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

Mr Jacobs: Good morning, my Lady. This is the opening statement on behalf of the Trades Union Congress. I appear with Ms Ruby Peacock and we are instructed by Thompsons Solicitors.

The TUC brings together over 5 million working people who make up its 48 member unions, and in this module this is working in partnership with the Wales TUC, the Scottish TUC, and the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.

My Lady, we will address five topics, the first of which is truth and candour.

In any public inquiry, the demand for truth and candour is a heavy one, all the more so we say in the context of this Inquiry. In the moving impact film shown yesterday, a bereaved husband, Alan, said powerfully is that what was needed was accountability and ownership of what went wrong.

The TUC is disheartened to see that so many witness statements of the key decision-makers are striking only for how utterly anodyne they are. There is very little ownership of what went wrong. Much is at odds with what the public has already seen and already knows. Many of the witness statements in this module would have the public believe that the government’s response to the pandemic was a wholly unique reversal of the swan analogy. What the public witnessed was the furious flapping of feet under water, but what is now being portrayed to this Inquiry is a serene gliding through the pandemic that happened behind closed doors.

My Lady, it will persuade no one.

The Cabinet Office in its written opening has described this Inquiry as an unprecedented moment of transparency about the government of this country. There is more than a little irony in that observation, given the intransigence of the Cabinet Office in refusing to provide the requested disclosure to this Inquiry and judicially reviewing a notice requiring disclosure.

The TUC hopes that the glare of these Inquiry hearings will bring more openness to the oral evidence than some of the witness statements. The Inquiry will no doubt continue in its rigorous approach to questioning.

Our second topic is to acknowledge loss and sacrifice in the workplace. Over 15,000 people of working age have died of Covid-19. From March 2020 to the end of the first year of the pandemic, there were at least 8,000 deaths of working age people involving the virus. Many who contracted Covid-19 in places of work suffered or continue to suffer the prolonged and debilitating effects of long Covid.

We were grateful yesterday to hear Mr Keith King’s Counsel in his opening refer to those in a variety of occupations who played a key role in keeping the country going and faced the greatest risk in doing so. Of course those in health and social care were truly on the frontline, but there were so many others: those who continued to work in the supermarkets, in transport, in food processing, in education, in communications, and many more.

It was in the workplace that many of the uneven impacts of the pandemic were felt. Many who continued to attend work were in lower paid jobs and many in insecure work. They were already suffering from the structural health disadvantages about which this Inquiry has heard. Many of these occupations intersect with a number of vulnerable and protected groups.

My Lady, our third topic is not loss but avoidable loss, and in particular the apparent dysfunction in government decision-making which resulted in avoidable loss of life.

The emerging evidence suggests that there was dysfunction rather than coherence, with decision-making flip-flopping between myopically serving one interest before giving in to serve another.

Eat Out to Help Out is a striking example. The aim of supporting the hospitality industry was a perfectly valid and important one, but there needed to be some careful thought as to how the scheme fitted within the overall strategy. What we find is that it was a Treasury scheme about which neither SAGE nor the Department of Health and Social Care were even consulted. That is a microcosm of repeated failures to make decisions which pursued a coherent plan with support across government.

So decision-making flitted between resisting certain NPIs, including lockdowns, at all costs before eventually accepting their inevitability.

In a WhatsApp message Simon Case described a particular decision as “A classic of the Johnson era – go fast, no go slower, listen to me, no agree it with Rishi …!”

That may ultimately prove to be an apt summary for much of the core political decision-making in response to the pandemic.

Our fourth topic is decision-making that served the economics of work but not its safety. The UK Government took a bold approach to supporting jobs and the economy, but the TUC is concerned that Westminster failed to show the same endeavour in supporting safety in the workplace, particularly in respect of those in lower income jobs.

That manifested in the approach to supporting self-isolation for those who continued to attend work. The consequence of not supporting those on low income to self-isolate is a perfectly obvious one. For someone on low income who needs to attend work in person and who does not have the benefit of adequate sick pay, foregoing income for two weeks while self-isolating may be extraordinarily difficult. The existing mechanism of statutory sick pay offered only £94.25 per week, and so was far too low to meaningfully incentivise self-isolation. Around 2 million workers who earned below the lower earnings limit were not eligible at all.

The problematically affected a number of vulnerable and protected groups working in higher risk occupations.

My Lady, if there was to be more than lip service to ameliorating uneven impacts, it was an area for action. It was also a problem very well known to the government. It was raised on numerous occasions by the TUC, including by way of a report of 3 March 2020. It was raised by the Behavioural Insights Team, who pointed to evidence that care homes that paid sick leave saw lower infection rates.

It was also raised by MPs. A letter to Matt Hancock from Conservative MP George Freeman referenced an outbreak at Banham Poultry stating “the current statutory sick pay doesn’t provide enough to live on”. He went on to describe the problem of food processing plants being closed due to outbreaks but workers without incomes or financial support for self-isolation being compelled to obtain employment in other plants, thus pushing the problem down the road.

It was also raised by SAGE. The minutes of the SAGE meeting of 1 May 2020 advised that an accessible offer of financial support to those in need could reduce the risk of non-adherence.

Sir Patrick Vallance, in his evening diary, recorded on 21 August 2020:

“[Chief Medical Officer] said clearly that financial support for people self-isolating is key. [Cabinet Office] working through mechanisms (very slowly).”

On 7 September 2020 he wrote:

“[Chancellor] blocking all notion of paying to get people to isolate despite all the evidence that this will be needed.”

So it was that the UK Government response was meagre. At the very end of September 2020, months into the pandemic, the self-isolation support scheme was established. Local authorities were given £50 million to fund the scheme. To give that some perspective, my Lady, £70 billion was spent on the furlough scheme and £840 million was spent in the month of August 2020 encouraging the public to use restaurants.

The TUC subsequently reported that local authorities were rejecting 70% of applications and only a fifth of workers had even heard of the scheme. It was far too little, far too late. The scheme really was tokenistic and devoid of any real commitment to supporting low income workers in high-risk workplaces.

In this module, the Inquiry should ask whether all of the professed anxiety for vulnerable groups translated into action. Support for self-isolation was a practical, concrete and entirely obvious way of supporting the effectiveness of self-isolation and supporting a low-income, high-risk workforce which intersected with a number of vulnerable groups. It should not have been any surprise to see mass outbreaks at clothing factories in Leicester, at meat packing factories, at the Bakkavor sandwich making factory, and many others.

It is far from the only example of low income workers in high-risk workplaces being a low priority. Another example is care workers. From early in the pandemic, it was known that staff moving between homes in a highly fragmented sector was a problem. It was raised with the UK Government externally and, we now know, internally. Restricting staff from attending one place of work but not others required a scheme of financial support, but there was a reluctance to provide it.

The context was a lack of robust response to safety in the workplaces generally. Lack of PPE, inadequate use of general and individual risk assessments for particularly vulnerable workers, poor social distancing, unnecessary journeys, were all issues commonly reported to the TUC and its unions.

Government engagement with sectoral partners including unions was ad hoc and haphazard. Consultation on key guidance documents was often late or non-existent. Just by way of example, key guidance produced by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on the return to work after the first lockdown was provided to the TUC on a Sunday morning, with a 12-hour response time. The TUC did respond with a number of concerns raised but the consultation was for too late to be meaningful.

All of this reflects an approach which values the economics of work but neglected its safety. That impacted particularly low income and often vulnerable workers who worked in occupations with exposure to the virus.

My Lady, our fifth and final topic is decision-making concerning school attendance. The central theme is similar to the general dysfunction in decision-making we described a few moments ago. After the first lockdown, the mantra was to keep schools open. That was a worthy imperative, but the mantra resulted in a pursuit of that objective until it became impossible to continue. It led to hiding from the science rather than being guided by it, until ignoring it was impossible.

Unions supported a return to unrestricted school attendance in September 2020 but called for further NPIs in schools and also a contingency plan. The government refused.

Sir Patrick Vallance noted the Prime Minister saying in a Covid-S meeting on 6 August 2020:

“Don’t want to hear about plan B and C for failure. I just want pupils back at school.”

My Lady, the methodology of “don’t have a plan B because you might end up using it” is, in the face of a virus such as Covid-19, indefensible.

Decision-making through the autumn of 2020, whilst the R rate moved upwards, equivocated. In December 2020, the London Borough of Greenwich was threatened with legal action if it closed school doors in the face of the surging R rate in its area.

Ultimately there was the farcical scenario of thousands of primary school children returning to school and mixing for a single day on 4 January 2021 before a U-turn was announced and schools closed again. It is one of the most striking examples of the bullish pursuit of one particular objective, founded on hope against hope, until such pursuit becomes impossible.

Education unions were frequently concerned by a lack of government transparency about school attendance and transmission, so it is a concern to see reference in the Vallance diaries to the Department of Education declining to raise questions of SAGE because the minutes would be published.

These are important issues which fall within the scope of this module. That Sir Gavin Williamson is not on the witness list appears to the education unions to be an omission, however incidental his role may in fact have been, and the Inquiry is invited to rectify it.

My Lady, that is our opening statement. Thank you.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Mr Jacobs.

Mr Thomas King’s Counsel.