Support UNISON’s work on the Covid-19 Inquiry

The UK Covid-19 Public Inquiry is an independent public inquiry set up to examine the UK’s response to and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, including what lessons can be learned from the pandemic.

The inquiry was launched in June 2022 with the first public hearing taking place in June 2023. It is chaired by Baroness Heather Hallett, a cross-bench peer.

To ensure we have the biggest impact for our members, UNISON is working with the Trades Union Congress (TUC), which acts as the ‘core participant’ for its affiliated unions, to engage with the inquiry. This provides opportunities to make opening and closing statements, suggest witnesses, question them, and examine evidence.

Key workers and the Inquiry

The final module of the UK Covid-19 Public Inquiry, Module 10, will have its public hearings in early 2026.

This is an extremely important module for UNISON and the wider trade union movement as this module will examine the pandemic’s impact on society, including a strong focus on ‘key workers’ (excluding health and social care workers, who have had their own independent modules). For UNISON, a ‘key worker’ is anyone who kept public services and society functioning.

How you can help

To support our work on the inquiry, we want to collect the experiences and stories of members who were key workers during the pandemic, which can be submitted as evidence and help form our policy recommendations to the inquiry.

We recently carried out this work for Module 6, which focuses on the social care sector. We collected hundreds of moving accounts covering issues from sick pay and isolation payments to access to PPE and the harrowing effect on social care workers’ mental health. These are powerful testimonies that bolster the power of UNISON’s and the TUC’s recommendations and wider campaigning in the sector.

Now we have the same opportunity for Module 10. 

If you are (or were) an officer, organiser, case worker or anyone else involved in supporting key workers during this period and have stories to share about the issues affecting members, please complete the form below. This will help us to structure surveys or other data-gathering activities with members across different sectors.

The sectors we are interested in are:

1. Local government
2. Education
3. Police and probation
4. Energy and utilities
5. Transport
6. Private contractors

Issues might include:

• Safety in the workplace, eg access to testing and PPE where required
• Financial support, eg sick pay or support for self-isolation
• Social partnership during the pandemic, eg the role of UNISON and other unions working with employers, government and regulators to improve conditions and operations
• Transitioning to home working for some workers
• Equalities issues, e.g. disproportionate impact on some groups of workers.

We are collecting these experiences because we want to ensure that the inquiry has the evidence needed to make positive recommendations for workers, and to reflect important lessons learned from the pandemic.

The article Support UNISON’s work on the Covid-19 Inquiry first appeared on the UNISON National site.