Leicester mayor ‘failed’ on factory breaches
LEICESTER’S mayor and Labour councillors were warned three months ago that factories were operating in breach of Covid-19 rules but failed to act, a former minister has claimed.
Conservative politicians wrote to members of the council in April warning that some manufacturing sites appeared to be operating in “shuttered premises”, risking the health of workers, as well as their families and the local population. Baroness Verma, who was a development minister under David Cameron and chairs the city’s Conservative federation, said she had been concerned the factories were operating in breach of social distancing rules, which required staff to stay two metres apart and wash their hands regularly.
Leicester became the first city in Britain to be put back into lockdown after public health officials expressed alarm at a significant rise in Covid-19 cases. Last week, a report by Labour Behind the Label, a garment workers’ rights group, alleged that some suppliers were operating factories without social distancing measures.
Garment factory workers in Leicester told Telegraph that while their shut down when the lockdown was announced, they were reopened with no social distancing or hygiene measures in place. They said the front gates of the factories stayed closed, perhaps to give the appearance they were not open.
The Health and Safety Executive has confirmed that it is now “actively investigating three textile businesses” in the city and has issued a formal improvement notice requiring one firm to “take action to control the risk of Covid-19 in the workplace”.
In an email to Labour councillors on April 18, Leicester Conservatives stated: “We have had a number of people contacting us in fear that factory owners are flouting the law by appearing closed but with employees still working behind shuttered premises. This is not only dangerous to the workers in the factories but also to the families and wider communities at large. We want assurances from you that you are ensuring these occurrences are reported to the police and trading standards, and action taken immediately.”
Several councillors responded by saying they were forwarding the email
‘The factories tried to hide the fact they were open. All were officially closed but work was going on inside’
on to Sir Peter Soulsby, mayor of Leicester.
Baroness Verma said: “It was an open secret that the factories were open. The concerns were about the conditions in which some of them were operating. Why weren’t the mayor and councillors using the intelligence and going out there?”
A spokesman for Leicester City Council said factories could remain open “as long as they operate safely according to government guidance”, and that “ensuring safe operating in factories – including social distancing – is the responsibility of the Health and Safety Executive”. However, it worked with the HSE and other agencies to ensure a “joint approach”. Meanwhile, two workers claimed they were scared to return to factories during lockdown.
One said: “The factories tried to hide the fact that they were open. All factories were officially closed but work was going on inside. [The] facade and front doors of the factories were closed.”
Another said: “The main gate of the factory was closed and workers were herded inside through the rear side.”
A Public Health England spokesman said: “There is no evidence that the rise in the infection can be explained by outbreaks in care homes, hospital settings or industrial processes.”
Seek and ye shall find, in the words of St Matthew. A simple enough principle: look hard enough for something and you should discover it; don’t look and you won’t. So why can’t Matt Hancock – nor, it seems, many others in government – seem to grasp it? Leicester, this weekend, is back in lockdown. Why? Because of a “surge” of new cases of Covid-19. A couple of members of the Cabinet are reported to have even gone so far as to demand that the city be closed off with roadblocks.
But what if it is all an illusion – the rise in recorded cases purely a result of more people being tested? A report by Public Health England isn’t sure, concluding: “Evidence for the scale of the outbreak is limited and may, in part, be artefactually related to growth in availability of testing.” The report revealed that the rise in cases was purely down to “Pillar 2” tests – tests carried out in the community, which have increased rapidly in recent weeks. In Leicester, it transpires, four mobile testing units have been deployed.
On the other hand, there has been no rise in cases of Covid-19 in Leicester identified via “Pillar 1” tests – those conducted in a clinical setting, typically on people admitted to hospital with severe symptoms. Nor has there been any rise in admissions to Leicester hospitals, which have been running at between six and 10 admissions per day for the past month.
There has been a rise in the percentage of tests on under-18s turning out positive. That is true only among this age group and it is surely the case that so few children suffer serious symptoms that very small numbers of them would have been tested until community testing was ramped up.
Did Hancock, or anyone else in Government, look at the full data before Leicester was sent back into a hugely damaging lockdown? If they did, it is hard to see that they acted upon it – rather, they seem simply to have looked at the headline figure for new recorded cases and panicked.
However, the figure for recorded cases is meaningless on its own, without knowing how much testing is going on, because it takes no account of the large number of cases of Covid-19 which cause few or no symptoms. According to the Government, 283,000 people have tested positive for Covid-19 since January. Antibody tests, however, indicate that 6.78 per cent of the population – 4.5 million people – have been infected. In other words, testing has only managed to pick up around one in 16 cases of the disease.
If we suddenly tested everyone at once, we would pick up the missing cases. The trouble is that we would then have an enormous spike in new recorded infections and Mr Hancock would order us all indoors for the next three years.
The perverse moral of the Leicester story is that, unless you want to be locked down, try not to get tested. The more people in your town who get tested, the more confirmed cases there will be and the more likely the Government will panic and close you down. The people of Leicester are being punished for faithfully trooping into those mobile testing units.