4. Submissions on Behalf of the Trades Union Congress by Mr Jacobs

Lady Hallett: Mr Jacobs.

Mr Jacobs: Thank you, my Lady.

I don’t know if you want me to work with a particular breaking point in mind.

Lady Hallett: No, I’d like to complete it, please, because I really have to finish by a certain time.

Mr Jacobs: I’ll press on.

My Lady, I appear on behalf of the Trades Union Congress, the TUC. We have been designated as a core participant in Modules 1 and also the four parts of Module 2.

The TUC brings together 5.5 million working people who make up its 48 member unions from all parts of the UK.

The TUC is also working in partnership with the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, or the ICTU. The ICTU is the single umbrella organisation for trade unions on the island of Ireland. It’s required, through its mission statement, to strive to achieve economic developments, social cohesion and justice by upholding the values of solidarity, fairness and equality.

The Northern Ireland Committee, the NIC, of the ICTU, is the representative body for 34 trade unions, with over 200,000 members across Northern Ireland. In membership terms, it is the largest civil society organisation in Northern Ireland.

My Lady, for the purposes of these submissions I will generally refer to the NIC, the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.

My Lady, across the UK, thousands of people of working age died in the pandemic, many of whom were key workers in high risk workplaces in a range of sectors. As the TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady put it in a joint statement this year on Workers’ Memorial Day:

“We’ll forever be in the debt of the workers who kept the country going during the pandemic - nursers, carers, bus drivers, factory workers and so many more.

“Far too many were exposed to the virus at work - and lost their lives as a consequence. Now the government owes it to them, and to their families, to make sure that the public inquiry investigates what should have been done to keep everyone safe at work.”

With that in mind, my Lady, Ms Dobbin this morning, in her very helpful opening statement, referred to the common purpose shared by this Inquiry, its core participants, and those who will give evidence, and that is a common purpose absolutely shared and supported by the TUC.

My Lady, I will focus my submissions for the purposes of this hearing on issues of scope.

Firstly, the issue of a lack of a functioning Executive for the three years leading to January 2020, we are glad to see it in the provisional scope documents and also for it to receive some focus in Ms Dobbin’s opening this morning. All I say is this. On its face, the issue has potential relevance to a number of modules: Module 1 on preparedness, a lack of an executive must be relevant to the preparedness of a government to respond to something as difficult as a pandemic; to Module 2, all the more so in circumstances that the UK Government had particular additional obligations as there was no functioning Executive; but also of course, and perhaps primarily, this module.

There is a risk of important issues falling between modules, and I addressed you yesterday in Modules 2A and 2B on core participants being able to engage with the Inquiry at an early stage with what issues the Inquiry is actually enquiring into and in what modules.

It can shed some light on what it’s looking at, either through disclosure of Rule 9 requests or an early and developing list of issues, and that’s equally important in this module. Beyond that, I simply refer my Lady to submissions I made yesterday on those points.

The short point, really, is that we don’t want to be complaining after the event that an important issue has not been investigated and has fallen between modules. We want to have the opportunity to point it out constructively and in advance.

My Lady, in our written submissions in relation to scope, we’ve pointed to the issue of the island of Ireland; as Mr Lavery refers to it, the single epidemiological unit. All I say on that is that we agree entirely with what was said by Mr Lavery, and again, grateful to see it have some focus in Ms Dobbin’s submissions.

More significantly, my Lady, evidence of impact and the relevance of evidence of impact in Module 2C. Although later modules are going to focus on particular areas, I addressed you yesterday on the importance of having enough evidence of impact to set the central political decision-making in context. These political decisions weren’t made in the abstract; they were decisions with real world perceptible and observable impacts which should have fed back into decision-making.

I think, my Lady, it’s really a similar point to that made just a few moments ago by Ms Anyadike-Danes, which is how experiences fed back up the line and into political decision-making.

One important issue, we say, is that the use and effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions, NPIs, played out in significant part in workplaces across the UK. Community transmission and significant loss of life occurred in a number of sectors. In Northern Ireland, there were particularly significant difficulties in relation to food production sites.

My Lady, Ms Dobbin spoke of the Inquiry seeking an inclusive approach in which the experiences of disadvantaged groups are seen and heard, and we say to that that that includes workers such as those on food production sites which were in low paid but very high risk jobs, and perhaps have far less sort of priority or prominence in the public consciousness.

So, for example, my Lady, in March 2020 there was a mass walkout of up to 1,000 workers at Moy Park in Portadown over concerns of a failure to provide basic health and safety protections to the workforce, and there were similar walkouts in ABP Meats in Lurgan.

At the time the Unite regional officer, Sean McKeever, explained that:

“Food and retail workers are now front line workers in the battle against the Covid-19 virus but are at risk of being sacrificed by our politicians. The Northern Ireland Executive’s shameful failure to bring forward any meaningful enforcement mechanisms whatsoever cannot be allowed to continue. The Health and Safety Executive is chronically under-resourced and under-staffed to deal with the scale of this challenge – they are no longer conducting inspections at workplaces – leaving workers to fend for themselves.”

So Unite advocated for the Northern Ireland Executive to require Covid testing for workers in the poultry and meat packing sector. The high risk nature of the sector had been recognised, but there was nonetheless a failure to roll out any comprehensive programme of testing for those working in it.

So we say, my Lady, in examining in this module the development of the approach to NPIs, non-pharmaceutical interventions, in light of the understanding of their impact on transmission, there must be at least some evidence as to impact.

Ultimately, my Lady, the barometer which you should have in mind is not how government decisions looked on paper, but how they played out in practice.

The NIC also made repeated requests to meet bilaterally with the First and deputy First Ministers of the Northern Ireland Executive. The joint office of the First and deputy First Minister failed or declined to meet with the NIC, which the NIC itself regards as a regrettable and significant failure of leadership.

That lack of engagement is itself, we say, an important issue for this module. Ms Dobbin described looking at how those who govern in Northern Ireland came together to make decisions for all of the community. We say that’s not just coming together within the government itself, but also coming together with important parts of civil society and groups such as the NIC.

My Lady, just standing back for a moment, we obviously make that submission in the context of the TUC’s and the NIC’s particular focus, but I say that in fact just listening to the submissions this morning, one can see that some evidence of impact is important Ms Anyadike-Danes was making submissions about the experiences of those in care homes, and it would just not be possible, we say, to look at that sort of issue divorced from any evidence at all as to how government decisions were playing out in practice and how experiences fed back up the line, as Ms Anyadike-Danes put it.

My Lady, in relation to Rule 9 requests, the Inquiry is invited to direct a request to the NIC, who we say can give relevant and important evidence on the use and effectiveness of NPIs in workplaces. The Inquiry is also invited to direct a Rule 9 request to the Northern Ireland Food and Drink Industry. I don’t refer to the industry generally in an amorphous sense, but the organisation with that title.

That organisation was involved in disseminating in effect government guidance and decisions as to NPIs. So, for example, on 27 March 2020 it issued the Good Manufacturing Practice Covid-19, which was described as taking the advice from Public Health England and practical experiences from local food manufacturers, in effect to give guidance to help food production lines continue and feed the nation during the pandemic.

My Lady, what does the evidence of an organisation such as the Northern Ireland Food and Drink Industry have anything to do with government decision-making? Well, entirely hypothetically, if that body was to say that it had adequate engagement from the Northern Ireland Executive, that it had clear decisions that it could implement, that it had clear public health messaging, that may assist you. And of course, equally, if it says something very different, that it found decision-making confused, that it found it was not able to translate public health messaging into the workplace, that too is going to be important, we say, to considering matters which fall squarely within Module 2C.

The final point I make, and of course, my Lady, perhaps in the interests of time, I stand by of course what is said in my written submissions without addressing everything, but very briefly, we have already invited in other modules for the Inquiry to hold some, what we have described as strand-tying closing submissions after the conclusion of Modules 2A, 2B and 2C in order to take a sort of more holistic view of the lessons learned across the modules, and we simply say that it can’t be too early to think proactively about how the modular approach, which has a lot to commend it, is ultimately going to form a coherent whole.

My Lady, unless I can assist further.

Lady Hallett: No, thank you very much indeed, Mr Jacobs, I’m very grateful to you.

Ms Dobbin, do you have any closing remarks?