Lessons from the Covid-19 Inquiry
After hearing from over 350 witnesses and examining over 3 million pages of documentary evidence, the Covid Inquiry came to an end on 5th March 2026.
The TUC contributed throughout as a “core participant” and presented an important report on the experience of the UK’s 10.6 million keyworkers which should be required reading for safety reps. The TUC’s evidence details the extraordinary levels of avoidable suffering that we endured during the pandemic and how the bosses’ profit-grabbing undermined workplace safety. It described how Black and minority ethnic workers, women, disabled people, migrant workers, and insecurely employed workers did a large proportion of the work to keep essential services running and suffered the greatest harm.
The heavy burden of death and life-altering disability suffered by the working-class, and these workers in particular, was not an inevitable consequence of living through a dangerous time. It is an inevitable consequence of work-from-home bosses and their political representatives prioritising profit over human life.
The pandemic was primarily a crisis of workplace safety. Almost all household-to-household social mixing took place in workplaces, our own and other peoples (public transport, the supermarket, the care home, the hospital, the school, etc.). Ensuring the highest standards of workplace infection control would have saved lives and meant we could have avoided many of the harsher restrictions, such as school closures and bans on visits to care homes. Instead of decent workplace infection control and relative freedom, we had substandard controls in the workplace and huge sacrifice.
The Inquiry criticised the government for its delay in locking down in March 2020. It estimates that 23,000 lives might have been saved if we had locked down a week earlier. But it also found that lockdowns might have been avoided all together if the public health effort had focused on supporting sick and infectious people and their households to isolate. Very little effort went towards supporting isolation.
We entered the pandemic after decades of outsourcing and casualisation in essential services. 40% of keyworkers, including many health and social care workers, had no occupational sick pay and could not afford to isolate. For these workers the most they would get was Statutory Sick Pay, which was less than £100 a week. Despite the extraordinary sacrifices that working-class people made to stop the spread of infection, employers were not willing to sacrifice a few hundred quid in sick pay. In addition to this financial pressure, the TUC gave evidence from various sectors where workers were actively bullied into work with known Covid infection. These exploitative employment practices systematically drove infectious workers into our workplaces and public buildings and undermined the public health effort. The government were aware and did nothing.
In March 2020, Matt Hancock admitted on BBC’s Question Time that £94.25 a week Statutory Sick Pay was “not enough to live on”. In the same month, the Department of Health issued instructions to all NHS Trusts to “ensure everyone working in the building can isolate on full pay”. Some NHS Trusts did organise full isolation pay for bank and outsourced workers but the provision was patchy, not well advertised and quietly withdrawn in July 2022. Despite the Department of Health recognising the UK’s miserly SSP rate undermined the public health effort, government did not follow this logic through and extend full isolation pay to all keyworkers. When the peak of infections passed, the NHS did not learn the lesson and insist on all workers having full sick pay but reverted to the pre-pandemic status quo.
By September 2020, the Test and Trace service raised the alarm that less than 1 in 5 people were compliant with isolation rules. They identified that main reason for non-compliance was financial hardship. The government’s response was completely inadequate. They organised a limited, means tested isolation pay for part time, low wage workers, and subsidies for care homes to pay full isolation pay based on voluntary opt-in by care home providers.
Recent efforts by the Labour government to improve SSP have fallen well short of what is necessary. Under the new Employment Rights Act SSP is paid from the first (rather than the fourth) day of sickness. But the poverty rate of £123.25 a week or 80% wages (whichever is lower!) it is still drives sick and infectious people into work. Contrast this to Germany where SSP is paid at 100% wages for the first 6 weeks.
Alongside the inadequate efforts to isolate the infectious, workplace safety was further undermined by the absolute denial of airborne transmission. In March 2020, the World Health Organisation set the tone for all public health authorities with a now infamous tweet: “FACT: COVID-19 is NOT airborne”. There was never any scientific evidence for this claim and as evidence for airborne transmission accumulated public health authorities quietly backtracked. In many ways, the quiet backtracking was as reckless as the initial denial and led to no change in practice. The Covid Inquiry is damning of the UK Infection Prevention and Control Cell that set the NHS guidance arguing its unevidenced assumptions, lack of caution, and lack of accountability “led to a failure properly to protect patients and healthcare workers against the risks posed by Covid-19.” Still, none of the members of this cell have been called to account for this failure and continue to operate at the highest levels of the health service.
The distinction between droplet and airborne transmission is a practical one for workplace safety. Droplets are large particles that fall to the floor after 1-2 metres of leaving the airway. Droplet-only transmission can be controlled with 2 metre distancing, which costs employers nothing. Loose-fitting face coverings catch droplets as they leave the airway adding additional protection as source control. Aerosols are smaller particles that remain suspended in the air like smoke. Airborne transmission requires employers to ensure good ventilation and, where necessary, air cleaning technology. Health and safety reps, armed with CO2 monitors, have found that even in the NHS there are many buildings with inadequate ventilation that do not meet legal standards. Six years on from the first infections and almost no progress has been made on clean air in the workplace.
The failures of workplace infection control documented by the Covid Inquiry have not emerged after the event. Thousands of workers complained to the Health and Safety Executive during the pandemic but the regulator took almost no action. The HSE issued 94% less enforcement notices in 2020 than they did in the previous year. While over 15,000 working aged people died and rates of hospital-acquired Covid-19 infection in mental health and social care settings were over 60%, the HSE effectively shut up shop and allowed employers to act with inpunity.
The TUC submission to the Covid Inquiry is extremely important for understanding the greatest crisis in workplace safety in a generation but the report tends to treat workers as passive victims rather than active participants, organising and shaping the pandemic response. Many of us were actively organising, insisting on our right to life and an evidence-based approach to workplace safety. Our victories, though small, saved lives.
The most significant action was the threat of many thousands of school workers to refuse work on safety grounds in January 2021. This significant act of collective defiance was decisive in forcing the government to announce the third national lockdown. There are many more examples of organised workers standing up to their management and winning safety critical improvements. For instance, NHS safety reps in East London have organised a successful campaign to win full sick pay for outsourced workers and some air cleaning technology on wards.
While keyworkers were denied basic workplace safety like sick pay and legally compliant ventilation, capitalist governments used the cover of the pandemic to organise a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to idle property owners. In the UK, the Tory government loaded up on debt in order to give over £350 billion in “business support”. There was also a massive expansion of the quantitative easing and other fiscal measures designed to inflate asset prices and maintain the profitability of private capital. As global economic output fell by about 10%, and incomes of 99% of people fell, the world’s richest 10 men doubled their wealth by $821 billion. Around the world, cost of paying off this debt is being loaded onto the working class, with austerity and cuts to essential public services.
Against this profit-grabbing we need to organise. The extraordinary efforts of many trade union reps and working-class activists in spreading evidence-based information on clean air and sick pay and insisting the lessons of the pandemic are learnt has not stopped. We have still not good ventilation and full sick pay in most workplaces, including in the NHS and social care sector. This is not only a problem for future pandemics but its a problem now. Although the government stopped collecting the data in 2024, evidence suggests rates of long Covid continue to rise.
The pandemic gave us a very bitter lesson that the ruling class will always try to load the social costs of a crisis onto workers and the most vulnerable. But it also provided very many examples of workers’ solidarity and organisation saving lives and winning safety critical improvements. Both lessons need to be learnt by many millions of workers if we are to avoid similar suffering in the increasingly uncertain years ahead.
