A return to work - but is it safe?

There is a worryingly laissez-faire tone emerging from the government around rules for returning to work after the coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown. This, perhaps, shouldn’t surprise us from this Tory administration, where pumping money into the economy and intervening all over the place goes against its orthodoxy. Moving away from a small state, where business is left to stand on its own without subsidy, makes them deeply uncomfortable.

And the Conservatives have form.

When EU Directives required the six pack of Health and Safety Regulations to be introduced into UK law, the pre-1997 Major administration did its best to water them down. The words ‘reasonably practicable’ were put into previously unambiguous requirements being made of employers on Health and Safety issues. Regulations governing issues ranging from display screen equipment to manual handling had the words inserted so they became as synonymous with Health and Safety then as ‘furlough’ has become with Covid-19 now.

More recently, in 2013, the notorious section 69 of the Cameron government’s Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act removed civil liability for breaches of health and safety regulations, leaving workers having, once again, to prove negligence, even when their employer had broken the regulations.

This fell in line with Cameron’s 2012 new year's resolution to "kill off the health and safety culture for good". His government’s Red Tape Challenge insisted that two regulations had to be removed for every one coming in. The challenge was led by Sir Oliver Letwin who, on the very morning of the Grenfell Tower disaster, had convened a meeting to discuss the further deregulation of building safety.

When regulating workplace safety, why make things crystal clear when you can add ambiguity to give employers licence to get the economy moving again?  Well, perhaps because the consequence of allowing individual employers freedom is the kind of state sponsored anarchy that the United States is looking at now - with the Trump administration seeking to pass the buck to individual states. 

And again the Conservatives have form.

Ten years of austerity was built around forcing others to make the hard decisions. You announce cuts and then pass the delivery of the weakened services down to the NHS Trusts, to the local authorities, to the prison service to implement. The instruction may come from on high but the pain and heartache of delivery is left to those on the frontline.

For weeks we have been fed a simple message - Stay home.  Protect lives.  Save the NHS - and the British public have been fantastically responsible in following that. Everyone wants to ‘return to normal’ as soon as possible (even a ‘new normal’ would do) but there is understandable fear at what that means and entails. The flip side of national clarity is not individual employer interpretation. The danger is clear and present in the words of senior Tory MP, Sir Graham Brady, when he said last week:

“If anything, in some instances it may be that the public have been a little bit too willing to stay at home. I am sure I am not the only member who has heard from employers who are struggling to fulfil orders because it is difficult to get employees back from furlough.”

Workers – especially those on reduced pay, as furloughed workers usually are – want to get back to work but they need to do so safely. The TUC has already set out a framework which would allow that.

The clamour from those for whom the market is all, to trust that all employers are good employers, is not borne out in the cases that we have seen over the last 100 years. History repeats itself. Too many people are still injured day in, day out, through lack of – or inadequate - risk assessment. Too many corners are still cut and workers get injured as a result.  Demands on employees are ramped up and the consequences are not thought through.

The bad employer, who has had their production lines stand still and seen their profits nosedive in lockdown, will be very tempted to make up for lost time when workers return. If there is a lack of clarity on the minimum standards employees can expect, there will be exploitation. In the context of Covid-19 that could mean infection, illness and even death.

Legally, workers cannot be penalised for refusing to work in circumstances that pose a serious and imminent danger to their health, but that is little comfort to the employee whose employer is making demands and expecting unsafe working to deliver on them. That is why understandable, reliable and easily enforceable health and safety instruction from the top of government is so important.

Workers must be provided with safe systems of work based on careful analysis of individual workplaces and working practices. Of course adequate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) must be provided but PPE is the very last resort – the likelihood of exposure to COVID-19 must be tackled first.

That means – at the very least -clear rules on minimum social distancing, public transport that doesn’t put those running it or using it in danger and accessible and responsive enforcement. To have any teeth, those rules must be enforceable; a vague wish list that employers ‘may want to consider’ just won’t do. Government, led by a faction of the Conservative party that has excelled in simple messaging from the Brexit debate onwards, must not be allowed to get away with a lack of clarity now.

The consequences are far too grave.