Opinion
For test and trace to work, the public needs to trust this government. But how can we?
Boris Johnson has consistently sneered at health and safety, so when he wants to end the lockdown early we should be worried
by Polly ToynbeeThe unlocking begins, as some schools open on Monday, as do outdoor markets and car showrooms, and households can meet in private gardens. Good news. But after his catastrophic delay in entering lockdown, how is anyone to know if Boris Johnson’s opening up will be any better?
He might be following “the science”, or he might be following fellow libertarians, such as the Spectator editor’s demand that “It’s time to restore liberty”, or the Sun’s “Ale meet again” pressure for pubs to open. The chief scientist pointed out yesterday that there are still 8,000 new cases a day; the infection rate, or R number, is still near one.
This relaxing of rules falls under the shadow of the 60,000 excess deaths that have occurred, representing not just personal tragedies but a national shame. The Financial Times shows Britain to be “world-beating” only in our deaths per million – worse than Donald Trump’s USA, and Italy. Slow lockdowns created high death rates.
The virus is expected to break out in pockets across the country, but neither testing nor tracing is yet up to speed. Health secretary Matt Hancock “launched” test and track yesterday morning because it was promised for 1 June’s primary school openings, not because it’s ready. Anyone can do a “launch” – I can announce the launch of my new career as a brain surgeon or a tight-rope walker. This government’s bad habit of announcing and failing, overpromising and underdelivering, raises fears that they don’t know if this is really time to ease up.
Nor can we altogether trust the civil servant scientists who have stood by their lecterns, obedient to their masters – as the editor of the Lancet has warned in the Guardian. We don’t know if the time is right. But we will soon find out.
Relaxing the rules relies on good testing and tracing, with public trust vital for compliance. But the testing figures are still a fraud: the government claims there is the capacity to perform 161,000 tests a day and that “84% of the tests from the drive-through centres are returned within 24 hours, 95% of all tests are returned within 48 hours”; but Radio 4’s More or Less has revealed that in reality barely half the number announced are actual people tested, once duplicate tests and non-tests are deducted. Without honesty and precision, nothing will be trusted.
No doubt 25,000 contact tracers have been hired, but they are nowhere near ready to go: each has to have a DBS check, which normally takes a month. As the Guardian has revealed, tracers complain they have no contact with anyone, just a computer system that isn’t working: as I write, an experienced contact tracer has sent me another “critical incident” message she received locking her out of the malfunctioning system. Councils, whose expert public health services were ignored until now, are suddenly told they are key to stamping out local virus eruptions – but no one has linked them to the centre.
Reasonable people would understand that setting up something this complex is bound to take time: Dido Harding, the chair of NHS track and trace, wisely contradicts Hancock and says it won’t be up and running for a month. That is at least believable, and credibility is all. What remains forever unbelievable is that Boris Johnson closed down contact tracing 11 weeks ago: if he hadn’t, we might have a European-level service – never mind his absurd “world-beating”.
From Monday, millions more return to work, often thrown into close contact with others, with no guarantee they will be safe. In shops, takeaways, warehouses or offices, there is often no way to protect people: danger could be anywhere. Johnson airily asserts he will “insist that business across the country look after their workers and are Covid-secure”. How? All employers need to do is show they have made reasonable efforts, with plenty of masking tape and signage. They only risk a legal case if they’ve committed an act of gross negligence, says Ian Hart, the editor of Heath and Safety Practitioners.
The most unbelievable of the prime minister’s promises is that the Health and Safety Executive will conduct “spot inspections to ensure businesses are keeping our employees safe”. First, the HSE’s inspectors, along with all other regulators, were first to be stood down – as you would expect from a Johnson government: never let a good crisis go to waste.
Second, Johnson has been an “’elf ’n’ safety gone mad” rabble-rouser since time immemorial, his fallback for any thin column-writing day. He and his claque have won, eviscerating the HSE, ordering it in 2011 to cut inspections by a third. Its budget has been cut by £100m since 2010, and it has lost a third of its workforce. Local authorities have had to cut health and safety, and environmental health, to the bone. “Light-touch” regulation and “bonfires of red tape” have been favourite Tory battle cries, with Johnson the cheerleader. Labour’s employment spokesman, Andy McDonald, says an employer’s chance of a spot inspection is once in every 275 years.
Leftwingers, Johnson wrote, like “to ban hunting, smoking, smacking, snacking, and to swaddle everyone in the public and private sector with a great choking duvet of risk assessments”. Speeding is normal: “The speed limit is 10mph too low. It bares [sic] no relation to the speed motorists actually use.” During the Labour government, he complained of “the ever more elaborate regulation of the workplace”. Even a bylaw banning swimming without a permit in the busiest lanes of the Thames was “the kind of gratuitous legislation that is sapping the moral fibre of the nation.” During his party leadership campaign he waved a kipper claiming EU-regulated packaging was “Pointless, pointless, expensive, environmentally damaging ’elf ’n’ safety” (It was revealed to be his own government’s rule).
So for people returning anxiously to their workplaces, uncertain of their safety, how must it feel to find their fate in the hands of such a man?
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
• Guardian Newsroom: The Dominic Cummings story
On Wednesday 3 June at 7pm we’re holding a live-streamed event exploring the ongoing controversy of Dominic Cummings’ lockdown-defying road trip and the government’s handling of the ensuing fallout. With the Guardian’s deputy national news editor, Archie Bland, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland and Observer chief leader writer Sonia Sodha.
Book tickets here