At Inspectas, protecting people is at the heart of everything we do. Our work in asbestos surveying, fire safety, water management, CDM and wider compliance exists because we understand that workplace risks aren’t always visible — and that a genuinely safe workplace has to consider the whole person, not just the physical environment.
Just as we take a rigorous, no-nonsense approach to managing compliance, we believe employers should apply the same seriousness to psychological wellbeing at work.
Mental health is now the single biggest driver of work-related ill health in Great Britain, and we want to help our clients and the wider industry take it as seriously as any other occupational hazard.
Why this matters right now
The latest annual statistics from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) make sobering reading. In 2024/25, an estimated 964,000 workers suffered from work-related stress, depression or anxiety — a record high and a 24% jump on the previous year’s figure of 776,000. Of those, 409,000 were entirely new cases that developed during the year.
Stress, depression and anxiety now account for 52% of all work-related ill health and a striking 62% of all working days lost to work-related illness — some 22.1 million working days in total, an average of nearly 23 days lost per case. Public administration, education, and health and social care are among the sectors reporting the highest rates, but no industry is immune.
Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, employers already have a legal duty to assess the risk of work-related stress in the same way they would any other workplace hazard. HSE’s free tools and this month’s campaign activity are designed to make that duty easier to act on.
Free webinar: Work-related stress and how to manage it
12 August, 2.30pm–3.30pm
This free HSE webinar is aimed at helping workplaces successfully manage work-related stress, and will close with a live audience question-and-answer session — a good opportunity to put specific workplace scenarios to the experts. The session covers the practical resources and tools available to employers, including:
- The Stress Management Standards — HSE’s framework covering the six key areas of work design most closely linked to stress if they go unmanaged: demands (workload, work patterns and environment), control (how much say staff have over how they work), support (encouragement and resources from managers and colleagues), relationships (avoiding conflict and dealing with unacceptable behaviour), role (clarity over responsibilities) and change (how organisational change is managed and communicated).hse.gov
- The Stress Indicator Tool — a free, anonymous 35-question staff survey built around those same six areas. Once at least 10 responses are collected, it automatically generates a report benchmarking your organisation against each Management Standard and flagging where the risks sit, so you can target action rather than guess.books.hse.gov
You can register for the webinar here.
Working Minds campaign: watch their new video
HSE’s ongoing Working Minds campaign exists to help employers prevent work-related stress before it takes hold and support good mental health across the workforce. As part of the campaign, HSE has released a new short video showing how early action and simple, open conversations between managers and staff can significantly reduce the risk of stress escalating into a longer-term problem.
You can watch it here: Prevent stress before it starts.
For further detail, HSE’s full guidance on stress and mental health at work covers risk assessment, legal duties and practical steps for managers.
Our take
Whether it’s an unmanaged physical hazard like asbestos or an unmanaged psychological one like chronic workplace stress, the principle is the same: risks that go unassessed don’t go away — they get worse, and they get more expensive, both in human and financial terms.
We’d encourage every employer we work with to treat this HSE webinar and the Working Minds resources as seriously as any other compliance obligation, and to build regular stress risk assessments into the same health and safety cycle as their physical safety checks.