Warehousing injures more of its workers each year than road haulage or the transport sector as a whole. Most reported injuries are slips and handling; vehicles cause over a quarter of the sector's deaths. The cameras over the docks have been watching both.
A distribution centre is a workplace transport site that happens to be indoors. HSE's Warehousing and storage guidance (HSG76) and A guide to workplace transport safety (HSG136) describe the same hazards a yard has, compressed: forklifts and pedestrians in the same aisles, reversing at dock doors, loading bays where lorry drivers walk through the operation, racking that turns every aisle end into a blind corner.
Three things make it hard to manage.
Volume. A busy site runs hundreds of truck movements a shift. The interactions that matter are a tiny fraction of them, and they look exactly like the ones that do not matter until the last second.
Peaks and agency labour. Peak season brings temporary staff and agency drivers who have not learned the building. Induction tells them the rules; it does not tell them which aisle end the regulars treat as a shortcut.
The clipboard sees the day shift. Safety walks and audits happen when the safety team is in. The site runs 24 hours, and the quietest hours are the ones with the fewest people watching and the most assumptions in play.
A distribution centre is a workplace transport site that happens to be indoors.
Events are recorded with camera, time, type and clip, and the picture builds by zone and by shift. The useful output is rarely a single clip. It is that the same aisle end produces a near miss on every late shift, or that the dock route changes when the agency crew is in.
From HSE's published statistics, quoted as published:
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Non-fatal injury rate, warehousing | 2,610 per 100,000 workers (2.6%) |
| Non-fatal injury rate, all industries | 1,710 per 100,000 (1.7%) |
| Fatal injury rate, transportation and storage | 0.87 per 100,000, around 2.2× all-industry |
| Share of sector deaths from being struck by a moving vehicle | 27% (five-year) |
| Share of sector specified injuries from being struck by a moving vehicle | 6% |
| Share of sector specified injuries from slips, trips and falls | 45% |
Sources: HSE, Transportation and storage statistics in Great Britain 2025; Kind of accident statistics in Great Britain 2025. Full figures and sources on our warehouse and logistics statistics page.
The last three rows are the point. Vehicles are 6% of serious injuries and 27% of deaths. A warehouse's injury log is an honest record of its injuries and a poor guide to what will kill someone there.
RoboK works with logistics operators, transport companies and manufacturers with large distribution operations across the UK, including Welch's Transport, Muntons and Clays, alongside the ports where our work began. Our customers' safety leads tend to describe the same first effect: a handful of clips that start conversations the report form never could.
Access to the camera streams you choose to cover, typically a handful on the highest-risk zones to start, four to twelve on most sites. Footage is processed and stored in the UK and kept only as long as your retention policy requires. Faces can be blurred where you need them to be. We provide an IT overview and our data-handling documents before anything is connected.
It does not watch the whole building, and it is not a replacement for the traffic management plan. It checks whether the plan is what actually happens.
With one zone and a question. The dock door where the drivers walk through. The aisle end the late shift cuts across. The charging area. Two weeks on one camera, with a written report of what it saw, is usually enough to know whether the thing you suspected is the thing that is happening.
In most cases, yes. It connects to existing camera streams; position and image quality matter, and we assess each camera before relying on it. Where a zone has no usable camera we can supply one, including portable units.
It records what happens regardless of who is involved, and faces can be blurred. The value with a changing workforce is seeing which rules hold when the regulars are not there.
The people the site nominates, typically the safety lead and shift managers. Clips are attached to events, not browsed; access is logged. Whether footage is used in formal processes is the site's policy, not ours.
No. It records the events that do not get reported, and gives the ones that do a timestamp and a clip. Sites usually keep their reporting process and use the camera record alongside it.
Typically one to two weeks from camera access to the first events, on the cameras chosen to start. Our team handles the assessment, configuration and training.
No. It looks for safety events only; the safety view is separate from security and from any productivity system.
Pick the dock door or aisle end that worries you most. Two weeks on one camera will show you what happens there on the shifts nobody walks. Safety Mapping: a free two-week trial on one camera.