Covid-19 Inquiry: Closing Statements

Outsourced and Migrant Workers Had No Voice During the Pandemic. Module 3 Amplified Their Experiences and Calls for the End of Precarious Employment. 

Watch the closing statement here

Counsel instructed by PILC made the closing statements of Module 3 of the Covid-19 Inquiry on behalf of the Frontline Migrant Health Workers’ Group (FMHWG). This group of workers is made up of Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), United Voices of the World (UVW), and Kanlungan Filipino Consortium.   

The closing statements emphasised the experience of and impact on FMHWG’s members, how predictable that impact was, and the silence and inaction of Government.  However, from the outset, the submissions made for our clients emphasised that systemic issues such as outsourced employment apply to the working class as a whole, regardless of ethnicity. 

The persistent and recurring theme of the accounts of outsourced and migrant workers is that they had no voice throughout the pandemic.  

Watch the closing statement here

15 years of austerity in the lead up to the pandemic meant chronic underfunding and understaffing in the NHS. The Group’s members experienced the pandemic as part of a second tier of the healthcare workforce, the lowest paid and in the most insecure employment.  

“It is undeniably clear that if there were another pandemic tomorrow, the low paid, precariously employed and migrant healthcare workers would continue to die at the same significantly higher, disproportionate rates.”  

Up until 22 April 2020, 63% of the healthcare worker deaths were ethnic minority workers and of that 63%, at least 83% were migrants. 36% of those migrant deaths were workers from the Philippines. That was by far the highest national mortality rate for migrant health workers. 

In relation to the closing statements, Director of PILC Paul Heron said:  

“We urge the COVID-19 Public Inquiry to deliver unequivocal recommendations addressing the intersecting crises of NHS privatisation, outsourcing, and the hostile environment. Decades of profit-driven policies have eroded our public healthcare system, leaving it ill-equipped to manage a pandemic. The inquiry must expose how private profit has been prioritised over public health and how outsourcing has undermined worker protections. This is a critical opportunity to demand an NHS that values its workers, ends the hostile environment, and restores its founding principles of universal, publicly-funded healthcare. Anything less would be a disservice to the public and those who sacrificed so much.” 

Watch the closing address here

Within the healthcare system, precarious employment has to end now. Healthcare workers must be employed by the hospitals they work in, and Migrant workers must enjoy the same protections as their non-migrant colleagues. The healthcare workforce protects all of us. We need to stop clapping and protect them in return.  

Watch the closing statement here

Learn more about the experience of the members of FMHWG here.

For Module 3, we wanted to provide a current and historical analysis of the impact outsourcing and privatisation has had on the NHS. On behalf of the FMHWG, we asked for the Covid-19 Inquiry to commission a report.  

The Inquiry refused our request.  

Together with FMHWG, we felt we had no choice but to commission this report  to provide it as evidence to the Covid-19 public inquiry ourselves. 

Read Forty years of failure: private sector contracting and its impact on the NHS here.  

In the new year, we will host an event to discuss the shocking findings so that you can use it as a tool in your campaigns.  

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