UK Construction and Law
New non-executive director confirmed for the Health and Safety Executive board
By Staff Writer | 15 August 2026
Louise Hosking succeeds Professor Gina Radford, who leaves in September 2026. The appointment is made by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and brings an environmental health background onto the board of the regulator that brings most construction safety prosecutions.
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has confirmed the appointment of Louise Hosking as a non-executive director of the Health and Safety Executive. She replaces Professor Gina Radford, who leaves the board in September 2026.
Board appointments at a regulator rarely make the trade press, and they should. The non-executive members are the people who approve the regulator's strategy, its priorities and the way it allocates inspection and enforcement effort. A contractor never meets them. A contractor meets the consequences of what they decided two years earlier.
Louise will be a great addition to our team of effective and committed non-executive directors who are focused on enabling the delivery of HSE's vitally important mission of protecting people and places.
Sarah Newton, Chair of the Board, Health and Safety Executive
What she brings to the table
The regulator describes Louise Hosking as a board level leader with more than 30 years across health and safety, environmental health, governance and regulatory assurance. She is a former local authority environmental health officer. She has held senior executive and non-executive positions including Executive Director of Environmental Health at the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, and she has served as President and Chair of Council at the professional body for occupational safety and health.
The local authority element is the part worth noting for anyone working on refurbishment, fit out and small works in occupied buildings. An environmental health officer's working life is spent inside other people's premises, applying regulation to businesses that have no in house safety function and no professional adviser on call. That is a description of a large part of the construction supply chain, and it is not the perspective a board recruits when it looks for major hazard experience.
The board as it stands today
The regulator's own published list of board members names eleven non-executives including the Chair, Sarah Newton, alongside an Executive Committee led by the Chief Executive, Sarah Albon. Professor Radford is still listed, consistent with a departure in September.
Recruitment of non-executive directors is a rolling exercise as members reach the end of their terms. It is run by the public appointments team at the Department for Work and Pensions, the regulator's sponsor department, with the board chair involved. That is worth knowing because it means further changes to the board's composition should be expected rather than treated as news each time one lands.
The context the appointment lands in
The appointment was confirmed on 11 August. The following day the regulator published a prosecution in which a council was fined £6,000 after a worker fell from a stepladder stored outside in poor condition and suffered broken ribs and a fractured collarbone, and it restated in the same release that its latest statistics show falls from height remain the leading cause of workplace death and injury.
Falls from height are still the leading cause of workplace death and injury on the regulator's own figures. Every board that has sat at this organisation for the last decade has been told the same thing.
That is the standing problem the incoming board member joins. It is not a new one, it is not a complicated one, and it is the reason a governance notice of this kind is worth two minutes of a site director's attention.