Continuing to protect workers during the coronavirus outbreak

Like many other organisations, the GLAA is operating slightly differently in light of the coronavirus outbreak to ensure our work protecting vulnerable workers continues.

Following the Prime Minister’s announcement that people should work from home wherever possible, many GLAA functions are now operating remotely.

This includes Communications, Licensing, Strategy, HR, Learning and Development, IT and Investigation Management.

It is anticipated that the Intelligence and Finance teams will follow suit shortly once various technical solutions have been implemented.

These measures will be in place initially for the next two weeks up to and including Friday 3 April 2020. We will, however, continue to review related risks daily.

We have also updated the advice on our website to ask people to email us with their queries rather than phone us, which will allow us to use online translation tools and forward queries to the right person to respond.

In terms of licensing application inspections, we will endeavour to do the majority of this by electronic correspondence and by telephone interview, reducing the need for a physical inspection.

With regards to compliance inspections, we will endeavour to collate as much information as we can electronically, and some interviews will take place by phone. this will mean that where visits are essential they can be as short as possible.

Our investigating officers continue to operate on the front line and each case is being risk-assessed where investigative activity may bring an officer into contact with other people. Our investigators are committed to continuing their important work of identifying and protecting victims of labour exploitation and modern slavery.

In light of the new advice around social distancing, we’ve advised colleagues not to attend face-to-face meetings unless absolutely necessary and should participate over the phone instead. We’ve also asked our people to review their plans for the weeks ahead and cancel any non-essential travel.

We will continue to follow the national advice coming from Government about measures to adopt going forward.

Click on this link to read more coronavirus advice for both employers and employees.