A new campaign is calling on the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) to abandon its refusal to address Britain’s work-related suicide crisis.

‘Death wish’, a new report in the union-backed Hazards magazine, “challenges the Health and Safety Executive’s flat refusal to investigate, record or prevent workplace suicides or to take action against the bad bosses pushing us to the brink.”

The campaign urges people concerned about the deteriorating working conditions fuelling work-related desperation and mental health problems to send an online postcard to the new HSE chief executive, Sarah Albon.

The e-postcard notes the new HSE leader is now “in a position to rectify a grievous HSE enforcement and justice blindspot. Suicides are one of the biggest single contributors to the annual work-related fatalities toll. However, they are absent from HSE’s statistics and from its inspection and prevention regimes.”

It concludes: “If HSE wants to be a relevant regulator, it can no longer ignore the single most deadly desperate consequence, of terror, trauma and tyranny at work. We urge you to remove immediately the current HSE suicide reporting and inspection exemptions.” Last month, Unite called for “solutions that tackle the cause, not just the symptoms, of the mental health epidemic now rife in construction,” warning that work-related suicides were one tragic outcome of this epidemic.

The Communications union CWU this year called for work-related suicide to “be recognised in legislation” and to “place the burden of proof on the employer to demonstrate that the suicide was not work-related” .