Inside Boris Johnson’s plan for how the UK can ‘live with Covid’

Newly returned office staff will be asked to go back to home working under government plans to avoid a winter spike in coronavirus infections, leaked official papers suggest.

A Whitehall document seen by Politico’s London Playbook also reveals a range of other proposed measures being considered by ministers to help the nation “live with Covid” after England moves into “step four” of the government’s Covid roadmap.

Playbook’s Alex Wickham reports that “some form of working from home is set to continue for the long haul” under the plans outlined in the document, which also deliver a “stinging criticism of the existing government policy on sick pay, urging ministers to do more to support people isolating” as a result of Covid infections.

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Final steps

According to Wickham, “the most striking recommendation” in the leaked document is that the “government should not actively tell people to go back to the workplace” following England’s so-called Freedom Day, now scheduled for 19 July.

Instead, civil servants have discussed a “hybrid approach” in which the government imposes “no legal restrictions on who can go to work” but introduces “ways to help people continue working from home if there is no need for them to be in an office”.

Whether staff should be advised to stay at home is “an intensely controversial subject already”, Wickham adds, with “senior ministers firmly against this proposal and arguing people should be directly encouraged to return to work as normal”. Indeed, the issue looks likely to be the next “major row” for Boris Johnson to negotiate “in the coming weeks”.

And newly released statistics from Office for National Statistics suggest that bosses are also “on a collision course with staff over a shift to permanent home working”, The Telegraph reports.

According to the results of recent surveys, 85% of employees currently working from home support a post-pandemic “hybrid” approach of spliting their time between home and the office. But “almost two in five firms expect more than three-quarters of staff to be in their normal workplace post-Covid”, the paper continues.

The findings suggest that “businesses and employees could be at loggerheads” over working arrangements, a dispute that could be exacerbated by government guidance - not backed by legal requirements - to stay away from the office.

Despite businesses already investing in Covid-proofing office spaces, the leaked Whitehall document also proposes introducing “new rules for businesses to help keep workplaces safe, including the possibility of requiring minimum standards of ventilation”, according to Playbook’s Wickham. Firms may now be advised to scrap perspex screens, amid fears that when positioned improperly, the intended Covid barriers “actually increase the risk of transmission by blocking airflow”, Wickham continues.

Civil servants have also discussed economic “barriers” and “disincentives” that may stop people from self-isolating after contact with Covid cases, with the document calling for ministers to do more to address the problem.

The self-isolation issue is all the more pressing given “concern among scientific experts that there will be another spike in infections toward the winter that could put the NHS under heavy pressure”, reports Wickham, who says that “some experts are lobbying ministers for stronger measures to be applied” during that period.

‘Live with Covid’

Boris Johnson announced this week that the original Freedom Day date was being set back from 21 June, following warnings from government scientists of a “significant resurgence” in hospitalisations unless the final step out of restrictions was delayed. The prime minister said he was “confident” that the delay would not need to be longer than four weeks.

But Johnson was unable to “rule out the possibility the date could be pushed back further”, the BBC reports, amid concerns about the spread of the more transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus.

Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove yesterday sounded a more confident note about the lifting of final restrictions, telling Sky News that while the postponement was “regrettable”, it would “require an unprecedented and remarkable alteration in the progress of the disease” for a second delay to be necessary.

“What we want to do is make sure that when we do make that move that we don’t go back,” Gove told the broadcaster. “Because the worst thing for business, the worst thing for any of us, would be to open up again and then to very quickly find that we had to reimpose restrictions.”

Much now depends on the Covid vaccination programme, as the UK races to contain outbreaks of the delta variant. The government has announced the acceleration of the jabs rollout, saying that “all adults will have been offered a first dose and around two-thirds of all adults will have been offered two doses” by 19 July.

But the Whitehall leak suggests that ministers believe the country will have to learn how to “live with Covid” well beyond that date.

No decisions have been made yet on the suggestions in the documents, says Playbook’s Wickham, but even at a “draft stage”, they “offer some clear insight into ministers’ thinking on what life might be like this summer and possibly for a long time to come”.