The Construction Leadership Council (CLC) has published a Mental Health Joint Code of Practice for the UK construction sector, with insurance broker Marsh among the partners that helped develop it.
The code, published on June 15, was led by the Department for Business and Trade, Heathrow, The Crown Estate, BAM UK and Ireland, Mates in Mind and the University of Warwick. Marsh, law firm BCLP and the New Hospital Programme served as supporting partners. It will be piloted on two live Crown Estate developments in central London alongside Kier Construction.
The impetus behind the code is considerable. According to the ONS, the suicide rate among male construction workers is approximately 34 per 100,000, against an overall UK rate of around 10 per 100,000. Suicide now kills more people in construction than falls from height, with ONS data recording 355 deaths by suicide among skilled construction and building trades workers in 2024 alone.
The financial cost is equally significant. Research by QBE found that poor mental health costs the UK construction industry at least £1.2 billion per year, with 5.1 million working days lost annually. Around 682,000 workers reported suffering a workplace injury as a direct result of poor mental health, and three-quarters of those who continued working while mentally unwell said doing so increased their risk of injury.
The CLC's consultation, which drew more than 3,000 responses alongside regional focus groups, identified five primary psychosocial hazards: working patterns including long hours and excessive travel; people factors such as dignity and respect at work; operational pressures; barriers to seeking help, including stigma; and financial insecurity from late payment and contract uncertainty.
The code is designed as a prevention tool rather than a crisis response.
The CLC acknowledged that while support work already exists across the sector, efforts have historically focused on intervention once workers are already struggling. The new framework aims to help clients, employers and supply chain firms address those hazards upstream, at the point where work is commissioned, designed, procured and planned.
Gillian Merron (pictured, left), minister for mental health, said: "It is really encouraging to see the construction industry taking this crucial step to ensure the wellbeing of its workforce, and I hope it sets a strong example for other sectors to follow."
Marsh's involvement as a development partner reflects a growing recognition across the insurance market that mental health is a material risk management issue, not solely a welfare concern. The connection between mental ill health and physical injury in construction creates compounding exposure across multiple lines at once.
The employers' liability implications are direct. HSE figures showed that during 2023/24, approximately 14,000 construction workers suffered from work-related stress, depression and anxiety, accounting for 18% of all ill health in the sector. The regulator has indicated it anticipates a move towards enforcement action against businesses not adequately addressing psychosocial risk. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, a failure to manage foreseeable mental health hazards can give rise to negligence claims where a worker suffers a recognised psychiatric injury.
Claims specialists at Clyde and Co have noted that psychiatric injury is increasingly being added to claims that would not historically have included a mental health component. Across the wider UK economy in 2024, 776,000 workers suffered from work-related stress, depression or anxiety, and the number of claims involving severe workplace stress has doubled. There is also a growing aggregation risk, where clusters of similar claims may be treated as a single large claim, increasing the financial exposure for insurers.
Personal accident and group income protection lines carry exposure too. More than a quarter of construction workers took time off in the preceding 12 months due to poor mental health, with nearly half absent for at least a week. Mental illness was the second most common cause of new group income protection claims across all UK industries in 2025, accounting for 20% of new claims, according to GRiD data published this month.
Kelly Looney (pictured, right), CEO of UK Construction at Marsh Risk, said the firm was proud of its sector-wide involvement in shaping the code, adding that the wellbeing of everyone in the construction community matters deeply given that Marsh works alongside clients on projects every day.
The HSE now expects organisations to manage psychosocial hazards with the same rigour as physical ones, with the ISO 45003 standard providing an internationally agreed framework for doing so. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has separately identified mental ill health as the leading cause of long-term absence across the UK.
For insurers and brokers underwriting construction risks, the CLC's code creates a documented, government-endorsed baseline against which future employer conduct may be assessed. Firms that adopt it build an auditable risk management record; those that do not may find it harder to defend a claim, or their premium, when things go wrong.
