Poor sick pay costs lives

Dido Harding, Head of Test and Trace, has told the Covid-19 inquiry: “The UK spent much less than other developed countries enabling disadvantaged people to self isolate. If we had allocated more of the NHS test and trace budget to isolation support, I strongly suspect that fewer would have died and infection rates would have been lower with all the benefits that would have brought.”

Of course, Harding, a Tory peer and former boss of Sainsbury’s, is talking in ruling-class euphemisms. By “disadvantaged people” she means low-paid workers without occupational sick pay. During the high point of the pandemic, workers without occupational sick pay received less than £100 a week statutory sick pay if they had to isolate. Perhaps as many as 12 million keyworkers, including most care workers and a large number of outsourced hospital workers, were in that terrible position. These people were “disadvantaged” by employers who prioritised profit over stopping the spread of infection.

Alongside Malta, Britain has the lowest rate of statutory sick pay in Europe and by a big margin. Labour’s reforms to SSP (now just £118.25 a week) do nothing to change that. Without the financial means to take time off, workers with known or suspected infection drag themselves into work.

Harding’s service picked up on this problem early in September 2020, when she reported to Parliament that less than one in five people were compliant with isolation rules. This was a striking figure, because compliance with other Covid measures (mask wearing, social distancing etc.) was very high (85-95%).

Harding lobbied the government for more isolation support at the time, but, she tells us, Rishi Sunak was ideologically opposed to increasing Statutory Sick Pay. At that time Test and Trace was spending up to £1 million a day on management consultants — enough to pay full isolation pay to over 15,000 minimum wage workers. It cost £29.5 billion in all, but there is no evidence Test and Trace reduced the rate of infection, if only because so many keyworkers could not afford to act on the information that the service provided.

Workers’ Liberty activists understood the importance of full sick pay for workplace safety in March 2020. Our trade unionists in local government, the NHS, the civil service and on London Underground won full Covid isolation pay for tens of thousands of low paid workers in our industries. We set up the Safe and Equal campaign to promote the need for full sick pay more widely. But mostly the wider movement did not respond.

The limited victories on sick pay between 2020-2022 have since been reversed. Workers in care homes and the NHS still need full sick pay as a basic infection control measure. More broadly, in our age of pandemics, the UK’s poverty rate of SSP creates a huge and avoidable vulnerability.