Social Security

Kim Johnson Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab) [V]]

I welcome the opportunity to speak in this important debate and recognise the thousands of Liverpool constituents affected by asbestos-related diseases. I would like to start by paying tribute to the fantastic work of the Merseyside Asbestos Victim Support Group, which has assisted thousands of victims in obtaining welfare benefits and civil compensation, as well as providing invaluable community support for victims and dependants of meso and other asbestos-related conditions.

I welcome this move to increase payments in line with inflation, and the uprating being applied to all disability benefits. However, while I welcome the fact that it has been regular practice to agree the uplift, we must make moves to ensure that the annual uprating of the schemes is placed on a statutory footing and that more is done to ensure parity of payments to dependants. Can the Minister tell us what the Government’s latest estimate is of the cost of providing equal payments to dependants, at a time when covid has left cancer patients waiting longer for diagnoses, treatments and surgery as well as facing the heightened health risk of contracting the virus itself? The automatic uplift is especially welcome in this difficult context.

Coronavirus has revitalised our focus on occupational health hazards, and I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the incredible key workers who are continuing to lay their lives on the line every single day to keep our country running and to care for those in need, and especially to the thousands who have sadly paid the ultimate price. The pandemic has also highlighted the vital role of the Health and Safety Executive in keeping us safe at work. However, cuts over the last 10 years by the Tory Government have seen the number of health and safety inspectors drop by a third. Those cuts have left workers at risk in unsafe conditions.

Despite figures released by Public Health England last month showing that there had been 3,500 covid outbreaks in workplaces including offices, factories and construction sites since last July, the Government have defended their decision not to place covid in the highest risk category, and the HSE enforcement database has revealed that no covid-related prohibition notices have been issued since the pandemic broke out. A decade of devastating cuts has turned the Government’s health and safety watchdog into a lapdog, and without better funding and increased enforcement, which can only come from placing coronavirus in the highest risk category, workers’ lives will continue to be at risk.

The TUC has called covid

“the most serious workplace safety hazard in a generation”.

More than 10,000 workers have died from the virus and many others are now living with long-term health problems as a result of it, yet the Government have so far made an extra £14 million available to the HSE during the pandemic, which does not even begin to scratch the surface of the cuts of more than £100 million in the past decade. I want to take this opportunity to call on the Government to recognise the need to keep workers safe in their workplaces and to take significant steps to provide the HSE with the funding and powers it needs to keep our key workers safe as they work to keep us safe.