somebody can own a task. A commitment can be attached to a named hazard, on a named day, in a named place. Take the objects away and the verbs still read perfectly well on a poster.

Then there are the tables, which any document controller could have opened the Friday before.

The United States Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries for 2023, released in December 2024, recorded 1,075 private-industry construction fatalities — the most of any industry sector, and the sector's highest total going back to 2011. Falls, slips and trips accounted for 421 of those deaths, 39.2 per cent. Transportation incidents accounted for another 240, 22.3 per cent. The fatal falls to a lower level were mostly not spectacular drops from a tower: 260 of them, 64.4 per cent of that class, were from a height of between six and thirty feet. Sixty-seven were from more than thirty feet. Portable ladders and stairs were the primary source of 109 construction fatalities.

On 9 May, in the middle of the stand-down week itself, the Bureau of Labor Statistics restated the same year: construction accounted for about one in five workplace deaths, and for 47.8 per cent of all fatal falls, slips and trips. Within construction, roofing contractors accounted for 110 of those fall deaths, and residential building construction for another 62. The ordinary roof and the ordinary house, then, rather than the exceptional mega-project.

Britain's most recent full-year print, as of 30 May, was still the Health and Safety Executive's 2023/24 fatal-injury statistics from the previous July. Fifty-one construction workers were killed, up from 47, against a five-year average of 42; the Executive noted that the average of the latest two years was statistically significantly higher than the pre-pandemic period. Across all industries, falls from a height remained the leading kind of fatal accident to workers — 50 of 138 deaths, 36 per cent. Construction continued to take a disproportionate share of the national total. A British job that sat out an American campaign week did not sit out the hazard class.

None of this is new, and nobody in the sector would pretend otherwise. OSHA's Focus Four — falls to a lower level, struck-by, electrocution, caught-in/between — has grouped the events that kill most construction workers for years. Choosing falls for the stand-down was a reading of a table, not a marketing decision.

So the movement I would record for May is the distance between those two public objects. On one side, a request for a planned conversation and a pause. On the other, deaths concentrated on falls from ordinary heights, on ladders and stairs, on roofs and houses, in a year when American construction fatalities were the highest in more than a decade and British construction deaths sat above their five-year average.

That distance is an information problem before it is a safety-culture one, and saying so is not a slight on anybody who ran a stand-down. A pause that cannot name the issued sheet, the opening, the exclusion zone and the residual hazard on the roof it is standing down has plenty of attention and nothing to aim it at. It fails in the same place a toolbox talk fails when it says "work to the drawings": the sentence is fine, and the current container is missing from it. The unofficial set in the cabin, the superseded roll on the table, the permit that cites a folder rather than a revision — those are the objects the fall pattern keeps meeting.

Whether the week shifted any rate is not knowable yet, and will be published later, by the houses that compile such things.

What changed in the standards

Very little, which is roughly what you would expect from May. No new ISO 19650 part appeared. Part 6, on health and safety information — the ISO text dated 13 January, the BS EN ISO text dated 31 January — remains the working communication standard for classifying and sharing health and safety information through the information-management process. A campaign week does not turn it into a commencement.

The UK BIM Framework issued no replacement text to mark the week. CDM 2015's tenth year was April's story, not this one. The Building Safety Act's information duties in England were already in force. And the OSHA stand-down is a campaign partnership: not a new regulation, and certainly not a British statutory instrument.

One thing to watch

Give it a fortnight and see what survives. If supervisors and document controllers are still arguing about what the pause actually named — a conversation, or a briefing tied to a current issued set — then it landed somewhere useful.

The stand-down record is the thing to go and look at. If attendance was signed and the hazard line reads "falls" with no sheet, no revision and no location, what the week produced was a folder. If the roof being stood down belongs to the trade the 2023 table already named, and the details for it still live in a messaging thread, the pause never met the pattern it was aimed at. And if Part 6 turns up on a slide as evidence that health and safety information is now handled, while the health and safety file is still a binder assembled at completion, nothing on a live job has changed.

What to ask for costs almost nothing at this point in the year: on the next stand-down, insist the sign-in sheet carries the drawing revision and the location the talk was about. Principal contractors can make that the format, and clients can ask to see it. Posters come down inside a week. Falls from six to thirty feet do not.