The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) confirms that the provisional figure for the number of workers fatally injured in 2010/11 is 171 (which corresponds to a rate of fatal injury of 0.6 per 100,000 workers).
"Given that these statistics are based on a count of events that are rare, they are highly subject to chance variation from one year to the next. Therefore, when seeking to use the data to make inferences about changes in the inherent dangerousness of work conditions, it is necessary to look at trends over a number of years. The incorporation of the 2010/11 data into the time series reinforces an underlying downward trend.
The figure of 171 worker deaths in 2010/11 is 17% lower than the average for the past five years (205). In terms of the rate of fatal injuries, the latest figure of 0.6 per 100,000 workers is 14% lower than the five-year average rate of 0.7."
The HSE continue by stating that Eurostat have made a comparison of the fatal injury rates across EU countries. This reveals that the fatal injury rate for Great Britain is consistently one of the lowest in Europe.