Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether the Health and Safety Executive plans to reclassify covid-19 as a serious workplace risk in response to the Delta variant of covid-19.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) takes Covid-19 safety at work very seriously and is playing a critical role in the national response to the pandemic. HSE has recently carried out a review of the classification of Covid-19 within its Enforcement Management Model (EMM) and has no plans to undertake a further review at this time.

On 16 June 2021, HSE placed on its website the most recent review of HSE’s proportionality of enforcement decision making in the pandemic and how EMM supports this - https://www.hse.gov.uk/coronavirus/regulating-health-and-safety/enforcement-coronavirus.htm.

The review included consideration of the effect on the working age population of new variants, known to be circulating at the time, to determine if there is any evidence to support the new variants posing a greater risk to this age group. Fully quantifying or isolating the effect of variants on overall infection or mortality rates is complex, due to confounding factors. Infection and mortality rates have fluctuated over the course of the pandemic and continue to do so, due to a number of factors including the degree of societal restrictions, changes in people’s working and social practices, seasonal variations in terms of vulnerability to viruses and most recently the roll-out of the vaccination programme.

HSE will continue to monitor the potential impact of new variants alongside the effectiveness of the vaccination programme, workplace transmission and health outcomes.