Here's the thing about RIDDOR that surprises most play venue operators: the majority of injuries that happen in your venue are not reportable, including plenty where an ambulance turns up. And some injuries that look minor absolutely are. Get the distinction wrong in one direction and you're filing reports the HSE never wanted. Get it wrong in the other and you've committed a criminal offence without realising it.
RIDDOR is the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013, the law that requires the “responsible person” at a workplace to report certain deaths, injuries, and incidents to the Health and Safety Executive. At a soft play centre or trampoline park, the responsible person is you: the employer, or whoever is in control of the premises. The full text is at legislation.gov.uk, and the HSE's own guidance lives at hse.gov.uk/riddor. It sits alongside the wider duties we covered in our complete guide to UK soft play regulations.
The question that decides everything
For visitor injuries, one test does almost all the work: did the accident arise out of, or in connection with, your work activity?
A four-year-old collides with another child on the wavy slide and chips a tooth. Painful, upsetting, and (assuming the slide was sound and supervision was in place) not reportable. Children hurting themselves in the ordinary course of play is a risk of the activity, not a failure of the venue.
Now change one detail. The child was hurt because a worn seam in the slide's covering caught their arm. That's an accident connected with the condition of your equipment, which makes it your work activity. If they're taken straight to hospital, it's reportable.
In practice, a visitor injury at a play venue becomes reportable when both parts are true:
- The person was taken directly from your venue to hospital for treatment. A precautionary check-up doesn't count. The HSE is explicit that examination alone isn't treatment.
- The accident arose from your work activity: defective or poorly maintained equipment, inadequate supervision where you'd promised it, the condition of the premises (a wet floor, a broken barrier), or the way the activity was organised.
Ambulance called but the parents took the child home? Not reportable. Hospital visit two days later because the arm still hurt? Not reportable either, because “directly from the scene” matters. Keep a record of all of it anyway. More on that below.
The rules get stricter for your own staff
Your employees get much less benefit of the doubt. Three categories matter for a play venue.
Specified injuries must be reported without delay. The list in Regulation 4 includes: fractures (except to fingers, thumbs and toes), amputations, any crush injury to the head or torso, serious burns, permanent loss or reduction of sight, scalping requiring hospital treatment, and loss of consciousness caused by a head injury or asphyxia. A team member who breaks a wrist stepping awkwardly off the ball pit edge is a specified injury. It's reportable even though the same fracture in a customer might not be.
Over-seven-day injuries are the ones venues miss most. If a work-related accident leaves an employee unable to do their normal job for more than seven consecutive days, you must report it within 15 days of the accident. Two traps hide in the counting: you don't count the day of the accident itself, but you do count weekends and days off. A part-timer who hurts their back on a Friday and couldn't have worked a full shift until the following Sunday has passed the threshold, whether or not they were rostered.
Over-three-day injuries must be recorded but not reported. Your accident book covers this.
What are the RIDDOR reporting deadlines?
Every report goes through the HSE's online forms at hse.gov.uk/riddor/report.htm. Deaths and specified injuries can also be reported by phone on 0345 300 9923.
| What happened | Notify HSE | Written report due |
|---|---|---|
| Death or specified injury (worker) | Without delay | Within 10 days |
| Visitor taken directly to hospital, accident connected to your work activity | Without delay | Within 10 days |
| Worker incapacitated more than 7 consecutive days | Not required | Within 15 days of the accident |
| Worker incapacitated 3–7 days | Record only | No report required |
| Dangerous occurrence (e.g. structural collapse of play equipment) | Without delay | Within 10 days |
Keep copies of every RIDDOR report for at least three years. In practice, keep them longer. Civil claims for childhood injuries can be brought years after the event, and your report is part of your defence.
Is it reportable? Six judgement calls
These are the situations that generate the phone-a-friend moments. Work through the test each time: hospital, directly from the scene, connected to your work activity. For staff, add the specified-injury list and the seven-day count.
1. A child lands awkwardly on a trampoline and breaks their ankle. Ambulance takes them to hospital. The trampoline was in good condition, the safety briefing was given, court rules were being enforced. Not reportable. A broken bone from the inherent risk of bouncing is not an accident arising from your work activity. Record it in detail anyway, because your insurer and possibly a solicitor will ask.
2. A child's finger is caught in a gap where the safety netting had worked loose. Hospital, three stitches. Reportable. The netting is your equipment and its condition is your work activity. Report it within 10 days, and expect your own inspection records to be the first thing anyone looks at.
3. A team member slips on a freshly mopped corridor with no wet floor sign and sprains their wrist. They're off for nine days. Reportable as an over-seven-day injury, within 15 days of the accident. The mopping is your work activity and the missing sign is the failure.
4. A parent trips on a lifted edge of café flooring and hits their head. Taken straight to hospital. Reportable. Premises condition counts as connected with your work, and a member of the public went directly to hospital for treatment.
5. A child feels faint in the ball pit. Paramedics check them over at the venue and hand them back to their parents. Not reportable. Nobody went to hospital, and feeling unwell isn't an accident. Log it in your incident records and note what the paramedics said.
6. A gate swings back and fractures a weekend supervisor's toe. Not a specified injury, because fractures to fingers, thumbs and toes are excluded. It only becomes reportable if they can't do their normal job for more than seven consecutive days. Either way it goes in the accident book.
Notice how often the answer turns on evidence you'd need to already have: the inspection log showing the netting was checked, the cleaning rota, the briefing record. The report is the easy part. Proving the context is where venues come unstuck. Our daily checks checklist exists for exactly this reason.
The near-misses you must report anyway
RIDDOR also covers dangerous occurrences: incidents with the potential for serious harm, even when nobody was hurt. The full list sits in Schedule 2 of the regulations, and most of it (mines, pipelines, radiography) will never trouble a play venue. The one that can is the collapse, overturning or failure of load-bearing parts of equipment or structures. If a platform in your play frame gives way on a quiet Tuesday morning with no children on it, that's still a report, without delay. The empty frame was luck, not control.
Gas incidents are the other live one. If you have gas appliances in your café kitchen and a Gas Safe engineer flags an appliance as dangerous, the engineer reports it, but you'll want your own records straight.
Record everything, report selectively
This is the rule we'd put on the wall. RIDDOR sets a deliberately high bar for reporting, but your incident records need to catch everything: the bumped heads, the nosebleeds, the near-misses where the netting gave more than it should have.
The accident book is its own legal duty, separate from RIDDOR. Under the Social Security (Claims and Payments) Regulations 1979, any employer with ten or more employees must keep one, and since the entries contain personal data they need storing in line with UK GDPR. Keep accident records for at least three years from the date of entry. For incidents involving children, keep them until the child turns 21, because the limitation clock for a claim doesn't start until they're 18.
Why so much emphasis on records? Three separate systems rely on them. Your accident book satisfies the social security rules. Your insurer will ask for incident history when you renew, and again when a claim lands. And if the HSE ever does investigate, the first thing an inspector asks for is your records. A venue that can show every incident, however small, with what was done about it, is a venue that looks in control. We covered what inspectors actually ask for in our inspection preparation guide.
A near-miss log is the part most venues don't keep, and it's the one that prevents the reportable incident. The seam that catches an arm next month is fraying today.
Where play venues get caught out
The over-seven-day rule for staff is the biggest gap. A supervisor off for a week with a bad back after moving equipment is a report, and it's routinely missed because nobody connects “sore back” with “RIDDOR”. Second is treating every ambulance as reportable and every non-ambulance as not; the test is hospital treatment plus connection to your work activity, not the vehicle. Third is the missing paper trail: an incident is judged reportable, reported, and then the venue can't later show the inspection records proving the equipment had been checked. The report was right; the evidence behind it was thin.
One honest caveat. The line between “risk of the activity” and “connected with your work” is genuinely blurry in places, and the HSE's own guidance acknowledges it. If you're unsure whether an incident is reportable, report it. Over-reporting costs you a form; under-reporting is an offence.
Where SafePlay fits
SafePlay keeps the evidence side of this ready before you ever need it: equipment inspection history in the Equipment Register, signed-off daily checks proving the venue was walked that morning, staff training records in Staff Compliance, and every certificate and risk assessment in the Document Vault. When something does happen, the question isn't “can we find the paperwork?” It's already one screen away.