On 30 November 2021, GMLC gave expert evidence on Long Covid, employment and welfare rights to the APPG on Coronavirus. Latest estimates suggest 1.5m people in the UK are living with Long Covid, with over half a million experiencing symptoms for over a year. Alongside the Trades Union Congress, Long Covid sufferers and medical experts, GMLC made recommendations for law and policy reform to better support those experiencing Long Covid.
In March 2022, the APPG released its Long Covid report, summarising evidence and making official recommendations to the government. Here, GMLC campaign volunteer Judy Sutton and Campaigns Officer Kate Bradley consider the report and how far it will go to ease the problems Long Covid sufferers are facing in the benefits system and at work.
Summary of the All-Party Parliamentary Group report on Long Covid March 2022
Findings
- Long Covid is having a significant impact on the UK workforce (leading to an estimated 1.82 million days lost to health care workers alone, between March 2020 and September 2021).
- Long Covid is likely to become endemic within the population, alongside Covid-19 itself.
- People with Long Covid have difficulty seeking advice and support.
- Rigid phased returns to work and the denial of flexible working options are having a negative impact on those with Long Covid.
- Many people with Long Covid acquired it through occupational exposure.
- The failure to identify Covid-19 and Long Covid as an occupational disease is out of step with other European countries.
- Long Covid symptoms are wide-ranging.
- The current Long Covid pathways, including Long Covid clinics are inadequate and do not meet current demand.
- The absence of a legal definition for Long Covid is resulting in many Employment Tribunal claims.
- Classifying Long Covid as a disability could increase access to financial support and provide employment protections.
- Long Covid can have a significant impact on a child’s education and the response from schools has been very variable.
- Children with Long Covid also experience a wide range of symptoms, and these can differ from those of adults with Long Covid.
Recommendations
As a result of these findings the APPG made the following recommendations, which the government may or may not chose to implement. The UK government is asked to:
- Commit £100 million per annum to fund research into diagnostic and treatment pathways for people with Long Covid.
- Urgently produce guidelines for employers (private and public sector) for managing Long Covid in the workplace.
- Launch a compensation scheme for keyworkers living with Long Covid, which goes beyond the existing system of sick pay.
- Urgently review Long Covid care pathways to ensure Healthcare system is capable of meeting current and future demand.
- Propose a legal definition of Long Covid which recognises the relapsing and remitting nature of the condition and assess the applicability of existing disability provisions for people living with Long Covid.
- Accurately measure, report, and monitor the number of people, including children, living with Long Covid in the UK.
- Add Long Covid to the list of considerations when making public health policy.
- Launch specialised care pathways for children living with Long Covid.
- Issue guidance to schools on the management and support of pupils with Long Covid.
- Issue urgent guidance to medical practitioners on Long Covid in children and adults.
Evaluation
GMLC’s comments were specifically referenced in the report, and recommendations 2) and 5) appear to have been partly drawn from GMLC’s suggestions. This is promising and we hope that these recommendations are implemented. It would constitute a vast improvement on the current situation.
However, there are questions as to whether the recommendations go far enough to tackle the issues people with Long Covid are facing. Many of the recommendations are reporting and process-focused, leaving an enforcement-shaped hole. Guidance to employers is only useful if it can be enforced. This may leave employees with very few options due to weakened workers’ rights, the lack of free-to-access employment lawyers across the UK, and a long wait to get to the employment tribunals (currently standing at around 340 days).
GMLC urged the APPG to advise the government to quickly pass secondary legislation through Parliament to recognise Long Covid as a disability under the Equality Act 2010. After a long fight, this was recently achieved by campaigners in relation to the illness ME, another fluctuating medical condition which can be severe enough to hinder people’s daily lives. This would lead to additional protections in employment and welfare rights law, as it would enable workers and claimants with Long Covid to classify mistreatment as discrimination. The APPG proposed instead ‘a legal definition of Long Covid which recognises the relapsing and remitting nature of the condition’. This may help, but may not be enough if the definition does not create duties that are binding on organisations and employers.
Many of GMLC’s other suggestions were not included in the recommendations. This is particularly true for those comments which relate to the wider contexts of a failing social welfare system. The government would need to go much further to support Long Covid sufferers in the long-term: to increase access to justice, reform packages of rights across housing, benefits and employment, and reverse harmful cuts that have decimated the social safety net for disabled people.
The majority of the APPG’s recommendations leave the government to determine and implement how they would like to apply them. This requires a trust in the current system that has not been borne out by recent government actions on Covid-19, who are asking the population to ‘live with the virus’ rather than implementing measures to reduce transmission and support Covid survivors.
The APPG propose that the government should consider Long Covid an occupational disease. This would be a welcome acknowledgement for those who acquired Covid-19 and Long Covid in the workplace, but it would be unusual on the current list of occupational diseases, as most official occupational diseases are not the result of infectious illnesses caught at work. This would be an interesting precedent.
The APPG recommend the government launch a compensation scheme which ‘goes beyond’ the existing system of sick pay, but only for keyworkers. GMLC discouraged an approach that favours keyworkers alone in any support schemes, as it risks excluding those who official systems do not recognise as keyworkers, such as the supermarket worker who gave us her story in our 2021 research into Long Covid. Nevertheless, providing compensation for frontline workers is better than the current absence of support, and would help many of those we have spoken to who caught Long Covid in the height of the pandemic.
Conclusions
It is concerning that there is a lack of access to advice and support for people affected by Long Covid, many of whom have struggled to navigate the benefits system or been unaware of their employment rights.
We welcome the APPG’s report on Long Covid and would support the implementation of their recommendations. However, more thorough and wide-reaching changes would be needed to restore a proper social safety net for those who find themselves disabled by Long Covid.
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GMLC recommends that workers join trade unions to ensure their rights are protected, and seek independent advice to ensure they receive all the benefits they are entitled to.
