Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if he will estimate the number of staff hours required to clear the current backlog of safety critical maintenance work in the offshore oil and gas industry.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) issued a maintenance backlog data request to all offshore production platform duty holders in February 2022, which included a request for remediation plans and timescales. This data was analysed at individual duty holder level and utilised to inform planned interventions with them. HSE will also be repeating its backlog data exercise in February 2023.

HSE’s focus is ensuring that duty holders have credible plans for addressing their safety critical and other maintenance backlogs and holding them to account for delivering the identified actions. Differences in the way duty holders define backlogs and the ongoing nature of the actions being taken to reduce the backlogs mean it is not possible to provide an accurate estimate of the required staff hours to address this.