Struck by a Moving Vehicle: The Site Risk That Hasn't Moved — and How AI Human Form Recognition Closes It

Construction's fatality figures improved sharply last year. The way people are still being killed did not change at all. Understanding that distinction is the difference between a safety program that celebrates a number and one that removes a hazard.

What the 2025/26 figures actually say

The Health and Safety Executive published its provisional fatal injury statistics for 2025/26 on 1 July 2026. 126 workers were killed in work-related incidents in Great Britain — provisionally the lowest single-year figure ever recorded outside the pandemic-affected years, against 217 twenty years earlier and 495 in 1981.

Construction recorded 25 worker deaths, down from 35 the previous year, with agriculture, forestry and fishing on 22. Falls from height remained the most common single cause at 31 deaths, around a quarter of the total. Being struck by a moving vehicle accounted for 24.

• 126 worker fatalities in Great Britain, 2025/26 (provisional) — plus 104 members of the public killed as a result of work-related incidents, up from 96.
• Construction: 25 deaths, the highest of any sector by volume.
• All-industry fatal injury rate: 0.37 per 100,000 workers. Agriculture, forestry and fishing: 8.09. Waste and recycling: 5.47.
• Workers aged 60 and over accounted for around a third of all fatalities (40 deaths) despite making up 12% of the workforce.

A falling total is not a falling risk

Year-on-year fatality counts in a sector the size of construction move for many reasons, and HSE itself cautions against reading a single year in isolation — the five-year average for construction sits above the 2025/26 figure. What has not moved is the mechanism. Taking the annual average across recent years, falls from height, being struck by a moving object and being struck by a moving vehicle together account for around 60% of all fatal injuries to workers. Two of those three are the interaction between a person on foot and something heavy that is moving.

That interaction is the design problem. It does not improve on its own.

Why mirrors, banksmen and hi-vis run out of road

The control hierarchy is not in dispute. HSE guidance, regulation 17 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 and industry codes such as PAS 13 all put physical segregation of people and vehicles first — separate routes, separate entry points, barriers where walkways run close to vehicle routes, and routes that follow the desire lines people will actually walk.

The difficulty is that segregation is designed once and lived every day. On a live site, the plan degrades. Deliveries arrive in the wrong place, the excavation moves, a temporary route is created for a fortnight and stays for five months, and a groundworker steps across a line because the alternative adds four minutes to every trip. Segregation on paper and segregation at 3pm on a wet Thursday are different things.

The secondary controls carry a similar weakness. Mirrors and reversing cameras require someone to be looking at the correct one at the correct second. Audible reversing alarms are so ubiquitous on a busy site that they stop functioning as a warning. And a banksman is himself a pedestrian standing in the danger zone, relying on the operator seeing him.

None of this makes those controls wrong. It makes them insufficient on their own.

The cost of getting it wrong

Enforcement in this area has been consistent and expensive. Three prosecutions concluded in 2024 followed fatalities where segregation controls were absent or had been allowed to degrade: CF Booth was fined £1.2 million, Samworth Brothers (Ginsters) £1.28 million, and Ward Recycling £1.75 million on a corporate manslaughter conviction.

More recently, at Southampton Magistrates' Court on 16 April 2026, R W Waste Limited pleaded guilty to breaching sections 2(1) and 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. A worker sorting waste had been run over by a reversing 15-tonne excavator in November 2023. He lost both lower legs and has been unable to return to work. HSE found the company had failed to implement adequate measures to separate pedestrians from moving vehicles.

Fines under the sentencing guideline scale with turnover, but they are rarely the largest consequence. Contract suspension, removal from approved supplier lists, PQQ damage and insurance repricing follow — and they persist long after the fine is paid.

What AI human form recognition adds

Human form recognition is a different category of control from a camera or a proximity sensor. Rather than presenting another view for the operator to monitor, or detecting that some object is nearby, Zone AI human form recognition uses AI trained specifically to identify human forms — moving or stationary — within defined zones around the machine, and then acts on that detection automatically.

A well-specified system does four things at once:

• Detects people, not obstacles. Stationary detection matters as much as movement: the highest-risk person is often the one crouched behind the machine who has not moved for two minutes.
• Escalates in stages. An audible warning at five meters, escalating to a spoken alarm at two meters, matches the response to the actual level of risk instead of alarming constantly and being tuned out.
• Tells the operator where. An in-cab zone display marks out the detection zones and shows the person's position and proximity at a glance, rather than requiring interpretation of four camera views.
• Tells the person on the ground. Pedestrian LED signaling — thumbs-up and no-entry displays, lighting and controls — closes the loop that every other system leaves open, by telling the worker whether they have actually been seen.

That last point is the one operators consistently underrate. Every conventional control informs the operator. Only signaling informs the person in danger.

Why the detection data matters as much as the detection

Each detection event can be pushed to the cloud for review and reporting. Aggregated across a plant fleet, that produces something a site walk cannot: a near-miss map. Which machine generates the most detections, in which zone, at which time of day, at which phase of the works.

That is how a device stops being a warning buzzer and starts informing the site layout. If the same excavator generates forty rear-zone detections a week between 07:00 and 07:30, the problem is the pedestrian route at shift start, not the operator. Fix that and the events disappear. It also gives you evidence — for CDM records, client audits and pre-qualification — that you identified a pattern and acted on it.

Client mandates are moving faster than regulation

There is no general legal requirement to fit human form recognition to plant. There is, increasingly, a commercial one. Major contractors — led by Balfour Beatty — now require HFR on plant as a condition of working on site, and specify the criteria the system must meet.

For principal contractors, that is a duty-of-care decision. For plant hire fleets, it is a market access decision: machinery without compliant HFR becomes unspecifiable on an increasing share of major projects, regardless of its condition or price. Fleets carrying assets on long cycles need to make that call before the tender, not during it.

Specifying HFR across a mixed plant fleet

Plant fleets are rarely uniform, and a single configuration will not fit an eight-tonne excavator and a fork-lift truck working a racked warehouse. Practical plant safety specification tends to break down as follows.

• Compact and mid-range plant — 1–4 camera AI HFR solutions on the highest-risk aspects, typically rear and offside.
• Large excavators and 360° machines — three to four cameras for full coverage around the slew, often alongside multi-camera MDVR coverage for recorded evidence.
• Fork-lift trucks and materials handling — AI HFR for fork-lift trucks, sized for tight cab spaces, with pedestrian detection tuned to racking and loading zones and thumbs-up / no-entry signaling for ground staff.
• Yard and boundary control — zonal lighting, boundary LED looms and two-way switch panels where the machine works a fixed footprint.
• Installation — pre-wired plug-and-play looms cut fitting time, simplify diagnostics and keep machines earning. On a hire fleet, install time is revenue, which is why we handle nationwide installation ourselves.

Specify once across the fleet and the reporting stays comparable between machines. Specify machine by machine and you will end up with data you cannot aggregate. The same logic applies wherever plant and people share ground — construction and plant fleets and waste and recycling operations alike.

Sources: HSE — Work-related fatal injuries in Great Britain, 2025/26 (provisional), published 1 July 2026; HSE Media Centre — Latest annual work-related fatalities published (1 July 2026); HSE — Workplace transport safety guidance; Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, regulation 17; BSI PAS 13 — Code of practice for safety barriers used in traffic management within workplace environments; HSE prosecutions: CF Booth, Samworth Brothers (Ginsters), Ward Recycling (2024); R W Waste Limited, Southampton Magistrates' Court, 16 April 2026; New Civil Engineer / British Safety Council coverage of HSE 2025/26 statistics.