Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether her Department is compliant with the requirement in section 3.1.8 of of the Civil Service Management Code that time off with pay for safety representatives will not be set against facility time allowed under existing arrangements.

DWP recognises the importance of the Health & Safety representative role and is compliant with the requirements in section 3.1.8 of the Civil Service Management Code. Arrangements are set out in our Employee Relations Framework which has been the subject of extensive consultation with our trade unions and was most recently reviewed in 2020. We allocate official time as necessary for example in response to serious incidents and to enable training for new H&S representatives, we have also treated all Covid related safety work as official time and keep this under regular review.