The Fee for Intervention scheme has been in place since October 2012 and allows the HSE to recover the cost of its regulatory work from duty holders found to be in material breach of health and safety law. It is not a fine, there is no court involved, and there is no maximum. It is a bill for the inspector’s time.
The rate
The FFI hourly rate is £188 per hour, applying from 1 April 2026. It is reviewed periodically and has risen steadily since the scheme began.
That rate covers the time the HSE spends identifying what is wrong and helping you put it right. In practice, that means:
- Time on site once a material breach has been identified
- Writing the notification of contravention, letter, improvement notice or prohibition notice
- Reviewing documents you subsequently provide
- Any specialist input the inspector draws on — occupational hygienists, engineering specialists, noise or ventilation experts
- Any follow-up visit to confirm the matter is resolved
- Associated administrative time
The last three points are where costs escalate. A single inspection that identifies a guarding defect and an inadequate COSHH assessment might involve two hours on site, three hours of report writing, a specialist review, and a return visit. Invoices commonly run to several thousand pounds, and complex investigations considerably more.
What triggers it: the “material breach” test
FFI is not triggered by an inspection. It is triggered by a material breach.
The HSE’s definition is a contravention of health and safety law that, in the opinion of the inspector, is serious enough that they must write to you about it. That written notification can take the form of a notification of contravention, an improvement notice, a prohibition notice, or a prosecution.
Two things follow.
Verbal advice does not trigger a fee. If an inspector points something out, explains what good looks like, and does not write to you about it, no fee arises. This is the ordinary outcome of a great many inspections.
The threshold is the inspector’s judgement. “Serious enough that they must write to you” is a judgement call made on the day, by the person standing in front of the issue. Two inspectors could reasonably differ. That subjectivity is precisely why the scheme has attracted criticism, and why the dispute process exists.
What FFI does not cover
Worth knowing, because it narrows the scope usefully:
- Local authority inspections. FFI applies to HSE-enforced premises only. If your business is enforced by your local council’s environmental health team — offices, shops, hotels, restaurants, leisure premises, pubs and clubs, nurseries, places of worship, privately owned museums — FFI does not apply. Factories, farms, construction sites, mines, schools and colleges, hospitals and nursing homes, and gas, electricity and water undertakings are HSE-enforced.
- The self-employed where their work does not put others at risk.
- Work covered by other cost-recovery regimes, such as COMAH-regulated major hazard sites, offshore installations, and licensed asbestos work, each of which has its own charging arrangements and rates.
How to challenge an invoice
There is a dispute process, and it is used more often than most businesses realise.
Query stage. If you think an invoice is wrong — the breach was not material, the hours are disproportionate, or the work described did not relate to the breach — raise a query with the HSE’s FFI team in writing within 20 working days of the invoice date. The query is either handled by that team or referred to the principal inspector. Many issues are resolved at this stage, and no additional charge arises.
Formal dispute. If the query is unsuccessful, you can escalate to a formal dispute, which is decided by an independent panel. You will normally be given a period to submit further representations and evidence before the panel meets, but you cannot usually attend the meeting or call witnesses. The panel can uphold or reject the dispute.
One important warning: if your dispute is unsuccessful, the HSE will charge its hourly rate for the time spent dealing with it. A weak dispute therefore increases the bill. Challenge where you have a genuine point and the evidence to support it, not on principle.
Practical points if you are considering a challenge:
- Dispute the material breach determination, not just the hours. If the breach was not material, the fee falls away entirely.
- Keep contemporaneous notes of the visit — what was discussed, what was shown, what the inspector said. A record made on the day carries far more weight than a recollection three months later.
- Check that the hours claimed relate specifically to the material breach. Time spent on general inspection activity, or on matters where no material breach was found, is not chargeable.
- Take advice before responding. A poorly framed dispute can strengthen the HSE’s position rather than weaken it.
Note that disputing an FFI invoice has no bearing on any separate enforcement action. Improvement and prohibition notices have their own appeal route: to an employment tribunal, within 21 days beginning with the date the notice was served. The distinction between the two matters. Appealing an improvement notice automatically suspends it until the appeal is determined. Appealing a prohibition notice does not — it stays in force unless you separately apply to the tribunal to suspend it.
Putting the cost in context
FFI is the least severe financial consequence of a health and safety failure, and it is worth seeing where it sits on the scale.
In 2024/25 the HSE issued around 4,400 enforcement notices — approximately 3,200 improvement notices and 1,200 prohibition notices. A prohibition notice stops the activity concerned immediately. For a manufacturer with a single production line, the cost of an unplanned stoppage will often dwarf both the fee and any subsequent fine.
Above that sits prosecution. In 2024/25 the HSE brought 246 prosecutions, secured convictions in 96% of cases, and courts imposed fines exceeding £33 million. Fine levels are set under the Sentencing Council’s definitive guideline, which starts from the organisation’s turnover — micro (£2 million or less), small (£2 million to £10 million), medium (£10 million to £50 million), large (£50 million and over) — and then applies the court’s assessment of culpability and harm.
For a micro organisation, very high culpability and category 1 harm has a starting point of £250,000 within a range of £150,000 to £450,000. For a large organisation, high culpability and category 1 harm starts at £2.4 million.
Against that scale, an FFI invoice is a warning shot. The more useful way to read one is as a documented record that a regulator has identified a serious failing in your arrangements — which is exactly what will be produced if anything worse happens later.
Reducing the likelihood of a fee
You cannot control whether an inspector visits. You can substantially influence what they find.
Know which of your risks are the obvious ones. In manufacturing, that means machinery guarding, local exhaust ventilation, noise, manual handling, and control of substances hazardous to health. These are where inspectors look first because they are where injury and ill health actually occur.
Close out your own actions. An audit report with actions still open eighteen months later is worse than no audit report. It establishes that you knew about a risk and did not address it, which speaks directly to culpability.
Keep statutory examinations current. LOLER thorough examinations, LEV thorough examination and test at least every 14 months under COSHH Regulation 9, pressure systems written schemes of examination, gas and electrical safety. These are binary — either the certificate is in date or it is not — and they are the first thing an inspector will ask for.
Make sure your documents describe reality. A risk assessment that does not match the process it covers is not a defence. It is evidence that the assessment was never meaningfully carried out.
Have someone competent to call. The most expensive FFI invoices generally follow visits where nobody on site could answer the inspector’s questions, so the inspector had to establish the position themselves — at £188 an hour.
Soteria (UK) Ltd helps businesses across the UK and Ireland stay ahead of regulatory scrutiny rather than react to it. Our Annual Fixed Fee Health and Safety Compliance service provides a complete outsourced service with proactive support and advice available 24-7-365, delivered by OSHCR-registered Chartered Health and Safety Practitioners.
Call 01925 626283 or email info@soteriauk.co.uk.
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