The 72% number, and the one underneath it that matters more
UNISON’s Housing Worker Survey 2024-25 landed in October 2025, and the headline figure does the heavy lifting in most of the coverage: 72% of housing workers experienced violence at work in the past year. That’s a striking enough number on its own.
Thing is, the figure that should actually keep a housing employer awake at night sits one layer down. Of the workers who experienced violence, 40% said they weren’t properly supported afterwards. Half said their employer took no action at all to stop it happening again.
Read those two together and it stops being a violence statistic. It becomes a description of a duty-of-care gap that already exists in UK law, playing out in a sector that hasn’t caught up to how bad it’s got. The incident rate is the symptom. The response, or the lack of it, is where the legal exposure actually lives.
What follows takes that apart properly: what UNISON found, what the law already requires of housing employers, where the two diverge, and what a defensible response actually looks like in practice.
What UNISON’s 2024-25 survey actually found
The survey pulled in over 1,100 responses from housing workers across the UK, which makes it the largest, most current picture of what this job actually involves right now. A few of the headline numbers:
- 72% experienced violence at work in the past year.
- 77% described the work as stressful, and four in five said pressures have worsened over recent years.
- A quarter had taken time off work due to stress.
- 57% were asked to take on duties outside their remit.
- Nearly a third manage patches of more than 1,000 homes, and over three-quarters report supporting a growing number of high-need tenants.
The number that doesn’t always make the summary write-ups is the scope creep. Fifty-seven percent taking on duties outside their remit isn’t a footnote; it changes the risk profile of the role. UNISON’s own framing is pretty direct about it. Housing staff increasingly feel like untrained social or support workers, firefighting one crisis after another. That’s a workforce carrying more complexity than it was built for, and the safety implications flow directly from it.
The gap that matters most: what happens after an incident
The violence figure gets the attention. Fair enough. But for an employer reading this survey, the response to that violence is the part that should really worry you.
Of the workers who experienced violence, 40% said they weren’t adequately supported afterwards. Half said their employer took no steps to prevent it happening again. Read together, that’s UNISON describing a workforce where a violent incident is often neither properly followed up nor used to protect the next person who walks into that same situation.
That gap is where legal exposure actually sits. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require employers to assess and manage risks to their staff, including lone workers. The duty is to do something about the risk, not simply note that an incident happened and move on.
An employer with no record, no follow-up and no pattern-tracking can’t demonstrate that duty is being met. They also have nothing to point to in support of the Worker Protection Act 2023’s “reasonable steps” defence if a harassment claim follows, because that defence depends on being able to show what was actually done.
It’s about to get harder. The Employment Rights Act 2025 is anticipated to raise the bar to “all reasonable steps” from October 2026. A weak record becomes an even weaker defence.
What the law requires, and where the survey says you’re exposed
It’s worth being precise about how the legal duties and the survey findings sit against each other, because this is where a housing provider’s actual exposure concentrates.
| What the law requires | What it asks of you | What UNISON found |
|---|---|---|
| Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 + MHSWR 1999 | Assess and manage lone-working risk, including violence from tenants | 72% experienced violence in the past year |
| Worker Protection Act 2023 (in force) | Take “reasonable steps” to prevent third-party harassment, and be able to show them | 50% of employers took no steps after an incident |
| Employment Rights Act 2025 (from October 2026) | “All reasonable steps” against third-party harassment | 40% of workers not adequately supported afterwards |
The pattern UNISON describes, no support and no prevention, is exactly the pattern this legal framework is designed to catch out. None of this needs a hypothetical tribunal case to take it seriously. It’s a description of what non-compliance with an existing duty looks like in practice, drawn from over a thousand workers in the sector.
Read more about how The Sentry supports lone worker safety across the sector on our social housing industry page.
Why the risk is rising: caseloads, complexity and the recruitment crisis
UNISON’s survey points to a workforce under growing strain, not a static risk. Over half of housing employers are struggling to fill vacant roles, and many are turning to agency staff to cover the gap.
That matters for lone working specifically. Agency and newly recruited staff typically have less time to build the local knowledge and the tenant relationships that experienced officers rely on to informally manage risk on a visit. The informal safety net that used to do a lot of the heavy lifting in this sector is quietly disappearing at the same time as the workload is going up.
Then there’s the training gap. Forty-five percent of the existing workforce say they lack the training their job actually needs, and almost one in five have gone more than three years without any health and safety training at all.
Put the pieces together and the direction of travel is clear: rising caseloads, rising complexity, a stretched and increasingly inexperienced frontline. And the workforce knows it. Per UNISON’s own findings, nearly two-thirds of current staff are already job-hunting, with more than half considering leaving the sector altogether. Without a change in how incidents are recorded and followed up, this is a cycle that reinforces itself. Experienced officers leave, the people replacing them carry less local knowledge, the risk on each visit goes up, and the absence of a proper incident record means nobody can see it happening.
What this means for your duty of care
Here’s the financial dimension, and it’s not abstract.
The Worker Protection Act 2023’s proactive duty to prevent third-party harassment, tightening further under the Employment Rights Act 2025, carries a real cost: a 25% tribunal compensation uplift where an employer failed to take reasonable steps. That uplift sits on top of average harassment and discrimination awards that currently sit at £53,403, uncapped, with the highest recent award reaching £995,000.
To be clear about what this is and isn’t: none of this means any individual housing provider is currently facing a claim. What it means is that UNISON’s own data shows the exact behaviour pattern, no support and no prevention, that this legal framework is specifically designed to catch out. A provider sitting on half of its incidents going unrecorded and unfollowed-up is sitting on the facts a tribunal would eventually ask for.
A short, honest self-check for any housing employer reading this:
- Can you list the violent incidents your team reported in the last 12 months, with dates and locations?
- For each one, can you show what follow-up happened and what was changed to prevent a repeat?
- Can you spot a repeat address, or a repeat individual, across your team’s incidents rather than only within one officer’s memory?
If the honest answer to any of those is “not really”, that’s the gap UNISON is describing. It’s also the gap the law is about to ask you to prove you’ve closed.
How The Sentry helps
The specific gap UNISON’s survey exposes, half of employers taking no steps after a violent incident, is fundamentally a records and follow-up problem as much as a prevention one. You can’t prove steps were taken if nobody recorded them.
The Sentry’s one-touch panic alarms, silent or loud, both recording video throughout, capture automatic evidence the moment a visit turns confrontational. That creates an objective record of what actually happened rather than relying on memory weeks later. One detail worth being precise about: the silent alarm also records audio. The loud alarm doesn’t, because a phone can’t sound a siren and record clean audio at the same time. That’s a hardware constraint, not a marketing choice, and it’s worth knowing before you specify which mode your team uses on which kind of visit.
The check-in timer, with configurable escalation, flags a missed check-in straight away. That triggers a manager alert during the visit itself, rather than the officer’s absence only being noticed once they’re overdue back at the office, or not noticed at all. On a patch of 1,000-plus homes, that timing difference is the actual safety benefit.
The in-app incident reporting tool is what closes the follow-up gap specifically. It captures written notes, typed or dictated straight into the note via the phone’s own microphone, alongside exact location, time and date, and photos, all logged from the same visit. That gives a manager an actual record to act on rather than a verbal account weeks later. It also lets the organisation spot a pattern, a repeat address or a repeat individual, across the whole team rather than only within one officer’s memory.
That’s what turns “no steps were taken” into having the evidence of the steps that were actually taken, and being able to prove it. Which is, in the end, what the duty of care actually asks for. The same obligations apply to local authority social work teams, and are set out in more detail in our guide to the Employment Rights Act 2025.
If half of your team’s incidents currently go unrecorded and unfollowed-up, it’s worth seeing what a structured incident-reporting and escalation process actually looks like. Book a free demo.
Key stats at a glance
- 72% of housing workers experienced violence at work in the past year (UNISON Housing Worker Survey 2024-25, published October 2025, n=1,100+).
- 40% of those workers weren’t adequately supported afterwards; 50% said their employer took no preventative action.
- 77% describe the work as stressful; a quarter have taken time off due to stress.
- 57% are asked to take on duties outside their remit.
- 45% lack the training their job needs; almost 1 in 5 have gone 3+ years without health and safety training.
- Over half of employers are struggling to recruit and are turning to agency staff; nearly two-thirds of current staff are already job-hunting.
FAQ
What percentage of housing workers have experienced violence at work? UNISON’s Housing Worker Survey 2024-25, based on over 1,100 responses and published in October 2025, found that 72% of respondents had experienced violence at work in the past year. It is the most current and largest UK survey of its kind.
What happens to housing workers after a violent incident at work? UNISON’s survey found that 40% of those who experienced violence said they weren’t adequately supported afterwards, and half said their employer took no steps to prevent a repeat incident. The response gap, not just the incident rate, is where employer duty-of-care exposure sits.
Why is violence against housing staff increasing? UNISON points to rising caseload complexity. Nearly a third of respondents manage patches of over 1,000 homes, and more than three-quarters report supporting a growing number of high-need tenants, often without matching training. UNISON describes staff as increasingly taking on work more suited to trained social or support workers.
Do housing associations have a legal duty to protect lone workers from violence? Yes. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require employers to assess and manage risks to lone workers. The Worker Protection Act 2023 adds a proactive duty to take reasonable steps against third-party harassment, including from tenants, tightening to “all reasonable steps” under the Employment Rights Act 2025 from October 2026.
How can housing associations respond to the findings of the UNISON 2024-25 survey? The survey itself points to the gaps to close first: consistent post-incident support, proactive training, and a documented lone-working and incident-reporting process, rather than relying on informal experience from long-serving staff who UNISON’s data suggests are increasingly looking to leave the sector.
This article was written by Stuart Evans, co-founder of The Sentry.