Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many prohibition notices for each sector have been served by the Health and Safety Executive to employers for breaching covid-19 safety.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) takes Covid-19 safety at work very seriously and it is playing a critical role in the national response to the pandemic. The Government has provided additional funding of £14 million to HSE to strengthen its capacity to tackle Covid-19.

Since the start of the pandemic HSE has carried out over 110,000 Coivd-19 spot checks and responded to over 18,000 concerns. Over 700 checks a day are currently taking place. Spot checks have been targeted in those industries where workers are most likely to be vulnerable to transmission risks.

HSE’s evidence is that more than 90% of the businesses checked have the right precautions in place or are willing to make necessary changes promptly and without the need for enforcement notices. HSE will continue to take enforcement action where appropriate, but the best use of its time and resource to ensure employers take the right action promptly is often to educate, persuade or require matters to be put right immediately.

HSE has to date issued two prohibition notices for breaches of workplace COVID-secure standards, both in the oil and gas industry (part of the extractive utilities sector).

A further 212 COVID-19 related interventions have resulted in improvement notices, 1,422 in written correspondence and 6429 in verbal advice.

The tables below provide the breakdowns by industry sector. To note, sector comparisons cannot be made as the figures are not like for like in each sector due to our targeting approach.

Table 1: COVID-19 related interventions resulting in an outcome of improvement notice

Table 2: COVID-19 related interventions resulting in an outcome of written correspondence

Table 3: COVID-19 related interventions resulting in an outcome of verbal advice

Note: This data was extracted from HSE’s live operational database on 9^th February 2021 and is subject to change e.g. as there can be a delay of up to 10 working days before actions are updated on the database.