What Are the Statistics on Workplace Violence?

There were an estimated 689,000 incidents of violence at work in England and Wales in 2024/25 - 370,000 assaults and 319,000 threats - according to the Health and Safety Executive's most recent figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). Around 329,000 adults experienced at least one incident. Of the assaults, 38% resulted in physical injury; the remaining 62% did not.

Retail is the sharpest-rising sector. The British Retail Consortium's 2025 Annual Crime Survey recorded over 2,000 incidents of violence and abuse against retail staff every day in 2023/24 - more than 730,000 incidents across the year, the highest rate the survey has ever recorded, and a 340% increase since 2020. Around 70 of those daily incidents involved a weapon, more than double the year before. The total cost of retail crime reached £4.2 billion over the same period.

Public-facing and caring roles carry disproportionate risk. The UK-wide Skills and Employment Survey found that roughly one in seven employees experienced some form of workplace abuse in the past year, but this is heavily concentrated in specific roles: around three in ten workers in caring and service occupations reported abuse annually, rising to nearly four in ten nurses specifically.

The real figure is almost certainly higher than any of these numbers suggest. Workplace violence is consistently under-reported - partly because physical and verbal abuse gets normalised as "part of the job" in frontline roles, and partly because staff don't always believe reporting will lead to a meaningful response. This gap between what's recorded and what actually happens is itself one of the reasons proactive training and clear reporting processes matter, rather than waiting for statistics to justify the investment after the fact.

These figures span every sector Stand2 works with - from retail to healthcare to transport and beyond. Our full range of training is built around exactly this reality: that staff in public-facing roles face a measurably higher risk of violence and aggression, and that risk varies enough by sector and role that training needs to be matched to it, not applied as a single generic course.