Covid-19 Inquiry

Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as I was the leader of the TUC when the pandemic struck and when the TUC sought and secured core status at the public inquiry.

Here is the hard truth that the public inquiry has revealed: faced with the greatest challenge that our country has experienced since the Second World War, the UK’s defences were weak and deficient. Years of severe spending cuts—so-called austerity policies—left public services woefully ill equipped and underprepared, and now we are paying the price. This is proof, if ever it were needed, that austerity is a false economy.

The report of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, found that public health, the NHS and the social care sector’s capacity to respond to the pandemic was “constrained” by funding, and that public service infrastructure was “not fit for purpose” and struggled with “severe staff shortages”. We all know that the human cost of austerity was high. Key workers on the front line of this war were sent over the top, without even proper PPE. Tens of thousands of unfilled vacancies left the staff who were on duty stretched beyond breaking point.

We now know that billions were wasted on VIP-lane Covid contracts, but that money was not found to fill vacancies by improving pay. In other words, there was a failure to invest in a workforce that would be fit to face a pandemic.

Throughout the pandemic, I spent many hours listening to key workers who were exhausted and demoralised. Endemic low pay, reliance on zero-hour and agency contracts, and real-wage reductions, had seen experienced staff walk away and made it much harder to attract new staff. Pressure on the front line was intolerable, not least when staff going to work every day knew that not only their own health but that of their families was at risk.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, public services did not magically bounce back. On the contrary, NHS hospital waiting lists reached record levels. Ministers, who had once praised key workers, quickly turned to blaming them. Rather than sit down and negotiate with staff unions in good faith, Ministers in effect walked out. After years of putting up with falling living standards, staff voted to take record levels of industrial action.

Instead of dealing with the root causes of discontent, the then Government sought to suppress the symptoms, banning strikes by the back door with the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act. In fact, no public service employer ever made use of that new law because, as Ministers were warned many times, to do so would only have poured fuel on the fire.

I hope to hear whether the Minister agrees that an explicit part of any resilience plan should be good industrial relations. Securing industrial peace is vital to the future of public service resilience. Positive industrial relations require mutual respect and all parties being willing to meet and negotiate. More than that, they require a recognition that the foundation for good public services is fair treatment of the workforce.

That is why our new Government deserve credit for taking the sensible road of honouring pay review body recommendations, actively resolving disputes, taking at least small steps towards pay restoration and promising a new deal for working people. By the time the next crisis strikes, we must have learned our lesson.

As the public inquiry report found, a failure to invest in systems of protection, including for staff who provide services, would dangerously damage the UK’s preparedness and resilience in the future. That is why criticism in some quarters of our Government for settling public service disputes is, frankly, so short-sighted, cynical and crass. Does my noble friend the Minister share my dismay that these critics have apparently forgotten the findings of the Covid public inquiry so soon? Any mature assessment of the lessons from the pandemic is that a Government working hard to restore full staffing of public services and harmonious industrial relations is key to our future resilience and response.

We must go further. A second key lesson is that we must mend our broken sick pay system. Today, UK statutory sick pay is just over £116 a week, ranked as one of the worst rates in Europe. The Government have inherited a system that requires a three-day waiting period, which leaves families with no savings literally penniless. Around 1 million workers who earn less than the lower earnings limit—two thirds of them women, and often on the minimum wage—are excluded from statutory sick pay altogether. During the pandemic, this system presented many workers with the Hobson’s choice of going into work when they were ill and should not have done, risking spreading the virus, or staying home unable to afford to feed their families. In my experience, this was particularly true for workers on insecure contracts, where staying home brings the added risk of losing out on offers of future shifts. We will never know exactly how many preventable illnesses and deaths were caused by our inadequate sick pay system, but it is a mistake that our country cannot afford to repeat. That is why I am proud that Labour is committed to ensuring that statutory sick pay is genuinely universal and that it will be paid from day one.

The final lesson I want to highlight, which has been raised by others and was acknowledged in the public inquiry report, is that high levels of inequality based on class, race, geography and disability left the UK particularly vulnerable to the virus. The evidence is clear: inequality fuelled the spread of the pandemic and the number of preventable deaths. The Covid bereaved families’ campaign has expressed concern that, so far, the inquiry has not paid enough attention to tackling that underlying driver of poor public health in the UK. I believe that that concern is justified, but the point is not just to acknowledge the problem of poverty and inequality but to fix it. From improving housing to health, and education to employment, there is much work to do. For sure, we owe it to those who lost their lives, including key workers, not just to repair and rebuild our public services but to build a fairer, more equal Britain.