The message in the Health and Safety Executive’s 19 November 2020 email could not have been more clear. Firms in criminal breach of Covid-19 rules, even where hundreds of workers are infected and workers may even have died, have impunity. With the pandemic at full force for over six months, HSE told Hazards: “We can confirm no prosecutions have been initiated as a result of Covid-19 to date.”
Only 136 legally-binding notices requiring firms to make Covid-related safety improvements had been issued in the period since the start of the pandemic until 4 November 2020, it said.
“As the official work-related Covid death rate runs at about a death a day, HSE’s strategy has been to be rarely seen and barely heard.”
October 2020 alone saw over 1,400 ‘acute respiratory infection’ clusters involving two or more workers in UK workplaces, almost exclusively involving Covid-19. The Public Health England figures do not include workers infected in care homes, hospitals, educational settings, prisons, food outlets and restaurants.
An HSE spokesperson told Hazards: “It’s encouraging to see the vast majority of duty holders are trying their best to be Covid-secure. Those that we are finding need to do more are in the main bringing up their standards after further guidance and support from HSE.
“Where minimum standards are not being met, we will take action, which includes enforcement. The action we’ve taken so far typically relates to social distancing and cleaning regimes.”
Trumped by the USA
The US safety regulator OSHA has been excoriated by the media, workplace safety experts and Democrats for being ‘missing in action’.
But in the same period up to the end of October, OSHA under the corporate-courting, regulation averse Trump administration issued 179 Covid-related citations and proposed fines totalling $2,496,768 (£1.9m). That figure doesn’t include actions taken by individual state OSHA regulators.
If OSHA is missing in action, HSE has disappeared entirely. In a breakdown obtained by Hazards of HSE’s 4,892 interventions, none (0 per cent) were prosecutions,
136 (<3 per cent) were legally-binding notices and 865 (18 per cent) were ‘written correspondence’. For the remainder – 3,891, or 80 per cent – the HSE’s intervention was limited to ‘verbal advice’.
HSE records show that, under the RIDDOR regulations, for the period from 10 April to 14 November 2020, “14,428 occupational disease notifications of Covid-19 in workers have been reported to enforcing authorities (HSE and LAs), including 189 death notifications. Of these reports, around a third have been made since early September in the second wave of employer reporting of occupational cases of Covid-19.”
AWFUL PICTURE The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) was set up to fail by a decade of Conservative budget cuts. But with Covid-19 deaths running at 3.4 times the rate of all other workplace fatalities, enforcement action and accountability has virtually disappeared.
These RIDDOR reports are largely at the discretion of employers. Far more will have slipped through the net, unreported or misattributed to ‘community transmission’.
And it was getting worse. Weekly workplace Covid-19 cases reported to HSE increased week-on-week from mid-September to mid-November, and remain high.
The week ending 14 November 2020 saw 1,026 reports – only just behind the all-time highs of 1,183 in the last week in April and 1,062 in the first week in May at the height of the first wave. Eleven work-related Covid-19 deaths were reported that week, the highest weekly toll since the end of May. The following week also saw 11 reported deaths.
Research published online in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine in December 2020 found UK healthcare workers were seven times as likely to have severe Covid-19 – defined as hospitalised or dying – as workers in ‘non-essential’ jobs. Those working in social care and education were 84 per cent more likely, while ‘other’ essential workers had a 60 per cent higher risk of developing severe Covid-19 [see: Essential jobs linked to severe Covid infection].
As hundreds died and tens of thousands fell ill as a result of workplace exposures, HSE’s preferred response was to have a little word.
Workers air concerns
As HSE opts for gentle persuasion, a major Covid crisis is unfolding. Internal HSE reports obtained by Hazards reveal outbreaks are racing through Britain’s workplaces. And the number of workplace outbreaks is rising.
In the last week in September 2020 there were 175 outbreaks in HSE enforced workplaces. The week to 26 October saw 281. By 23 November, outbreak reports in HSE-enforced workplaces hit 433 for that single week, a rate of over 60 work outbreaks per day.
The eight weeks from 6 October to 23 November 2020 saw HSE informed of over 2,000 workplace outbreaks. The same period saw over 5,000 workplace Covid infection cases reported to HSE, including 44 deaths. The officially reported work-related Covid-19 death rate, in a RIDDOR system criticised for excluding thousands of cases, is running at about a death a day. As the country faces an unprecedented workplace health crisis, HSE’s strategy is to be rarely seen and barely heard.
While HSE is employing a virtual enforcement amnesty, workers concerns are growing. A 2 November 2020 report from the Resolution Foundation found more than one-in-three (35 per cent) workers have an active concern about the transmission of Covid-19 in their workplace – with low-paid workers most likely to be worried, but least likely to raise concerns or see their complaints resolved.
‘Failed Safe?’ draws on an online YouGov survey of 6,061 adults across the UK. It found that nearly half (47 per cent) of workers that spend time in the workplace rate the risk of Covid-19 transmission at work as fairly or very high.
Those most worried about Covid in the workplace are often the least likely to raise concerns about it, the study found. For example, the workers in the lowest weekly pay quintile (the lowest fifth) are far less likely to raise Covid-related safety complaints as those in the highest pay quintile (52 per cent, compared to 72 per cent).
The lowest paid workers are around half as likely to report their Covid complaint was fully resolved as the highest paid workers (15 per cent, compared to 29 per cent).
ALL WRONG The Health and Safety Executive’s new workplace injury and ill-health statistics have revealed a major increase in the numbers being harmed at work. The figures show 1.6 million workers suffering from work-related ill-health, up from 1.4m the previous year; 638,000 were new cases of work-related ill-health, up over 28 per cent from 497,000 cases in 2018/19. The non-fatal injury toll was up 20 per cent on the previous year, to 693,000 non-fatal injuries at work – almost 2,000 every day, or more than one every minute, 24/7, year round. more
The report notes that the Health and Safety Executive entered the pandemic severely under-resourced, with its budget per workplace under its inspection remit more than halving over the past decade, from £224 in 2010/11 to just £100 in 2020/21.
Lindsay Judge, research director at the Resolution Foundation, said: “Given many workers’ limited ability to get employers to address Covid concerns, the UK needs a strong enforcement regime to ensure that workplaces are as safe as can be. But instead health and safety resources have been cut, inspections have been slow, and Covid-related enforcement notices are few and far between.”
The report recommends: “More weight should be placed on the employee voice as a source of intelligence to inform enforcement targeting.”
It found workers were twice as likely to seek advice on workplace Covid-19 concerns from their union as from HSE, far higher than for any other source of information.
Dismissing problems
The employee voice, though, has often been silenced through the pandemic, an analysis of reports to the legal charity Protect found. The charity’s records show 41 per cent of employees raising Covid-19 concerns were ignored by their employers and 20 per cent of whistleblowers were dismissed.
The charity said it has been inundated with Covid-19 whistleblowing concerns, many of an extremely serious nature. Its report, ‘The best warning system: Whistleblowing during Covid-19’ examines over 600 Covid-19 calls to the Protect advice line between March and September 2020.
ESSENTIALLY WRONG UK health care workers are seven times more likely to develop severe Covid-19 – so bad they are hospitalised or die – than workers in non-essential jobs, a study has found. Other essential jobs in social care, education and transport also had greatly increased risks. more
Commenting on the 29 October 2020 publication of the report, Protect chief executive Liz Gardiner said: “There is no excuse for employers to ignore whistleblowers, but during a global pandemic, it is a danger for us all when concerns are not acted on and the consequences could be a matter of life and death.”
The organisation is calling for a penalty regime where an organisation can be fined or sanctioned for breaching the whistleblowing standards. It also wants “new legal standards on all regulators to ensure they deal effectively and promptly with whistleblowing concerns being raised to them – and regulators doing much more to drive up standards of whistleblowing arrangements amongst entities they regulate.”
HSE, though, has stepped back from the fray. The 189 Covid-related deaths reported under RIDDOR in the six months from April 2020 dwarf the full year all fatalities figure of 111 deaths for 2019/20.
An unprecedented work-related loss of life has been met with resignation and inaction by HSE. But with few resources and a culture that has evolved by government policy from regulator to adviser, it was perhaps unreasonable to expect anything more.
Workers are dying for something better.
Essential jobs linked to severe Covid infection
Healthcare workers are seven times as likely to have severe Covid-19 as workers in ‘non-essential’ jobs, a study has found. The risk is twice as high for those with jobs in the ‘social and education’ and transport sectors.
The research, published online in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine in December 2020 focuses on the first UK-wide lockdown and compared the risk of developing severe Covid-19 infection in essential and non-essential workers. It linked data from the UK Biobank study, Covid-19 test results from Public Health England, and recorded deaths for the period 16 March to 26 July 2020. Severe infection was defined as a positive test result for SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for Covid-19, while in hospital, or death attributable to the virus.
Compared with non-essential workers, those working in healthcare roles were more than 7 times as likely to have severe infection. And those working in social care and education were 84 per cent as likely to do so; while ‘other’ essential workers had a 60 per cent higher risk of developing severe Covid-19.
With the exception of transport workers, for whom heightened risk of severe Covid-19 infection was linked to socioeconomic status, the findings held true even after accounting for potentially influential risk factors, including lifestyle, co-existing health problems, and work patterns. Non-white essential workers had the highest risk of severe Covid-19 infection, the study found.
The authors from Glasgow, Syracuse and Limerick universities, conclude: “Our findings reinforce the need for adequate health and safety arrangements and provision of PPE for essential workers, especially in the health and social care sectors. The health and wellbeing of essential workers is critical to limiting the spread and managing the burden of global pandemics.”
| • | Miriam Mutambudzi, Claire Niedwiedz, Ewan Beaton Macdonald and others. Occupation and risk of severe COVID-19: prospective cohort study of 120 075 UK Biobank participants, Occupational & Environmental Medicine, published online first 9 December 2020. doi:10.1136/oemed-2020-106731. |
Work harm soars, enforcement crashes
The Health and Safety Executive’s new workplace injury and ill-health statistics have revealed a major increase in the numbers being harmed at work. HSE’s annual statistics report published on 4 November 2020 includes figures for work-related ill health, workplace injuries, working days lost, enforcement action taken, and the associated costs to Great Britain.
The figures show 1.6 million workers suffering from work-related ill-health, up from 1.4m the previous year. Within this total, 638,000 were new cases of work-related ill-health, up over 28 per cent from 497,000 cases in 2018/19. The non-fatal injury toll has seen a 20 per cent increase on the previous year, rising to 693,000 workers sustaining non-fatal injuries in 2019/2020 from the figure of 581,000 in 2018/19.
The statistics, compiled from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and other sources, reveal that in Great Britain in the 2019/2020 period there were 111 fatal injuries at work, a record low, while work-related injuries and ill-health rose sharply.
Despite the dramatic rise in workers harmed by work, only 325 cases were prosecuted and resulted in a conviction, less a third the level in 2000/01. The convictions tally represented a 12 per cent fall from the 2018/19 figure of 364 successful convictions. Enforcement notices issued by HSE have also fallen sharply. In 2019/20 notices issued by HSE fell by over a quarter (26 per cent) to 7,075, down from 8,936 in 2018/19, continuing a long-term downward trend.
In 2019/2020, HSE estimates the economic cost to Great Britain totalled £16.2 billion, up from £15bn the previous year. There were 38.8 million working days lost in 2019/20, up from 28.2 million in 2018/19.
The safety regulator reported that more than half of Britain’s working days lost in 2019/20 were due to mental ill-health.
NO! NO! NO!
No prosecutions. No leadership. No clue. Hazards looks at the impact of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) keeping a safe distance from enforcement activity as Covid-19 raged in the workplace.
| Contents | |
| • | Introduction |
| • | Trumped by the USA |
| • | Workers air concerns |
| • | Dismissing problems |
| Other stories | |
| • | Essential jobs linked to severe Covid infection |
| • | Work harm soars, enforcement crashes |
| Hazards webpages | |
| • | Hazards news |
| • | Infections |
| • | Work and health |
See the dedicated Hazards coronavirus resources pages.