Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent steps she has taken to improve the enforcement of workplace health and safety legislation.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) takes enforcement action which is in line with their Enforcement Policy Statement and the Enforcement Management Model. There have been no recent changes in their approach to how they take enforcement action.

HSE continues to use a range of enforcement tools to ensure compliance with health and safety legislation from advice through to enforcement notices and prosecution.

HSE adopts different intervention techniques when regulating workplace health and safety legislation to ensure that they target those workplaces most likely to give rise to the greatest risk.

To reduce transmission of COVID-19 arising in workplaces during the pandemic, HSE has received additional Government funding. They used this to set up a COVID-19 spot check programme with a blended approach of telephone interviews and site visits to check employers had taken the right action at workplaces to protect workers. This has resulted in more than 270,000 spot checks of HSE and Local Authority enforced workplaces being carried out since the start of the pandemic.