Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, with reference to the Answer of 22 December 2015 to Question 19825, how many complaints were received by the Pay and Work Rights Helpline regarding employment issues in each of the last five years; and how many of those complaints were from (a) apprentices, (b) interns and (c) self-employed people in that same period.

Information on all Acas helpline calls and those that relate to Pay and Works Rights Helpline (PWRH) issues specifically are available below. Information on self-employed status is not collected by Acas.

Table 1: Enquiries made to the Acas helpline by topic and caller type, 2015/16 to 2016/17

Source: Acas

Notes

1. Figures are rounded to the nearest ten.
2. ‘All topics’ covers total calls to the Acas helpline.
3. ‘PWRH’ covers those who discussed one (or more) topics under the PWRH umbrella which includes: ‘Non-payment/deduction of wages’, ‘NMW/NLW’, ‘Non-payment of NMW/NLW’, ‘Agency Worker Regulations’, ‘Contracts/Terms including non-receipt’, ‘Entertainment/Model Agencies’, ‘Gangmasters’.
4. PWRH figures are a subset of ‘all topics’.
5. In 2015/16 and 2016/17, 95% of all calls received were captured by the Acas Data Capture System.

The answer given to the hon. Member on 22 December 2015, by the then Minister of State for Skills to Question 19825, reported Pay and Works Right Helpline (PWRH) data between 2009-10 and 2014-15. The PWRH was replaced by the Acas helpline in April 2015. Acas data is not directly comparable to data collected under the PWRH, as Acas handle a much wider range of enquiries on employment matters. It is not possible to specifically identify the number of calls received by Acas that would have been handled by the previous PWRH.