It’s smart to check returning staff are jabbed, says Raab
BUSINESSES should ensure that their staff are vaccinated before returning to the workplace, a Cabinet minister has suggested.
Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, said yesterday that it was a “smart policy” for companies to insist on staff being double jabbed in order to return to the office.
A government source told The Daily Telegraph that ministers want firms to advise staff to get jabbed and “explain why it’s obviously a sensible thing to do to protect yourself and others”.
Mr Raab’s intervention came after a series of companies announced plans to make inoculation against the coronavirus obligatory for all employees.
Pimlico Plumbers confirmed last month that it was enforcing a “no jab, no job” recruitment policy, while Google has said it will require full vaccination from all 144,000 staff globally.
Ministers would need to look “carefully” at whether there should be “hard and fast legal rules” around the issue, Mr Raab told Sky News, but added: “Our message, overwhelmingly, is ‘get a jab’.”
It is unlikely that rules mandating vaccine passports for certain leisure activities from late September will also be rolled out for all employment, it is understood. “There’s a big difference between things like nightclubs rather than work, which is essential,” the government source said.
Downing Street appeared to give the green light to businesses to devise their own conditions for their employees.
Asked whether Boris Johnson was
relaxed about the idea of employers insisting that staff were double jabbed, a No 10 spokesman said: “You would have to speak to the individual employers about their own policies.”
Tory MP Steve Baker, deputy chair- man of the lockdown-sceptic Covid Recovery Group, said last night that “the Government is now encouraging discrimination in relation to vaccinations” in a way that he said would be unthinkable for other characteristics.
“We used to believe that medical information is confidential. Now we’re encouraging firms to demand knowledge of it. I find it at best distasteful and at worst disgusting,” he said.
Earlier this month, the Commons voted through proposals to make Covid-19 jabs compulsory for care home staff in England. The rules, to be brought in from October, also apply to NHS staff who enter care homes.
More than 30 Tory MPS mounted a revolt in the House, however, with senior lockdown sceptic Mark Harper accusing ministers of an “abuse” in failing to set out the impact of a “difficult and controversial” policy.
The Prime Minister said last week that proof of vaccination would be required in nightclubs and other large and crowded venues from late September once every adult in England had been offered two jabs. The proposal has also led to a backlash among Conservative MPS.