RoSPA Awards Crowns Construction as the Safety Profession Sounds the Alarm

RoSPA Awards Crowns Construction as the Safety Profession Sounds the Alarm

When RoSPA renamed its most senior trophy after Lord Jordan of Bournville and handed it to a construction, housebuilding and property group, the symbolism was hard to miss. Construction remains the sector that kills more British workers than any other, and yet the industry’s safety leaders now sit at the very front of the world’s largest occupational safety awards scheme.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents marked seven decades of its awards at London’s Grosvenor Hotel on 30 June, and the evening carried more strategic weight than a typical black-tie celebration. Alongside the trophies came the launch of a report on the future of the health and safety profession itself, arriving at a point where the sector that built modern safety culture is struggling to recruit and retain the people who sustain it.

For construction employers, infrastructure owners and the investors who underwrite major projects, the two developments are connected. Safety performance has become a proxy for operational discipline, supply-chain reliability and reputational risk, and clients increasingly treat third-party recognition as a marker of a contractor worth trusting with complex work.

At the same time, the pipeline of competent safety practitioners is thinning just as regulatory demands, psychosocial risk and new technology raise the bar for what competence means. The awards celebrate how far the discipline has travelled since 1956; the accompanying report is a warning about whether the profession can hold that ground.

Briefing

• The Sovini Group, a North West construction, housebuilding and property organisation, won the top honour, the newly renamed Lord Jordan of Bournville Trophy, selected from among the highest-performing sector winners.
• RoSPA’s oldest and most prestigious award, formerly the Sir George Earle Trophy, was renamed to mark Lord Jordan’s lifelong safety advocacy and his 90th birthday.
• Winners were drawn from around 2,000 entries across roughly 60 countries, spanning SMEs to global corporations across more than 20 sector categories.
• RoSPA used the ceremony to launch its OSH Skills Commission report, sponsored by Speedy Hire, addressing recruitment, retention and competence in the safety profession.
• The awards, sponsored by NEBOSH, coincide with UK data showing construction still records the highest number of worker fatalities and that overall safety gains have plateaued.

A skills shortage now shapes the safety story

The most consequential item of the evening was not a trophy but a document. RoSPA chose the anniversary to publish the findings of its OSH Skills Commission, a body convened in partnership with Speedy Hire and launched earlier in the year at the House of Lords under RoSPA vice president Baroness Crawley of Edgbaston.

The commission’s central premise is uncomfortable for an industry that prides itself on continuous improvement: the supply of competent occupational safety and health professionals is under strain, and that strain has direct consequences for productivity and for lives. Baroness Crawley has described the commission as born of difficult circumstances, warning that a growing skills shortage is denting national productivity and putting people in danger, a framing that positions safety competence as an economic issue rather than a compliance overhead.

The work was structured around five expert roundtables covering recruitment, retention, worker consultation, wellbeing and culture, and technology in occupational safety, each chaired by a senior figure from bodies including Policy Connect, IOSH, Unite, the Society of Occupational Medicine and the British Standards Institution. That breadth matters because the pressures are cumulative rather than isolated. Experienced practitioners are retiring or leaving faster than they can be replaced, remaining staff absorb heavier workloads, and a more transient, cross-sector labour market means knowledge no longer accretes within a single employer over a career.

Speedy Hire’s group health, safety and environment leadership has publicly linked this churn to fresh risk, noting that a workforce moving rapidly between roles brings energy but leaves knowledge gaps behind it. For construction specifically, where subcontracting and short project cycles already fragment accountability, that dynamic is not abstract.

Why a construction group taking the top prize matters

The Sovini Group’s win of the Lord Jordan of Bournville Trophy is the detail that should register most with the built-environment sector. The Bootle-based organisation, which owns, manages and maintains around 14,500 homes through an integrated supply chain spanning construction, property services, scaffolding and asbestos removal, secured the Construction, Housebuilding and Property Development Sector Award before being elevated to the overall prize, which RoSPA draws from its strongest sector winners.

It was the group’s twelfth consecutive year of RoSPA recognition, a record that speaks to the awards’ underlying logic. Consistency, not a single strong year, is what the scheme rewards, and repeat entry functions as a form of external benchmarking that many contractors now build into their assurance frameworks.

The wider slate of sector winners underlines how far the discipline reaches beyond the building site. Barchester Healthcare took the healthcare category, Shepley Engineers the engineering services award, Kuehne and Nagel’s HMRC border facilities the public services category, AS Watson’s UK retail brands the wholesale and retail award, and Sri Lanka’s MAS Active the manufacturing prize.

Entries are assessed across the full span of a safety management system, from governance and risk control to how organisations respond to emerging hazards, and RoSPA has increasingly folded questions about innovation and technology into that assessment. For infrastructure clients running competitive procurement, the appeal is straightforward: a rigorous, independent scheme offers a shorthand for the maturity of a contractor’s safety culture that a compliance certificate alone cannot.

Seven decades of progress, and a stubborn plateau

The anniversary invites a longer view, and the numbers justify the celebration. When RoSPA first handed out its awards in 1956, British workplaces were defined by unguarded machinery and practices that would be unthinkable today. The trajectory since has been dramatic, with UK worker fatalities falling from 495 in 1981 to 223 two decades ago.

The Health and Safety Executive’s most recent finalised figures, covering 2024/25, recorded 124 worker deaths, and provisional data for 2025/26 points to a broadly similar total. Great Britain now ranks among the safest places in the world to work, and the awards scheme has grown in parallel from a small national event into a global programme reaching millions of employees.

The harder truth is that progress has flattened. HSE has acknowledged that the rate of fatal injury has plateaued over the past decade once pandemic distortions are set aside, and construction continues to carry the heaviest burden. The sector recorded 35 worker deaths in 2024/25, more than any other industry, with falls from height responsible for over half of construction fatalities and its fatal injury rate running several times the all-industry average.

Work-related ill health, driven heavily by stress, anxiety and depression, now affects close to two million people, and HSE has put the annual cost of workplace injury and ill health at roughly £22.9 billion. Against that backdrop, the celebratory tone of an anniversary and the sober warning of a skills report are two readings of the same situation: the easy gains have been banked, and the next tranche of improvement will demand more capable people, not simply more rules.

AI, wellbeing and the changing definition of competence

What the profession is being asked to master is also shifting. RoSPA’s assessors now probe how organisations respond to emerging risk areas including artificial intelligence, and the OSH Skills Commission gave technology in occupational safety a dedicated workstream. Predictive analytics, digital monitoring and automation are entering site management and asset operation, offering earlier warning of hazards but demanding new literacy from practitioners who must interpret the outputs and design controls around them.

The risk for construction is a widening gap between organisations that can absorb these tools and those left managing them without the underlying competence, precisely the divide the commission was created to address.

Psychosocial risk has moved in parallel from the margins to the centre of the safety brief. The volume of work-related ill health tied to mental health has forced employers to treat wellbeing, culture and psychological safety as core competencies rather than soft extras, and the commission’s inclusion of a wellbeing workstream reflects that reality.

RoSPA has separately flagged, through earlier research, that accident rates across society have begun to rise again, lending urgency to the argument that competence must be actively protected rather than assumed. For a sector as exposed as construction, the practical implication is that safety leadership can no longer rest on hazard control alone; it must extend to the mental resilience of a workforce operating under commercial and time pressure.

What the anniversary signals for the years ahead

The people at the centre of the evening framed it as both a celebration and a call to keep pushing. Lord Jordan of Bournville, whose name the top trophy now carries, said: ‘It is an enormous honour to have RoSPA’s top award named the Lord Jordan of Bournville Trophy. But it is an even greater privilege to meet the award winners taking forward the cause of everything I, RoSPA and other champions of health and safety have fought for over 70 years. The enthusiasm, energy and innovation of all our award winners are the driving force towards a safer society for everyone.’

RoSPA Chief Executive Rebecca Hickman set the milestone against its economic stakes, arguing: ‘a healthy workforce is essential for a healthy economy, and all our RoSPA winners – past, present and future – are at the vanguard of a global movement demonstrating that health and safety isn’t just about compliance, but is central to success.’

For construction professionals, infrastructure owners and investors, the takeaway is less about who lifted which trophy and more about the direction of travel. The recognition of a construction and housing group at the very top of a global scheme confirms that the built environment can lead on safety rather than trail it, while the skills report makes clear that leadership is contingent on a pipeline of competent people that is no longer guaranteed.

NEBOSH Chief Executive Andy Shenstone, whose organisation sponsors the awards, tied the two threads together in observing ‘the Award winners have achieved the highest standards in health and safety and raised the bar for the entire profession.’ Raising that bar and staffing the profession that must clear it are, on the evidence of this anniversary, the twin challenges the industry now has to hold in view.

Key Industry Questions

1. Why should a construction or infrastructure firm care about winning a RoSPA Award? Recognition functions as independent evidence of safety-management maturity, which increasingly influences procurement outcomes. Clients running competitive tenders often treat a rigorous, externally judged award as a credible signal that a contractor’s culture and systems are sound, over and above baseline compliance certificates. Because RoSPA assesses the full breadth of a management system and rewards year-on-year consistency rather than a single strong period, sustained recognition can strengthen prequalification positions, support insurance conversations and reassure joint-venture partners. For firms bidding on major infrastructure, where reputational and delivery risk are scrutinised closely, that external validation can carry commercial weight disproportionate to the cost of entering.
2. What is the OSH Skills Commission and why does it matter to the built environment? It is a RoSPA initiative, backed by Speedy Hire, examining why the supply of competent occupational safety and health professionals is under strain and what should be done about it. Structured around five roundtables covering recruitment, retention, worker consultation, wellbeing and technology, its report offers recommendations for government, educators and employers. For construction, which relies heavily on fragmented, subcontracted labour and short project cycles, a shortage of skilled safety practitioners threatens both compliance and productivity. The commission reframes safety competence as an economic asset, arguing that a thinning talent pipeline directly affects national output as well as worker protection.
3. Is construction still the most dangerous UK industry to work in? Construction records the highest absolute number of worker fatalities of any UK sector, with 35 deaths in 2024/25 and falls from height responsible for more than half of them. Its fatal injury rate also runs several times the all-industry average. On a per-worker basis, agriculture, forestry and fishing carries a higher rate, but construction’s combination of large workforce and persistent high-consequence hazards keeps it at the top of the fatality count. The plateau in overall UK safety improvement over the past decade means construction’s exposure is unlikely to fall meaningfully without renewed investment in competence, supervision and work-at-height controls.
4. What does the plateau in workplace fatalities mean for future safety strategy? It signals that the interventions which drove decades of improvement have largely delivered their gains, and that further progress will require harder, more targeted effort. Regulation, mechanisation and awareness campaigns reduced deaths from 495 in 1981 to around 124 in recent years, but the curve has flattened. The next phase depends less on new rules and more on embedding competence, addressing psychosocial risk and adopting technology intelligently. For employers, that shifts the emphasis toward workforce capability and culture, which is precisely why a skills shortage in the safety profession is now treated as a strategic rather than administrative concern.
5. How is artificial intelligence changing occupational safety expectations? AI and digital monitoring are entering site and asset management, offering predictive warning of hazards and earlier intervention, but they raise the competence threshold for practitioners who must interpret outputs and design controls around them. RoSPA now assesses how organisations respond to emerging risks including AI, and the skills commission gave technology a dedicated workstream. The concern is a widening divide between organisations able to absorb these tools and those left managing them without the underlying expertise. For construction, the practical risk is uneven adoption that creates new blind spots rather than closing existing ones, reinforcing the argument for sustained investment in professional development.
6. Why did RoSPA rename its top award, and does the change carry substance? The former Sir George Earle Trophy was renamed the Lord Jordan of Bournville Trophy to honour RoSPA’s Life President for his lifelong advocacy on worker protection, coinciding with his 90th birthday. Beyond the tribute, the renaming reinforces continuity of purpose at a symbolic moment, linking seven decades of progress to the individuals who championed it. The award’s selection method is unchanged: it is drawn from the strongest sector winners, meaning the recipient has already demonstrated category-leading performance. The 2026 choice of a construction and housing group underscores that the built environment can occupy the front rank of global safety recognition.
7. What should investors read into a safety awards outcome? Safety performance increasingly correlates with operational discipline, and for asset-heavy sectors it is a legitimate proxy for management quality and downside risk. Repeated, independently judged recognition suggests robust systems, lower likelihood of costly incidents and stronger supply-chain reliability, all of which bear on project delivery and reputational exposure. The parallel skills warning is equally relevant, because a shortage of competent safety professionals raises the probability of incidents, enforcement action and disruption across the wider market. Investors weighing construction and infrastructure exposure can reasonably treat both a strong safety track record and a firm’s approach to safety talent as material to long-term value.

Strategic Takeaways

1. A construction and housebuilding group winning the scheme’s top honour confirms that the built environment can lead global safety recognition, giving contractors a credible differentiator in increasingly safety-conscious procurement.
2. The launch of the OSH Skills Commission report reframes safety competence as an economic and productivity issue, signalling that future regulation and industry standards are likely to focus on workforce capability, not just hazard control.
3. With UK safety gains plateauing and construction still leading fatality counts, the next phase of improvement will depend on people and culture rather than new rules, making investment in competent safety talent a strategic priority.
4. The integration of AI, predictive analytics and psychosocial risk into safety assessment is raising the definition of professional competence, and firms unable to build that capability risk falling behind on both compliance and client expectations.
5. Independent, sustained safety recognition is becoming a proxy for operational reliability and downside risk, and both a firm’s track record and its approach to safety-skills retention are increasingly material to clients, insurers and investors.