Your risk register probably runs to hundreds of entries. Substances, tasks, equipment, access, contractors. Every one of them scored, controlled, dated, and owned by somebody.
Now search it for stress.
Many come back empty. The people maintaining them are not careless. For more than a decade the whole subject was filed under human resources, somewhere between the employee assistance programme and the mental health first aid rota, and safety teams left it there because that is where it appeared to belong.
That filing held while the numbers stayed small. They have not stayed small. Stress is now the gap most likely to be found.
If an inspector asked today what your organisation has done to assess the risk of work-related stress, what would you hand over?
Stress is now most of the work-related ill health picture
Health and Safety Executive figures on work-related stress for 2024/25 recorded 964,000 workers suffering from stress, depression or anxiety caused or made worse by their job. Those cases cost 22.1 million working days, an average of 22.9 days for every person affected.
The proportion matters more than the headline. Stress, depression and anxiety accounted for 52% of all work-related ill health in that period, and 62% of all working days lost to it. More time is now lost to this single category than to every other work-related illness put together.
The direction is worth noting too. New cases rose to 409,000 from 300,000 the year before. Days lost climbed from 16.4 million to 22.1 million, an increase of almost a third in twelve months. The rate now sits at 2,770 cases per 100,000 workers, and each of the last three years has run above the pre-pandemic level recorded in 2018/19.
For a safety function used to tracking injury numbers that trend downward over time, this is the one moving the other way.
The causes on HSE's list are decisions somebody made
Ask people what caused it and the answers are strikingly consistent. HSE reports workload as the main factor, particularly tight deadlines, too much work, and too much pressure or responsibility. Behind that sit lack of managerial support, violence and bullying, organisational change, and uncertainty about roles.
Read that list again as a safety professional.
Not one of those is a personal characteristic. Every one is a decision somebody made about how work gets designed, resourced, scheduled or communicated. Deadlines are set. Headcount is signed off. Restructures are announced on a particular day in a particular way.
That is what makes work-related stress assessable. A hazard created by organisational decisions can be identified, evaluated and controlled by organisational decisions, which is the logic already applied to every other entry on the register. It also explains why resilience training on its own rarely shifts the numbers. Training the individual does nothing about the deadline.
What HSE actually means by stress
HSE defines stress as the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other types of demand placed on them. That definition draws a deliberate line. Pressure is a normal part of work and often a productive part of it. Stress is what happens when the demand outruns a person's capacity to meet it. The distinction matters for assessment, because the hazard is not pressure itself but the point at which pressure exceeds what the job has been designed to absorb.
The duty is older than the conversation about it
Nothing here is new law, which is exactly why the gap exists.
Section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires employers to ensure the health, safety and welfare of employees so far as is reasonably practicable. Health in that Act includes psychological health. Regulation 3 of the Management Regulations 1999 then requires a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks employees are exposed to at work, and stress is one of them.
The distance between that duty and normal practice is measurable. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found in its 2025 health and wellbeing survey that 64% of organisations take steps to identify or reduce workplace stress, and that 58% of those carry out risk assessments or stress audits. Multiply the two figures and fewer than four in ten UK organisations are carrying out a stress risk assessment at all. The rest are treating the symptom without having examined what produced it.
HSE has been consistent on this through its Working Minds campaign, which asks employers to treat stress and mental health at work as a routine part of existing risk assessment rather than a separate exercise. The regulator also provides a free interactive e-learning module on preventing work-related stress, which takes under an hour to complete. It sits alongside a risk assessment template, a talking toolkit and the Stress Indicator Tool in the Working Minds resources for employers, all free and aimed at people who accept the duty but do not know where to start.
Proportionality matters here, and HSE has been clear about its own threshold. It considers investigating work-related stress where there is evidence that several employees are affected and evidence of a wider organisational failing, rather than acting on individual cases. This is a duty about how work is designed across a team or a site. It is not a mechanism for managing one person's circumstances.
A wellbeing programme is not an assessment
Employee assistance programmes, mental health first aiders and wellbeing weeks all have value, and none of them evidences that a risk was assessed. They are support offered after the fact. An assessment identifies the hazard, evaluates who is exposed and how badly, records what has been changed to reduce it, and sets a date to check whether the change worked. An organisation can hold a full employee health and wellbeing budget and still have nothing to show against Regulation 3.
The six areas HSE expects you to assess
The structure most people assume does not exist for this hazard has been published for years. The HSE Management Standards break work-related stress into six areas of work design, and they function as the assessment framework in the same way a hierarchy of controls functions for a physical hazard.
- Demands: workload, work patterns and the working environment
- Control: how much say people have over the way they do their work
- Support: the encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation and line managers
- Relationships: conflict at work and unacceptable behaviour including bullying
- Role: whether people understand their responsibilities and whether those responsibilities conflict
- Change: how organisational change of any size is managed and communicated
Working through those six gives an assessment something a general wellbeing conversation never produces, which is a defined scope. You are no longer asking whether people feel stressed. You are asking whether demands are reasonable, whether roles are clear, whether change was communicated, and whether the relationships standard is being met on a particular shift or in a particular department. Those questions have answers, and the answers point at controls.
What this looks like next to a COSHH file
The objection worth taking seriously is that stress feels unmeasurable compared with a substance. A substance has an exposure limit. Stress has a mood.
That objection dissolves once you notice the method does not change. Identify the hazard. Establish who is exposed and how. Record what is already in place. Decide what else is needed, assign it to somebody, set a review date. Only the hazard type differs, along with the shape of the controls, which are organisational rather than engineered.
And if the argument is that stress cannot be measured, how does your organisation currently measure the adequacy of a manual handling control?
Sit back a little and picture this. You are in a return-to-work meeting, the third long absence from a team of nine in eight months. Each one handled properly, each one handled separately. Then somebody mentions the restructure that merged two functions last autumn, and you realise all three came out of the same reorganised team, doing work scoped for a headcount that no longer exists. Nobody hid anything. Nobody assessed it either, because no part of the process required anyone to.
With an assessment on file, that pattern surfaces at the review. Without one, you have three separate HR cases and no record that anyone identified the cause.
What to record so it stands up later
Write down the group affected rather than the individual, since this is an assessment of work design and not of people. Record the evidence you used, whether that came from a survey, sickness absence data, exit interviews or team consultation. Note the controls already operating before you add new ones. Name an owner for every action and give it a date. Set a review date and treat it exactly as you would a COSHH review date, because the value of the document sits in being able to show what you knew, what you changed, and when you last checked.
A stress risk assessment written in 2023 is not a control
Here is where most organisations that do get started come unstuck.
A stress risk assessment ages faster than almost anything else on the register. The hazard is built out of workload, headcount, reporting lines and change, and every one of those moves. A restructure, a resignation left unfilled, a new shift pattern, a contract won that nobody resourced properly. Any of them can invalidate an assessment that was accurate when it was written, and none of them triggers a review unless something in your system says so.
An out-of-date stress risk assessment carries the same exposure as an out-of-date COSHH file. It looks like compliance from a distance and evidences nothing under scrutiny.
There is a fair question sitting underneath all of this, which is why a company known for chemical compliance is writing about stress at all.
Regulation 3 does not sort hazards into categories. It asks for a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks people face at work, and the person who signs off the COSHH file is usually the person who owns the register that file sits in. Sevron built its software on the chemical and facilities side of that duty, working to the standards covered by our ISO and industry accreditations. The psychological side runs on the same law, lands on the same register and needs the same review cycle. A safer workplace means safer handling and safer buildings. It also means work that does not make people ill.
Where this has to live once it is written
Keeping assessments current is the part Safety365 was built for. Our risk management module holds the register, tracks controls against named owners, and schedules reviews so they happen before a date passes rather than after somebody notices. Where the first evidence of an organisational problem shows up in workplace incident and near-miss records, the same platform holds those too. It is the practical end of the Accelerated Compliance approach, taking a team from trained and capable through to genuinely audit-ready. Where an assessment turns up a gap under the support standard, our training partner The Knights of Safety Academy runs a free course on common mental health issues in the workplace. Training earns its place once the assessment has shown you which gap it fills.
A stress risk assessment shaped around the six Management Standards is a question we are actively working through. What the prompts should ask. How the evidence gets gathered without turning it into a survey nobody answers honestly. What a useful control record looks like when the controls are organisational rather than engineered. This is a concept being explored rather than anything we are announcing, and the people best placed to shape it are the ones who would have to live with the result.
The duty has been there since 1999. The difference now is that the numbers have grown too large for anyone to keep treating it as somebody else's file.
Frequently asked questions
What is workplace wellbeing, and how does it differ from work-related stress?
Health and wellbeing at work is a broad term covering the physical, mental and social health of people on the job, and most of what sits under it falls outside health and safety law. Work-related stress is narrower and specific. It describes a hazard arising from how work is designed and managed, and it carries a statutory duty to assess and control it.
Why is wellbeing in the workplace important?
Because it is now the largest single component of work-related ill health in Great Britain, with stress, depression and anxiety accounting for 62% of all working days lost. Health and wellbeing in the workplace also carries legal weight that general wellbeing initiatives do not, since the psychological health of employees falls within the employer's duty under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.
Is a stress risk assessment a legal requirement?
Yes, in effect. Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks employees face, and HSE treats work-related stress as one of those risks. Employers with five or more employees must also record the significant findings.
Does an employee assistance programme count as a control measure?
It can form part of the support you record, and it will not satisfy the duty on its own. An EAP helps a person already affected, whereas an assessment is expected to address the conditions producing the risk. Recording an EAP without any change to workload, role clarity or management support leaves the hazard exactly where it was.
How often should a stress risk assessment be reviewed?
At least annually as a baseline, and sooner whenever something changes the work itself. Restructures, headcount changes, new shift patterns and significant workload shifts should all trigger a review, as should any pattern in sickness absence or incident records suggesting the current controls are not holding.
Work-related stress became a risk register question the moment it became the majority of your ill health figures. If you want to talk through how that sits alongside the assessments you already maintain, or you have a view on what a stress risk assessment ought to ask, speak to our team.
Safety & Compliance Experts
The Sevron team brings decades of combined experience in health and safety compliance, risk assessment, and workplace safety solutions.
Reviewed by
Dale Allen
CEO & Founder
