Source: Worksafe New Zealand
WorkSafe’s Annual report has been published, which highlights key achievements for 2024/25.
It tracks our progress delivering on our strategic objectives to influence businesses and workers to meet their health and safety duties.
It sets out our actions over the year to reduce acute, chronic and catastrophic harm through our engaging, enforcement, and permitting activities.
“We focus on where WorkSafe’s input will make the biggest difference for New Zealand businesses and workers,” says WorkSafe Chief Executive, Sharon Thompson. “Alongside others in the system, WorkSafe’s activities are contributing to reducing the risks of harm, to keep people across New Zealand healthy and safe at work.
“WorkSafe has made purposeful progress over the year in our role influencing businesses and workers to meet their health and safety responsibilities.”
We also introduced several new performance measures to measure the success of our new strategy.
In March, we implemented a new organisational structure to support our new strategy and increase frontline capability, and throughout the year have boosted inspector numbers and training.
We also developed priority sector plans to deliver on the strategy. These plans set out how we target our engagement and enforcement activity, focusing on sectors where there is a higher risk of harm: agriculture, construction, forestry, and manufacturing.
Over the past 12 months we have triaged over 10,000 notifications and completed over 13,000 workplace assessments across high-risk sectors and high-risk work activities, to help businesses understand their critical risks.
We improved our permit processes and issued over 1,000 licences and certificates of competence, supporting safer high-risk work.
We started a work programme to bring our guidance up to date and make it more useful for businesses. Guidance was prioritised in the high-risk sectors of construction, forestry, agriculture and manufacturing, and we also produced new guidance for quarrying and mining, pesticides, and asbestos surveyors.
A survey of businesses visited by our inspectors found that 73% identified work health and safety improvements due to their interactions with WorkSafe, and 68% reported better understanding of health and safety requirements. 95% of people made a change after interacting with WorkSafe.
Looking ahead, we have developed our Statement of Intent 2025–29 which details a shift to clearer expectations, practical guidance, and proportionate regulation. This will be published on our website in December.
