2. Mr Gerry Murphy

MR GERRY MURPHY (affirmed).

Questions From Counsel to the Inquiry

Ms Dhanoa: Thank you for attending today, Mr Murphy, and for your assistance to the Inquiry.

Before I begin with my questions, there are just a few matters I want to bring to your attention. Whilst giving your evidence, please keep your voice up and speak into the microphone so that the stenographer can hear you for the transcript. If any question that I ask is unclear, please do say so, and I will rephrase it. If you would like a break at any time, please just say so.

You have provided this module of the Inquiry, Mr Murphy, with a witness statement. You should see that in front of you on the screen. If we scroll down to the last page, page 17, we can see there it’s dated 17 August 2023. Can you confirm, Mr Murphy, that the statement is true to the best of your knowledge and belief?

Mr Gerry Murphy: I can.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Murphy, you are the assistant general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions; is that correct?

Mr Gerry Murphy: That is indeed correct.

Counsel Inquiry: You’ve held this position since 13 March 202023?

Mr Gerry Murphy: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Previously you held the roles of chairperson of the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions as well as president of the same organisation?

Mr Gerry Murphy: Correct.

Counsel Inquiry: For the purposes of your evidence, Mr Murphy, I’ll refer to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions as ICTU and for my Lady as well to note. It’s correct that the Northern Ireland Committee of ICTU is a separate organisation to the Trades Union Congress, but in fact the organisations work together and have shared objectives. Is that correct?

Mr Gerry Murphy: That is indeed correct.

Counsel Inquiry: Putting it simply, the Northern Ireland Committee of ICTU’s role is simply to represent and advance the interests of workers. Is that a fair sort of brief summary?

Mr Gerry Murphy: Indeed it is.

Counsel Inquiry: In terms of the membership, Mr Murphy, ICTU is in fact the largest civil society organisation on the island of Ireland, it has 44 affiliated unions, north and south of the border, and it covers a wide cross-section of professions and sectors.

Mr Gerry Murphy: Yes.

Counsel Inquiry: The Northern Ireland Committee of ICTU is the representative body for 34 trade unions and it has over 200,000 members across Northern Ireland.

Mr Gerry Murphy: Correct again, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Murphy, I want to now move to consider the Strategic Engagement Forum. It was established in April 2020, and it brought together employers, trade unions and statutory bodies, including the Health and Safety Executive for Northern Ireland, and the Public Health Agency.

Please could you explain why it was created and what its purpose was.

Mr Gerry Murphy: Before I do that, today is May Day, International Workers’ Day, and I would like to acknowledge the fact that 400 people of working age, that is those aged between 18 and 65, died over the course of this pandemic. I do sincerely hope that the evidence that I give here today, and indeed the work of this Inquiry as a whole, will aid the creation of a set of circumstances where such a situation will never arise again.

In respect, then, to the Engagement Forum, the Engagement Forum was something which we at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions had long called for, indeed far in advance of the outbreak of any pandemic. We believe and continue to believe that there is a need for systematic and long-term triumvirate engagement, if you like, between the government, employers and trade unions, something which we believe is in the best interests of workers and their families, but also society as a whole, the economy in general, and good governance.

The Engagement Forum was established in March of 2020. I was a participant. There were five – six, actually, trade union representatives on the body as a whole. It was tasked with providing advice and counsel to the government of Northern Ireland around how their response to the pandemic could be managed across the economy and the workforce, the labour market.

It initially did some really good work. It confirmed, from a trade union point of view, which was much gratifying, that it was possible to work collaboratively with the government and the employers. We did that, we produced some very valuable work. We were the people who identified the list of key workers. We were the people who provided the list of essential sectors. We developed particular guidances around health advice, viral mitigations, to be distributed to the workforce and, you know, how that might be done and how it would be best shared and who needed to be informed. All of that was done by the Engagement Forum and done in a remarkably short period of time, considering how long it sometimes takes to get a decision made in this place. That was done in a matter of weeks.

Two weeks –

Counsel Inquiry: I’m just going to stop you there, Mr Murphy. It’s all extremely helpful. Was there any engagement of this kind, in the sense of a forum, that was in place between the Executive and trade unions before the pandemic?

Mr Gerry Murphy: No, indeed there wasn’t. And this forum, that was the one which we are now talking about, didn’t survive terribly long either. Effectively by the middle of 2020, this forum had ceased to function effectively at all and was, indeed, only meeting intermittently and was, by 2021, being referred – or the Department of the Economy had referred it for review to an academic in the University of Ulster, effectively ending the functioning of that body, the Engagement Forum.

It was particularly disappointing from a trade union point of view, because it had done some very good work, it had confirmed a loss and it had confirmed we believe to the government and to the employers that collaborative working across these three key sectors was possible. But it was ad hoc in nature, not what we really wanted and not what we want going forward, because we would still maintain that this is an effective way to get things done in terms of the labour market.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you. Mr Murphy, you helpfully set out a short while ago the sort of work that the forum was engaged in and what it managed to achieve, and you noted two particular pieces of work, preparing a list of key workers and essential and non-essential businesses, and it also established an emergency code of practice to assist businesses and their workforces in complying with Covid-19 related guidance and regulations, and that work was achieved.

I want to now look at INQ000279384. You will see that up on your screen. It’s a note of a meeting that took place on 10 June, so some time after the forum had been established in April 2020, and this was a meeting that was requested by the Northern Ireland Committee of ICTU, and the deputy First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, was present, including yourself as a representative of the National Teachers’ Organisation; that’s correct?

Mr Gerry Murphy: That’s correct, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: If we look on this first page at paragraph 2, it sets out there that Owen Reidy outlined three issues, as you said, that the forum was seen as a very helpful way in which to continue the engagement between the trade unions and the Executive, and there was a request for more formal quarterly engagement, an acknowledgement about what the forum was set up to do.

If we look further on at paragraph 3, I think that’s across the page, the deputy First Minister herself paid tribute to workers, particularly those on the frontline, and we’ll look further into that later on, and she indicated her support for more regular formal engagement with trade unions and acknowledged the work that had been undertaken, and she was supportive of the idea of it continuing beyond the pandemic.

If we look also at paragraph 8, please, so that’s the last one, it looks there as if it’s in draft form, but it says:

“The meeting concluded with the deputy First Minister confirming she [would] speak to the Health Minister Robin [Swann] about the issues raised that will have significant impact in the event of a second wave … and reiterated her commitment to effective engagement … going forward.”

You noted earlier, when discussing the work of the forum, that what we know ended up happening was that it didn’t continue. Having now looked at what was discussed and acknowledged by the deputy First Minister herself, it seemed to be positively received in the sense of what it created in terms of engagement between trade unions and the Executive.

In your statement, you note that, of course, after the initial work that was undertaken, the forum was unfortunately largely ignored by the Executive, which you’ve alluded to.

Why do you think this was?

Mr Gerry Murphy: The note of the meeting there is from June. We had made numerous requests by that point to meet with the office of the First and deputy First Minister, the First Minister and indeed the two junior ministers in that office met with us on that date, and as you can see – well, I’m not going to rehash what’s in the thing. Your question is why … why …

Counsel Inquiry: It was why you thought that the engagement didn’t continue, given the positive reception that at least deputy Minister Michelle O’Neill had acknowledged and articulated in the passages that I read out from this meeting in June.

Mr Gerry Murphy: I’m not really sure why it didn’t continue, and I would suggest respectfully that, you know, that’s possibly a question that needs to be addressed to Ms Foster or Ms O’Neill, you know, in their role. We felt certainly that the Engagement Forum, as the deputy First Minister reflected or is reflected in the note, that was very useful, notwithstanding the limitations which I pointed out. But, you know, I really can’t speak for them, and I don’t really have a view as to why they didn’t wish to see it continue.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Murphy, since the forum in 2021, as you have explained, drew to a close in the way it had been established, has there been anything else since of its kind?

Mr Gerry Murphy: There was the – there was quite a long hiatus really from the middle of 2020 until just recently, and in the last number of weeks we have, along with the employers and the Labour Relations Agency and the Department for the Economy, gone back to a body similar in nature to the Engagement Forum, indeed it’s probably going – we’re in the very initial stages of establishing this body, we haven’t even got so far as to formally confirming a name, but it’s likely to be – to include the Engagement Forum moniker, I suppose.

So we’ve had that hiatus really from 2020 until now. There is a recognition on the part of the Department for the Economy of what the deputy First Minister reflected in that note of the June meeting, you know, reflected the positive benefits of that social dialogue model. So it’s taken a while, but we appear to have the beginnings of such a model developing again.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Murphy.

I want to move on to now briefly consider briefings that were made by the Northern Ireland Committee of ICTU to the government in Northern Ireland.

Was the committee involved or made aware in any way in advance of the strategy that the government in Northern Ireland was going to adopt in response to the pandemic? So in the period sort of January to March, or before the forum was established in April 2020.

Mr Gerry Murphy: The short answer to your question is no, we were not. We were not involved in any planning, as I, you know, in my evidence to Module 1, you know, said.

So we weren’t involved in any planning and we weren’t involved in the initial stages of the response, the very initial stages of the response, apart from us communicating to them concerns that we had about, you know, the risks being faced by the workforce and indeed their families and society more generally. But they did not formally reach out to us, no.

Counsel Inquiry: The Northern Ireland Committee of ICTU in terms of its structure has policy subcommittees and they briefed committees of the Northern Ireland Assembly in a number of areas, so the health unions briefed members of the Legislative Assembly on the Health Scrutiny Committee on general NPI matters – that’s non-pharmaceutical interventions – in May and June of 2020, and were also asked to give detailed evidence on the situation developing inside care homes.

There were also briefings in relation to education and the situation arising inside schools in August and September of 2020, and there was also the Retired Workers Committee which was in dialogue with the Northern Ireland Older People’s Commissioner, who we just heard evidence from.

Mr Murphy, to what extent do you think that these briefings impacted decision-making?

Mr Gerry Murphy: Well, the committees to which you refer, or to which you were referring to, perform extremely valuable work and what they do is they reflect the views of the membership of the trade unions, and what they were doing to those Stormont scrutiny committees was reflecting those views.

The degree to which they impacted decision-making, I think it would be fair to say was fairly limited insofar as, you know, there was no … the committee – the committee was looking at what was coming forward, the situation was so fluid and moving so quickly that the information that the committee was gathering was in many cases already out of date probably, you know, as near as you could describe it. But it was nonetheless valuable because what it was, it was reflecting the experience of workers and their families to the Legislative Assembly and therefore informing to some degree the decision-making, but, as I was saying – or as I’m suggesting here, it was in many cases after decisions had been taken or, you know, as decisions were playing out, actually, in realtime. So limited is I think what I’m suggesting.

Counsel Inquiry: Can you provide perhaps a particular example of an area where briefings were made and albeit, as you’ve said, decisions may have already been taken or the briefings that were being given were perhaps a step behind, they were still positively received or able to make –

Mr Gerry Murphy: Well, I think the interactions between the ICTU health committee and the scrutiny committee in health are particularly helpful, they were helpful for both because what was lacking or one of the things I feel that was lacking across government in terms of decision-making was the voice of the worker directly feeding in, so it wasn’t feeding in, for example, at the level of the First and deputy First Minister, it was feeding in to a degree across some of the departments, because some of the departments, particularly those departments with established bargaining processes, you know, and established – established lines of communication, you know, allowed for – there was a mechanism to feed in at that point, but in other areas, Health and Safety Executive for Northern Ireland being an example, you know, it has a board for which there is provision in its underpinnings for three worker representatives, but for over a decade there wasn’t any worker representatives on that board. So vital workplace and workforce intelligence wasn’t available to them. So there were … there were some opportunities to feed in, and – but there wasn’t a systematic or government wide or joined up approach to that.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Murphy, I want to move on now to consider the workforce during the pandemic in a little more detail. There are 30,000 workers in Northern Ireland who are employed through employment agencies, and a large proportion of them during the pandemic were migrant workers who worked in agriculture and food processing. So they were on the frontline. Is that right?

Mr Gerry Murphy: That the absolutely correct, yes.

Counsel Inquiry: And as you alluded to earlier, it’s also right that the highest proportion of deaths amongst people of working age in Northern Ireland were among workers from processing plants and machine operatives, as I’ve said.

Mr Gerry Murphy: Yes, 13.4% of that 400 who lost their lives were in that sector.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Murphy, I just want to take a look now at a letter that was sent by Kevin Doherty, who was from the Migrant Workers Support Unit of ICTU, and it was sent to the minister, as you can see there on the screen, for communities, Carál Ní Chuilín, regarding – you’ll perhaps note from this letter, if you’ve seen it before, it was regarding the decision to halt the issuing of National Insurance numbers, the impact on new workers, and, more generally, the spread of the pandemic in workplaces. And you can see it’s dated 27 October 2020.

On that first page, the penultimate paragraph describes there some of the concerns that were articulated to the Minister for Communities, in particular regarding their inability to access national insurance numbers, which meant that they couldn’t qualify for statutory sick pay when they became ill. Other difficulties faced included: not being able to register with a GP, access free health services that they were entitled to; inability to open bank accounts if they could not provide proof of residence; and some were experiencing complications trying to register benefits for their families.

Mr Murphy, were these concerns that you were aware of?

Mr Gerry Murphy: Yes, they were. The letter which my colleague Kevin Doherty wrote to Carál Ní Chuilín, the minister at the time, reflects concerns that were coming to us from the work which we were undertaking through the Migrants Support Unit. As the letter outlines, that was a project we – a European-funded project we were engaged in with a number of other partners called Crossing Borders, Breaking Boundaries, that was about addressing or seeking to assist migrant workers in the labour force, of whom there were quite a number: 50,000 at the time, 23,000 – almost 24,000 of whom came from the EU, 26 of them, and the remainder were basically people who had come in from the rest of the world.

What we discovered in that work – so the project was about, as I said, then, addressing, you know, discrimination, other issues that were presenting here for those individuals, exploitation and the like. What we had discovered was that – what you’re highlighting here was one issue, so the absence of the National Insurance numbers was having serious implications, like the inability to register for a GP at this point was lethal for some of these people. The benefits, not being able to access benefit was equally, you know, just very difficult for some families.

There was the issue of statutory sick pay, of course, as well, which some of them weren’t able to qualify for.

By the way, the statutory sick payment at that time was £94.25 a week, it rose to a whole £95.85 by the end of the pandemic, completely inadequate in the modern world, not sufficient in any way to support a family or even an individual. Despite us, by the way, raising the issue of statutory sick pay a number of times separately with the government of Northern Ireland. So there was those two issues.

There was also the issue that these migrant workers were bringing to our attention around what they felt was disregard on the part of some employers for health and safety advices that was provided to them, you know, from the Public Health Agency and other people, including us.

Ms Dhanoa: Mr Murphy, I’m just going to stop you there.

My Lady, I’ve been asked if we can take a short break, and this would be a convenient moment to do so.

Lady Hallett: The usual morning break?

Ms Dhanoa: I think, yes. I think that would assist the stenographer, I’m sure.

Lady Hallett: You were mid-sentence, Mr Murphy. Did you want to …?

The Witness: I’m at your …

Ms Dhanoa: Mr Murphy, you were moving on to a matter I was going to consider in terms of health and safety in workplaces, so unless you wanted to say anything else, I think we can come back to that as I move along.

Lady Hallett: Very well. I shall return at 11.30.

(11.15 am)

(A short break)

(11.30 am)

Lady Hallett: Ms Dhanoa.

Ms Dhanoa: Thank you, my Lady.

Thank you, Mr Murphy. Before we took the break we were looking at one particular area of concern for workers and we looked at a letter sent by Kevin Doherty of the Migrant Workers Support Unit, which was in relation to National Insurance numbers and what the widespread ramifications were of new workers on the frontline who didn’t have those.

As you expressed, that was just one particular issue that you were aware of as an organisation.

One of the notable impacts of the pandemic was how it affected workplaces, and those in frontline roles doing essential work. Those engaged in that sort of work tended to be in lower paid roles and tended to be already suffering with exacerbated health issues, and they of course couldn’t work from home doing the essential work that they were.

Agrifood was a sector of that kind that required people to be at their place of work. In doing that sort of work, how did it affect those who were part of that workforce during the pandemic that you became aware of? What sort of issues were they facing?

Mr Gerry Murphy: Okay, well, that particular sector of the workforce tended to be – tended to have a very high proportion of migrant workers in it, so a lot of EU26 and a lot of rest of the world migrant workers working there, a lot of them actually working for agencies as well, which, again, lessened the protections available to them, in our view.

The issues that they were facing, in addition to those already outlined, included struggling with the language, which made communication difficult. It also – they also felt, and were communicating to us, particularly through the Migrant Services Unit, that they were being, on occasion, misadvised around what their entitlements were. They felt very strongly that the health and safety protections available to them weren’t always at a level which was entirely appropriate and indeed necessary.

They – it became clear also, in the course of our interactions with that community, that the Public Health Agency, for example, appeared to have a very poor dataset around, you know, their vulnerabilities, indeed how many of them there were, and where they were located. We wrote to them and brought that to their attention. And then of course the other issue was the access to statutory sick pay and other welfare entitlements.

Can I just make a further point about statutory sick pay? It had a number of – well, there were a number of consequences which flowed from that very low rate of statutory sick pay which I think would be of interest to the Inquiry. The first of those was that, because it was so low, it meant that a lot of workers felt they had no option, even though they were sick, but go to work. The consequences of that were that the risk to their fellow workers in their place of work increased, so the virus spread further, but it spread beyond the workplace, because these workers – because it was asymptomatic, of course, these workers were taking the virus home with them, so it was spreading out beyond that.

I seem to recall Dr McBride may have made a similar – or may have made that point as well in his evidence, I think in his evidence to this module, or perhaps Module 1, I can’t exactly recall, there’s so much paper here.

So, in the agrifood sector, manufacturing, service industries and retail, you had very high concentrations of low paid and migrant workers and, as I previously pointed out there, a very large part of the 400 people who lost their lives were in those particular sectors.

The migrant worker population there in the agrifood was largely EU26 in nature – in origin, rather, and one of those workers in particular lost his life in a Moy Park processing plant in Dungannon in County Tyrone in very early 2020, in March of 2020. I believe the senior Unite the Union official in the North here, since retired, Jackie Pollock, wrote to the First Minister and the deputy First Minister, and indeed copied in the Minister for the Economy, I believe, raising concerns which Unite the Union had which reflect the concerns which we had been reflecting as a Congress on behalf of all the unions to the same people.

You know, and Jackie Pollock in his letter on behalf of Unite the Union, on the workers’ behalf, was making the point that there should be mass testing in that sector. That never happened. That there should be more unannounced inspections. That didn’t happen either. And that, you know, there was, they felt, Unite the Union felt, and we shared this view up to a point as well, that there was some wilful disregarding of the advice on the part of some people, some of the employers.

So there was – interestingly, those workers, you know, working in those processing plants were particularly at risk, as were those who were in front-facing occupations such as retail. You know, that was the other big proportion of those 400 lives that were lost that I referred to, I think that was 12 – over 12% of that 400 were in retail and service.

Interestingly, that – there’s a couple of things about that number which I think bear looking at as well. The first of those is that those were by and large rest of the world migrant and low paid workers, so not EU26, and we believe that a very high proportion of those people were actually women, and the disproportionate impact of this virus on women in particular in those low paid and migrant sectors of the economy is something which we feel has been completely under-investigated and under-reported, possibly. We – unfortunately, while there are some general figures from the Northern Ireland Health and Safety Executive, we don’t have very complete sets of data from them, so it’s impossible to tell what we in congress or ICTU are of the view that it’s certainly an area which bears further examination.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you, Mr Murphy.

Would it be fair to say, from all that you’ve said, that those on the frontline and in lower paid roles were left behind?

Mr Gerry Murphy: I think that that is a fair enough description here, and left behind, that is despite the very huge effort on the part of their trade union representatives and belatedly on the part of the government, if you like, and the employers too, in fairness, but I think help such as it was when it came to that sector of the labour force was too late, the harm had already been done.

Counsel Inquiry: Mr Murphy, I just want to raise or explore another concern which was in relation to the impact of the pandemic on black, Asian and minority ethnic people, in particular there was a lack of specific data on the actual impact that Covid was having on these groups and migrant worker communities in Northern Ireland.

There was a letter sent to the health minister, Robin Swann, on 28 October 2020, in which a request was made for ethnicity and occupation to be recorded in Covid-19 data collection systems for health and social care in Northern Ireland.

The letter was responded to, and the health minister, Robin Swann, articulated that that work was under way and recognised the need for it.

How important was it to have such data, and was that then included in the data collection systems?

Mr Gerry Murphy: The letter that you’re referring to reflects the concerns which my colleague, Kevin Doherty, had previously articulated in his communication as well. It was very important, we felt, that this data would be collected, simply because these workers were in the lowest paid occupations, they were in what we now know but we suspected at the time to be the highest risk occupations. We also know that they were living in the most deprived communities and the figures then and now confirm that, you know, they were at two-thirds, you know, more risk than those that were living in the best or in the least deprived areas.

So the collection of basic data like how many people, black, ethnic minority people, are we talking about here, you know, where are they located, what age, you know, what age groups are they falling into, all of this would have greatly assisted and informed a response, a more targeted and complete response not only for working people, whom we represent, but also their families and indeed the community as a whole.

So was it fed in? I’m not entirely sure. But to be quite honest with you, I haven’t seen where it was fed in. All I can tell you is that I know that both our experience of the PHA’s data, as, you know, articulated by Kevin Doherty in his communication, and our experience of the Health and Safety Executive in NI and indeed confirmed by the HSENI’s own evidence to this module, it would suggest that those datasets are less complete than might have been optimum.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Murphy, one of the particular issues that this module is considering is the absence of a functioning Executive, so between the three years preceding the pandemic, 2017 through January 2020.

In your view, how did the absence of a functioning Executive impact the response to the pandemic, but in particular in relation to the interests of workers?

Mr Gerry Murphy: I think the absence of a functioning Executive was extremely negative to the experience of workers during Covid. First of all, the absence of the Executive meant that, well, it was a failure of political leadership, in our view. On top of that, it meant that vital workplace intelligence and workforce intelligence wasn’t made available directly to, you know, the key decision-makers. Indeed, once the Assembly was – or the Executive was restored in January of 2020, until – up until the period when it collapsed again in early 2022, we weren’t successful in getting a meeting with the Office of the First and deputy First Ministers during that period. It also impacted – it undermined already fragile political relationships, and threatened community cohesion, right at the very wrong time for everyone. It impacted negatively on policymaker policymaking and on policy development, so, for example, during this period, immediately preceding this period you had the publication of Bengoa, the Bengoa report into the health service, and the very necessary reforms there which, you know, had come about as a consequence of underfunding, demographic changes and other pressures, historical and otherwise, on the system. So there was nobody and no Executive to enact those necessary changes. So it meant, for example, that the health service going into the pandemic was … was struggling, you know, Robin Swann I think said operating on a hand to mouth basis, I don’t think I could disagree with that.

Further, then, the fact that there was no Executive meant that a very dire public finance situation couldn’t really be addressed so we lurched from one annual budget to the next annual budget, there was no strategic planning in financial terms over the piece which had allowed, you know, some effort to be made to address clear inadequacies and deficiencies across the entirety of the public services, not only health.

Counsel Inquiry: Thank you.

Mr Murphy, I just want to end on this note by looking ahead. You refer in your witness statement to the Fire Brigades Union who have a tripartite arrangement in place: they represent firefighters across the UK, and the arrangement that they have which applies in Northern Ireland is one which they work with employers and fire officers.

In your view, how successful is this, and would you recommend a similar arrangement for the Northern Ireland Committee of ICTU and the Executive?

Mr Gerry Murphy: I think what you’re pointing to is one of the things that we need to do going forward, and yes, it was extremely successful. You can tell it was successful – or the evidence for its success is the fact that, right across the British Isles, not one single member of the fire and rescue service lost their lives during this period as a result of the virus. It’s a tripartite arrangement that they entered with the Fire Brigades Union with their employers and with the Chief Fire Officers. It meant that when the pandemic kicked in they were able to implement system wide mitigations which worked extremely effectively in preventing any disruption to either cover or, you know, the health of individual firefighters.

So it was pretty – it’s a pretty effective approach and one which we would certainly advocate, but it’s only one, and it needs to be replicated, we believe, at a system wide, economy wide, government wide level, you know, this tripartite approach, you know, we began actually with this when your very first question was about the Engagement Forum, I’m suggesting that that model or a model very similar to that is essential going forward.

Other things I think which we would really want to consider here is, you know, an active inclusion of the workers’ voice in the planning going forward for future pandemic scenarios in the hope of course that we never find ourselves back there, but I think it would be essential that the workers’ voice would be included in any planning for that.

Additionally, we need to address some of the other issues, the issues around sick pay, around access to

services and benefits, particularly from those who are

new to our country who have come from other places, we

need to be more considerate of that. And, you know, the

other thing I think which we need to do is be a lot

kinder to those that we work with more generally.

Ms Dhanoa: Thank you, Mr Murphy.

My Lady, those are all the questions I have.

I understand there are no pre-approved Rule 10s, and

neither have any come in during the course of the

evidence.

Lady Hallett: Thank you, Ms Dhanoa.

Thank you very much for your help, Mr Murphy.

The Witness: Thank you.

(The witness withdrew)

Ms Dobbin: My Lady, may I call the next witness, please,

Sir David Sterling.