Working people in Scotland suffered the “lethal consequences” of Holyrood’s pandemic response being restricted by the devolution settlement and UK-wide austerity, the Covid-19 inquiry has heard.

The general secretary of the Scottish Trade Unions Congress (STUC) said the Scottish government, led by the Scottish National Party, was unable to take action on unemployment and workers’ health and safety issues due to budget cuts and limits on its devolved powers.

“Years of brutal austerity have fundamentally altered our public services, with lethal consequences,” Roz Foyer of the STUC told today’s Module 2A hearing, which looks at Scotland’s decision-making and political governance during the pandemic.

“Workers across our economy, especially in health and social care, were dangerously exposed to the virus through a deadly combination of understaffing, PPE, shortages and poor pandemic planning from central government with a Health and Safety Executive that was hamstrung by budget cuts and with limits on devolution.”

Working people were “caught in the crossfire”, she added, with a decade of austerity and recent cuts to public services having left services “ill-equipped” and with “no resilience” to meet the needs of the pandemic.

While these cuts and austerity policies may have been caused by the UK government, they were “certainly followed and implemented by the Scottish government”, said Foyer.

A previous module of the inquiry heard that Scottish health chiefs had raised concerns about access to personal protective equipment (PPE) two years before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I think that PPE reserves are something that must be taken into account in the future,” Foyer said today.

Protecting workers

The STUC raised concerns around workers’ ability to isolate after contracting Covid-19 in early summer 2020, as the first lockdown restrictions were being lifted in Scotland.

Foyer told the inquiry how the body had warned Scotland’s then first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, that the UK government’s statutory sick pay “was not adequate”.

“To some extent, issues like statutory sick pay were not in their [the Scottish government’s] gift to resolve – that was an issue that the UK government needed to resolve,” said Foyer.

After correspondence with the STUC on the issue, the Scottish government wrote to the UK government about it. It was agreed that “something should be done to improve statutory sick pay”, Foyer said, but there was no “shift on that”.

In June 2020, the Scottish government created a fund “from its own budget” to give social care workers – whether agency, private, voluntary or public – access to sick pay while isolating, Foyer said.

She added that budgetary constraints meant this could not be extended to all workers in Scotland.

Workplace safety

The Health and Safety Executive, the UK’s workplace health and safety regulator, did not engage appropriately with the Scottish government on workplace guidance during the pandemic, Foyer added.

There was a “missed opportunity” to share information with employers and workers, especially in workplaces with unions and union representatives who could disseminate guidance.

Given the long-term consequences of Covid-19, such as the death of a family member or long Covid, employers should have treated the virus as an industrial injury akin to a long-term health condition or asbestos-related injury, she said.

“Key workers put themselves and their families at risk to provide essential services at a time of real crisis,” said Foyer. “Many of those workers were on poverty pay rates, the majority were women and disproportionately they came from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds.

“The sad reality is that too many of those workers lost their lives protecting us but I don't think we protected them enough.”

Data issues

Later in the hearing, the former chief statistician for the Scottish government, Roger Halliday, said that in June 2020 there had been difficulties accessing data from the Department of Work and Pensions in Westminster that would have helped Holyrood to understand how the pandemic was affecting people’s finances and welfare.

Halliday agreed when questioned that such data would have helped Scotland’s pandemic response but that it had been difficult to “come to an arrangement” on it – a situation that he said has not been resolved.

Asked by the inquiry if there was a lack of data at the start of the pandemic on how Covid-19 affected at-risk and vulnerable groups, including ethnic minorities, Scott Heald, the head of profession for statistics at Public Health Scotland, said this was a fair comment and that this is still “a work in progress”.

Heald and Halliday, both of whose work helped inform reports to the Scottish government and a public daily Covid-19 dashboard showing information such as the number of cases and hospitalisations, also agreed that there had been data gaps in early 2020. This included a lack of data on the number of people being transferred from hospitals to care homes or between the community and care homes.

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