Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 26 February 2021 to Questions 155053 and 155054, whether there is a threshold that defines the working population as a whole.

The answer to question 155053 emphasised the importance to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in making proportionate regulatory decisions in the pandemic when considering the impact on the working age population as a whole. The working population includes anyone in legal employment. Workers above the legal working age and below state pension age account for the overwhelming majority of those in legal employment. To inform decisions about proportionate regulation, HSE statisticians have drawn on eleven data sets to give an overview of the impact on the working population. The age-differentiated data is categorised to identify people between legal working age and state pension age.