Undercutting and regulatory neglect make construction the deadliest job in the UK Neil Hayes was a talented footballer, described by those who knew him as a sharp wit, someone who could tear up a dance floor. Last summer, Hayes became a statistic, one of dozens of UK construction workers who die on the job every year, when he was crushed by a hydraulic machine while preparing the ground for Allies and Morrison’s latest smooth‑skinned enclave for the branded gentry. Camden Goods Yard is North London’s next live‑work mecca, offering canalside living in a choice of two interior colourways: Hockney blue or Hepworth greige. Prices start at £725,000, plus service charges and the cost of one groundworker. Construction labourers have, by most metrics, the most dangerous job in the UK. Workplace deaths are five times the average of other industries. Alongside the 51 workers who died from workplace injuries last year, another 500 died by suicide and 5,000 from past asbestos exposure. At least another 40,000 suffered from musculoskeletal disorders and 14,000 from work‑related mental ill health. Most of those casualties were easily preventable. No matter how often Keir Starmer parrots that he will ‘get Britain building’, he has paid little attention to the Britain that will do the building – the millions of workers who climb to dizzying heights, inhale chemical fumes and fry in the sun in the name of economic growth. If the prime minister really wants to fix the foundations of the British economy, he might first look at the model underpinning construction’s substructure. Firms are congenitally myopic, undercutting each other to win work, accepting paper‑thin profit margins that can be wiped out by the slightest gust of wind. ‘In 2020, construction workers died of Covid at a greater rate than nurses’ Another bleak superlative: construction businesses go bust at the highest rate of any sector. The industry mitigates this in part by relying on a casualised labour force, which it can prod to work harder, faster and longer when costs are squeezed, happily dropping members if they become sick or injured. Without secure employment, the very real threat of losing future job opportunities discourages those on site from speaking up about unsafe practices. It was not that long ago that some of the country’s largest contractors ran a joint blacklist, trading the names of union members and health and safety activists. Some believe that blacklisting is still rife. Building workers face these pressures away from their families in cramped, soulless cabins, not staying anywhere long enough to build lasting social bonds. No wonder construction workers are four times more likely to die by suicide than the average person. Rather than tackle the structural causes of this crisis, industry efforts turn responsibility for worker mental health onto the workers themselves. What they really need is to get paid on time and flexibility in hours, not breakroom posters outlining signs of depression.   Covid exposed the flimsiness of the scaffolding holding up the industry. The government declined to shut down sites, leaving contractors exposed to financial penalties if they failed to build on schedules they had agreed in non‑apocalyptic times. Many chose not to offer furlough, so their workers – often older, and thus at greater risk of complications – felt they had no choice but to turn up to sites and expose themselves to a deadly virus to keep their bills paid. While white‑collar workers sat at home baking banana bread, thousands of builders cobbled together temporary hospitals and heroically rescued their employers’ bottom lines. Thousands admitted in an online poll that they came into work with Covid because of the financial pressure to keep working. In 2020, construction workers died of Covid at a greater rate than nurses. ‘For every designer who has specified scabbled concrete or engineered stone, there is a tradesperson with toxic dust building up in their lungs’ Who looked out for them? Not the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the government agency tasked with inspecting construction sites. The 50‑year‑old inspectorate was pivotal in bringing down deaths in the sector until 2010, when they started to slowly creep back up. Since that year, when the quangophobic coalition government came to power, government grants to the HSE have halved in real terms. The organisation now hires a third fewer inspectors, while prosecutions have shrunk to a quarter of what they were. When the pandemic struck, all the etiolated HSE could offer were site inspections over the phone. The agency often turns up only after the worst has happened, to establish why company directors let their workers use faulty equipment or handle heavy machinery without proper training. Many cases are dropped for lack of resources or drag on for years. Even when shifty practices are exhumed in backlogged courts – another victim of Conservative cost‑cutting – fines for the lethal neglect of health and safety rarely pass £200,000. If any of Neil Hayes’ employers at Camden Goods Yard are prosecuted, the courts would likely value his life less than the deposit on a flat there. Architects can’t escape blame either. Every lauded architectural style has left a trail of bodies: from the asbestos‑infested modernist fetish objects such as the Barbican Estate and the Nakagin Capsule Tower, to pomo’s ironic celebration of MDF, unironically carcinogenic when cut. For every designer who has specified scabbled concrete or engineered stone, there is a tradesperson with toxic dust building up in their lungs. We all need to face the skeleton who installed the closet. Lead image: on International Workers’ Memorial Day, on 28 April, UK construction workers and their families meet at the statue of the Unknown Building Worker in London’s Tower Hill and release one black balloon for every worker killed on site that year. Last year, 45 balloons were released – but many more lives are lost annually from complications rooted in long-term exposure to toxic substances at work, and to suicide. Credit: IMAGESLIVE / Alamy 2025-04-28 Kristina Rapacki Share AR April 2025Buy Now