The hourly rate goes up every year
HSE charges businesses for the time inspectors spend investigating non-compliance. The hourly rate has risen every year, and it's not slowing down.
£166
2023
£174
2024
£183
2025
£188
2026
Inspections are intensifying
Enforcement activity is not flat. It's climbing. Inspections rose 47% to over 13,200 in 2024/25. Prosecutions hit 246 with a 96% conviction rate and over £33M in fines. Construction remains the most heavily scrutinised sector.
“Creating RAMS” is a named duty
This is the part most people miss. HSE guidance explicitly names “creating RAMS” as a fundamental safety-management duty. It's not a nice-to-have or a best-practice suggestion. The absence of RAMS is one of the specific triggers that leads to an FFI charge. If an inspector asks to see your risk assessment and method statement and you don't have one, the clock starts running at £188/hour.
The actual math
Even a short investigation, 2-3 hours of inspector time, costs more than a year of RAMScribe. The average charge is £875. A thorough investigation runs into thousands. And that's before any prosecution fines, which averaged well into five figures across the 246 cases in 2024/25.
The cheapest RAMS is the one you generate before the inspector shows up.
Get started
Generate a RAMS before you need one.
Describe the job and get the risk assessment and method statement back, built on the HSE five steps and CDM 2015.
First document free. Then £15 each, or three for £35. No subscription.
Sources
- HSE Fee for Intervention, 2024/25 annual data (hse.gov.uk/ffi)
- HSE FFI hourly rate table, 2023–2026 (hse.gov.uk/fee-for-intervention.htm)
- HSE prosecution data, latest published year (hse.gov.uk/enforce/enforcedata)
- HSE inspection statistics, construction sector, 2024/25 (hse.gov.uk/statistics)