What constitutes adequate supervision depends on the individuals, the tasks and the work environment.

For this reason, it's not possible to give a general rule.

The nature of the supervision doesn't always have to be someone standing there looking over their shoulder all the time.  Depending on the circumstances, it could be periodic contact or just someone being available in case of problems.

So the Health and Safety at Work Act  Section 2(c) makes it clear that an employer must ensure that they provide employees with “the provision of such information, instruction, training, and supervision as is necessary to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety at work of his employees;”  . What this means in practice is open to interpretation. There does not seem to be much case law about this (not in Redgrave’s anyway) . There is something in Pope v Gould(HSE Inspector) QBD, where  an employer argued that they should not be held liable for an injury to an employee because the employee did not follow specific instructions, which caused the injury. The Divisional Court ruled that simply instructing someone was not enough; the employer must ensure that the instructions are being followed. That touches on supervision, I suppose.

It is not clear what adequate supervision looks like. It might be adequate if there are no accidents, which means there  is more than  an element of hindsight in this: if there is an accident then obviously  lack of supervision could be a cause.

There was a case (15 years ago?), where a lift maintenance engineer fell down an open lift shaft and a lack of supervision was deemed to one of the causes of the accident. It was not made clear how the employer was meant to supervise a peripatetic  engineer miles from base.

Morning Mike - you point to one of the many problems with FFI.

That the fee charged is for the entire visit and follow up however many faults there might be that would each justify FFI for PART of the visit and PART of the follow up.

Which means that if you might reasonably challenge the whole of the FFI if it only related to an Inspector's opinion that the supervision was inadequate, there's no point as they have you, in colloquial speak, bang to rights on other matters and so it would make absolutely no difference to the price tag.

The result being that you haven't got a clue what this Inspector might think would have been "adequate supervision" had they not had the benefit of the hindsight of knowing that it was the supervisor who was supposedly NOT "adequately supervised", particularly if, as you write, the Inspector had no suggestions as to what would  have been appropriate.

....and in turn that is likely to lead to a lack of trust in the competence of HSE and its Inspectors.

Hi

All

Although not particularly what you are looking for UKAS produce a good document RG101.

It is a copywrite document so I cannot extract or print the relevant parts here.

The document relates to working within explosive atmospheres however, the annexes within the document have a very good sections laying out both Qualification and Competency categories of which there are three categories of person based upon their experience qualifications and training will full explanations as to what this might entail.

Then there is a annex on levels of supervision based of the category of persons being supervised and managed. This has 4 levels with definitions of what each level entails.

For information the three levels are considered as occasional, infrequent, frequent and constant. And full descriptions explaining what each level means in reality.

Using this documents explanations and format you could easily adapt and apply it to any trade/job or employee.