Long Covid: Impact on the Workforce

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, which brings back many memories, as the hon. Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) said. There will be no one in the Chamber today who is not reflecting on those who have been lost over the past two years. As of last week, we have lost 3,200 people in Northern Ireland and 157,000 across the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is fair to say that every family and every person has been touched by the loss of someone to covid. We cannot help but think of those numbers in this debate.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) on setting the scene and on her hard work with others on the APPG to bring this matter to a head and to highlight and better understand these issues.

I was first elected as a councillor in 1985, and I sat in the Northern Ireland Assembly for 12 consecutive years. When I first became a Member of the Legislative Assembly in 1998, one of the biggest issues in my office was benefits, and it continues to be the biggest issue—benefits, housing and planning, in that order.

The hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) talked about ME, and others will recognise this story. When I was an MLA, people with ME would come to me when they had to fill in benefits forms. They said, “My doctor says there is nothing wrong with me.” And I said, “Are there any other doctors in the practice you could speak to?” I am not disrespecting doctors, as they are excellent people, but there was no understanding of ME then. We had to fight incredible battles to get the evidence to prove these people had ME. They said they had chronic fatigue, and they did. It was called ME, and it was a disease. That supports what the hon. Lady, the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon and others have said.

I am not saying anyone here is special, but I commend the hon. Member for City of Chester for his very personal story, which the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) also mentioned. His personal story resonates, and he knows that I missed him. I said to him, “We missed you. Where have you been?” He did not tell me everything he had been through, but he told me some of it—he told it all today. Others in the House have been affected, too, so we thank him for his story.

Although I have been double-jabbed and boosted, I was informed by a test after getting home from the House on an early Saturday morning that I had covid. I could not understand it, because I had no symptoms. A lady from the NHS back home phoned me on the Saturday morning and said, “Mr Shannon, how do you feel?” And I said, “Would you be shocked to know that I feel great?” She said, “Well, do you have any symptoms?” And I said, “I have no symptoms. As a matter of fact, I do not think I have felt this well in the past two weeks.” The lady could not understand it, and she told me that I was asymptomatic. I am not sure what that means—

[Wendy Chamberlain]

It means you are special.

[Jim Shannon]

My wife says I am special. I thank the hon. Lady for being most complimentary.

I did not have any symptoms, but I isolated as instructed, because I follow the rules—that is the way to do it. Although I was fortunate and blessed to be asymptomatic and not ill with covid, that is not the case for the many people who did not come through covid unscathed. We have all mentioned that 1.5 million people, 2.4% of the population of this great nation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, have self-reported ongoing covid symptoms that have persisted for more than four weeks, as of 31 January 2022. Forty-five per cent of them, 685,000 people, first had or suspect they first had covid-19 at least one year previously.

I think of the wall outside St Thomas’s Hospital, where some ladies from Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere met us two or three months ago. I was walking to the hotel one night, many months ago, and passed the wall. It is a wonderful memorial to those who have passed on, and it is good that those ladies and others organised the wall to give people an outlet for their feelings.

Two years after the first lockdown, the long-term effects of covid are becoming clear. We need to put protection in place for employees with this long-term illness that doctors cannot pinpoint. These people struggle daily to live with it, but they are not protected by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.

This Government should urgently produce guidelines for employers in both the private sector and the public sector on managing the impact of long covid among their workforce. We should also launch a compensation scheme, as the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon mentioned, for all frontline key workers living with long covid. I agree with the APPG that the scheme should mirror the armed forces compensation scheme, which we discussed on Monday night, recognising the relapsing nature of long covid and going beyond the existing pay scheme.

Long covid is a debilitating illness. There is a gentlemen I have known ever since he came to Ards. He is the pastor of a church in my constituency, and he almost lost his life to covid. He is 6 feet 4 inches, and this big, strapping man was brought to his knees. He walked up the hill to Stormont in the “Voice for the Voiceless” protest, and I thought he would have to lie down. Long covid has hit him incredibly hard. He has one day of good and then three days of bad. He has headaches, stomach upsets, blood clots, reduced lung function and chronic fatigue. His church is happy to allow him to rest as he needs. Had he worked for another employer—I will not mention them—he would not have that protection. We must improve the current care pathways for long covid, with a view to ensuring the healthcare system is capable of meeting current and future demand.

In a Westminster Hall debate, I mentioned a constituent who had brain fog. The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), has lived that. It is important to say that one of our friends and colleagues in this House has lived with long covid and has found it incredibly difficult, as have others, to deal with. You are not far from our thoughts—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

He is not far.

[Jim Shannon]

Sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am probably getting carried away in the emotion of the occasion.

Has the Minister’s Department been able to collect the data on those with long covid? I want to see flexibility for those who are in full-time employment and employment guidelines, to which the hon. Member for Putney referred. I think all hon. Members present want to see them.

Perhaps the Minister can confirm whether the lessons have been learned from covid-19. As the hon. Member for North East Fife said, other diseases will come along and we must be prepared. What we learn from this disease will make us smarter for the next one. I put on record, because it is important when we are talking about these things, how well the Government reacted with the compensation schemes for businesses and the covid-19 vaccine. Those are the positives that gave us heart when we were down in the dumps.

Roughly 4% of the UK’s workforce has had long covid and 82 million work days were lost due to long covid absence in NHS England between March 2020 and September 2021. The real figure may be higher as it was not classified as a reason for absence at the start of the pandemic. It is clear that the effect on business is real, which is why we are having this debate, and that there must be structures in place to deal with it.

Again, I thank the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon and all hon. Members for their contributions. I look forward to the contributions from the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows) and the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish. The Minister is a friend to us all and I look forward to hearing what he says.