Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 04 November 2021
The debate is welcome. It allows me to expand on the evidence that I gave this morning to the Social Justice and Social Security Committee on my proposed Scottish employment injuries advisory council bill.
I am thankful that the committee accepted the statement of reasons, but I am even more grateful that it listened to the workers and trade unionists—to members of Unite the union, the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, the GMB, the Community trade union, Unison, the Communication Workers Union, the Fire Brigades Union and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen. They wrote to demand a voice on, and a role in, the new employment injuries assistance benefit. They did so because their colleagues who have caught Covid-19 in the workplace are now no longer fit for work or because women are apparently the wrong gender for that entitlement, although it is clear that they still get ill or injured through their work. Those women do not have access to the industrial injuries disablement benefit, or their entitlement is extremely limited, because that benefit is stuck very much in the previous century.
Any proposed bill will not, in itself, give women and those with long Covid access to the new employment injuries assistance directly. The Government and the Parliament need experts who have space, tenure and independence to research the illnesses and diseases and to make recommendations based on that. However, it is inconceivable that those issues would not be considered by a body with the authority and power to consider them and to make the first steps on the road to making the entitlement fit for the 21st century.
Trade unionists and workers who get ill at work must have a mandated seat at the table of a permanent, statutory and independent employment advisory council. Their expertise and lived experience of 21st-century workplaces are vital in making proposals that will form the benefit from the very start.
This morning, I asked the committee whether, when the Parliament considers regulations for a new devolved benefit, it would accept an equalities impact assessment that said that just 6 per cent of applications would come from women. It is clear that the answer to that question is no, we absolutely would not. However, that would be the case if a lift-and-shift approach was taken. Doing so would risk embedding a system that promotes inequalities and fails to reflect modern Scotland.
I thank the GMB women’s campaign unit, Engender, Close the Gap and Professor Andrew Watterson for their substantial insights on the issue of women’s health and safety at work. Currently, women have little access to the Westminster benefit because they have barely any entitlement to it. It is a benefit for the injuries and diseases that men got in workplaces that they predominantly worked in during the previous century. Cleaners with respiratory and skin diseases are not recognised by the current scheme, and breast cancer that is caused by shift work—that is the top occupational cancer in women—is not recognised. Even asbestos-related ovarian cancer, which is the most common gynaecological cancer in the UK, is not recognised. Women are missing from that scheme.
Care workers wrote to the committee to say that they risk injury at work daily. They have musculoskeletal disorders in the neck and upper limbs and injuries that are ignored by employers and the outdated UK benefit system.
Changes will not happen overnight, of course, but we need a system to do the work and consider that change. We do not currently have that in Scotland. New data and analysis and broad expertise and testimony will be needed to make the case for change.
I am grateful to the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, Thompsons Solicitors, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents and the British Occupational Hygiene Society, which offered their support and insights.
The committee also heard from people who have long Covid or who have colleagues with long Covid, who likely caught that through the course of their work. The impetus for my bill proposal was in response to their experience. Should people who contracted Covid at work not have access to a newly devolved benefit? Workers in health, social care, retail and public transport talk about how they became so severely ill that long Covid was impacting their ability to continue to do their work in the jobs that they loved and about how something should be done to support them.
However, in March this year, the UK Industrial Injuries Advisory Council refused to recognise Covid in that context. That exposes the risk to our social security system in deferring to, and requesting advice from, a UK council over which the Scottish ministers have no power. There has, therefore, been less progress on Scottish benefits, and those key workers whom we depended on and rightly applauded throughout the pandemic have been offered no access to the industrial injuries benefit.
A Scottish council with powers to commission research and make recommendations on how to support people who have caught Covid at work could offer hope that the new benefit will give people the access to social security that they are so desperately lacking under the UK entitlement. In the coming weeks, I will lodge my final proposal for a statutory Scottish employment injuries advisory council that can research, shape and scrutinise the new benefit. We need to ensure that workers and trade unionists who are injured in the course of their employment, especially women and those with long Covid, are at the heart of that council.
When it comes to accessing Scottish social security benefits, I hope to work closely with the cabinet secretary, the minister, the Social Justice and Social Security Committee and members on all sides of the chamber to ensure that there is full and equal access to a new form of employment injuries assistance that is fit for the 21st century.