COVID-19 Statement

We understand that your policy may be to restrict access to visitors and contractors during the next few weeks, with the exception for essential and critical services. Our control services do fall into this essential and critical category, preventing illness and death from legionella and a range of water-borne diseases. They are underpinned by legislation and requirements placed on a Responsible Person within our customers.

These requirements - the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and other relevant documents – are still in place and have not been reduced and as such our collective responsibility to work to these is still required. Access to your site is still necessary for these obligations to be met to keep your people and customers safe from exposure to Legionella. Continued access to your site will enable WCS Group to support you in adherence to legislation, and enable our joint responsibilities and Duty of Care to be fully fulfilled through adherence to the programme of planned preventative maintenance as detailed in our contract.

Our staff are experts in following strict protocols around hygiene. Please see our accompanying brief for further details.

During the current move to self-isolation, home working and reduced building occupancy, the following are critical in you continuing to ensure the prevention of a Legionella outbreak:

• It is essential to continue the current regime and perhaps even enhance the regime to offset a reduced water throughput and to minimise additional challenges over spring and summer.
• With a decrease in people attending sites, building water systems may not be being used as much, therefore creating stagnation and potential including an increased risk in Legionnaires Disease. Identification and flushing of low use outlets and systems becomes more important at this time and the site risk assessment may need to be reviewed.
• With warmer weather on the way, cases of Legionella rise especially with water systems being used less frequently.
• Our work is often completed in areas not frequented by the main building occupants - plant rooms, loft spaces etc. This reduces risk of cross contamination.
• We are happy to work with you to arrange alternate access away from building occupants

To help our clients facilitate their compliance, where we are advised that we cannot gain access to a site, we will be asking if access to communal or areas of the building not affected/isolated is possible. If this is the case, we will ask to carry on the visit as normal but noting that specific tasks/locations cannot be completed/accessed noting the reason why. Any sampling locations will be adjusted to the available areas of the building. This will complete our contractual obligation for this visit.

In line with changes to the Government position on the outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) declaring this a public health emergency of international concern, we are asking that all of our external Stakeholders including but not limited to; Sub-Contractors; Suppliers and Customers, take appropriate actions to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

We ask that anybody who may be an infection risk to refrain from entering any of our properties or sites. In line with current Government guidelines an individual who should self-isolate if exhibiting the following common symptoms:

As a precautionary measure, in the short to medium term, we ask that all external Stakeholder meetings are held where possible via conference call facility rather than face to face in order to limit the potential risk to all parties.

We are working tirelessly to help reduce the risk and prevent the spread of COVID-19 amongst our employees.