List of recommendations

Bring unions and business together in a ‘working better’ taskforce to set out a clear plan for how to address skills and workforce shortages, and deliver the Government’s stated ambition for a high wage high productivity economy.

Embed fair flexibility with a plan to ensure that everyone has access to fair flexible working arrangements, wherever they work.

• The government must set out a strategy on the future of flexible work and its integral role in shaping a better and more equal recovery for workers following the pandemic. This should include how they aim to respond to the impacts that increased remote working may have on transport, retail, hospitality and other sectors potentially affected by decreased office working in city centres. Increased levels of remote working could have substantial adverse effects for other workers in these sectors.  The government’s strategy must include steps to ensure that the jobs of those who may be impacted by lower levels of office-based working are not threatened.
• There is widespread recognition of the fact that the current legislative framework in relation to flexible working wasn’t working effectively before the pandemic. The government itself has highlighted the need for change in its 2019 manifesto commitment to make flexible working the default. We need the government to act without delay to introduce their long-promised Employment Bill and strengthen workers' rights in a range of areas to make sure we have a system of genuine flexible working that works for all workers. 
• This must include a right for workers to disconnect from work to have communication free time in their lives, a duty on employers to consider which flexible working arrangements are available in a role and publish these in job advertisements and a day one right to flexible working.

Build public sector resilience through investment in the public sector workforce – ensuring that public services can recover, address backlogs and cope with the pressure that any new variants will place on them.

• Government should fund sustained increases in pay for public sector workers that restore what they have lost through ten years of cuts and slow growth.
• Government must set out a long-term public sector workforce strategy with a focus on job creation, union engagement and an immediate end to any planned cuts to civil service headcount and any other public sector departments.
• Government must deliver a new funding settlement for our public services that, as a minimum, reverses the last decade of sustained cuts and ensures services can clear the Covid-19 backlog.

Bolster workplace safety and mental health support so that everyone can work with confidence

• Risk assessments: Employers must be compelled to provide airborne protections for workers, with ventilation measures and FFP3-grade face masks. individual risk assessments must be completed for groups of workers at heightened risk. And publication of risk assessments must be made mandatory.
• Regulation and Enforcement: Tougher enforcement is required to incentivise robust risk management, and government must provide a new funding settlement to HSE and local authorities allowing them to invest in inspectorate capacity.
• Covid testing: expand access to rapid testing, keeping it free, with prioritisation for frontline ‘key’ workers.

Boost workers’ financial security, providing protection against any new variants by fixing sick pay, increasing Universal Credit and putting in place a permanent short-time working scheme to provide certainty;

• The government should bring together unions and business to start work on the design of a new permanent short-time working scheme.
• Government should ensure that all workers can access sick pay by immediately removing the lower earnings limit to access statutory sick pay.
• Government should raise the level of statutory sick pay to the level of the real Living Wage, (around £320 a week).
• Government must raise the rate of Universal Credit to 80 per cent of the level of the real living wage, around £270 a week.

Banish global vaccine inequality – ending the shameful vaccine inequality that is helping to contribute to the development of new variants.

• The government should support the waiver to World Trade Organisation intellectual property (TRIPs) rules proposed by South Africa and India to ensure Global South countries can produce low cost versions of the vaccine.  This is needed to address the stark global inequalities in vaccination rates which have had a devastating impact on livelihoods in the Global South and increased the risk that further variants of Covid-19 develop.