Cost of workplace fatalities tops $1b as report links that with poor productivity

Monday, 8 September 2025

Injuries cost $1.3b in ACC costs and lost income, not including the cost of work-related illnesses and some other long-term costs.

An organisation representing many of New Zealand’s largest businesses is sounding an alarm over the country’s health and safety record and believes it has linked deaths with poor productivity for the first time.

The Business Leaders’ Health and Safety Forum was launched by former Prime Minister John Key in 2010 and its members employ about a quarter of the country’s 2.8 million workers.

A report it published today estimates the cost of workplace deaths again topped $1 billion last year, based on the price the Treasury puts on avoiding fatalities, after hovering around that level for the past several years.

Injuries cost another $1.3b in ACC costs and lost income, not including the cost of work-related illnesses and some other long-term costs.

Economist Shamubeel Eaqub said that while workplace injuries were decreasing, time off work per injury had risen sharply.

“Our workplace death rate is where Australia was 16 years ago, and where the United Kingdom was 40 years ago.”

The Business Leaders’ forum said it was able to link avoiding workplace deaths with higher productivity for the first time.

Of the 25 countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development with higher productivity than New Zealand, 80% had a lower workplace fatality rate, the forum found.

Brooke van Velden announces she's consulting on scaffolding reform that she'll announce later this year

The Government this year began consulting on a raft of reforms to health and safety laws and enforcement.

While some of the changes proposed by Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden have been welcomed by organisations that promote health and safety, the broad thrust has been towards a more permissive regime.

Two of the more controversial expected measures include not requiring the use of scaffolding and edge protection in some situations where they are now mandatory, and exempting small businesses from some rules.

Chris Alderson, chief executive of Construction Health and Safety NZ, said in July that one area where New Zealand was leading the UK and Australia was in preventing deaths and injuries from falls from heights.

That was since it started getting tougher on rules and enforcement in 2012.

He estimated the existing stricter rules could have saved between 40 and 70 lives over the past five years.

Business Forum chief executive Francois Barton said there were different views within its membership on how health and safety concerns should be addressed, and “compliance for compliance’s sake” was to no-one’s advantage.

But the forum’s view was that New Zealand had not yet earned the right to say “less” was better, he made clear.

“The idea that all New Zealand businesses are shivering in fear of the regulator isn't the experience I have.

“The very strong feedback we get is that, for those that make the investment in doing things right, there's nothing more disheartening than watching a competitor who’s quoted a lower price and not included those things getting away with it.

“We can and must lift the trajectory New Zealand is on, reversing some of the billions in dollars lost to our economy, and the tragic outcomes many New Zealand workers and their whānau face,” he said.