Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many (a) Stage 1 phone calls, (b) Stage 2 follow-up calls, (c) Stage 3 site visits and (d) covid support officer site visits have been undertaken by HSE in each month since March 2020 in relation to (i) all employee safety concerns arising from covid-19 and (ii) concerns of inadequate ventilation causing an increased risk of covid-19 transmission.

The stage 1, 2 & 3 approach you refer to relates specifically to proactive spot check calls and visits to business premises and not to those triggered by workplace concerns.

So far, HSE has proactively carried out a total of 92,566 spot checks, since March 2020, which includes both those passing through the staged process and those carried out separately from this process i.e. as a result of visits carried out by our inspectors. 83,718 went through the staged-process, of which 17,895 were referred to stage 2 and 3,311 of which were then referred to stage 3 for a visit.

With regard specifically to employee safety concerns arising from Covid-19, HSE categorises workplace COVID concerns into green, amber or red. Green concerns are those that can easily be resolved or where HSE is not the enforcing body. Amber and red COVID concerns have, to date, been dealt with by HSE regulatory operational staff.

Of these, HSE’s systems do not record the level of detail which would be required to establish how many concerns related to inadequate ventilation.

The table below provides by month the number of completed COVID concerns dealt with, the number of these that were investigated and completed by operational staff and the number that required a site visit. These numbers are additional to those listed in paragraph 2.

NB the data was extracted from HSE’s live operational database on 27^th January 2021. The number for completed COVID concerns is reported on a weekly basis and this is as of 24^th January 2021.