During the first Downing Street Covid press conference of 2022 Boris Johnson announced that approximately 100,000 workers in key industries will be told to take lateral flow tests on every working day in an effort to reduce the impact of the virus on staffing.
The prime minister insisted that, despite the recent shortage, lateral flow tests would be sent directly to workplaces for “critical national services”. These critical workers are those who work in essential services, cannot work from home and are at risk of infecting each other - for example, due to working together in an enclosed space. The industries impacted are likely to be:
- Food distribution and processing
- Nuclear power, and other forms of power generation
- Air traffic control
- Border Force
- Police and Fire and Rescue Services control rooms
- Test kit warehouses and test surge labs.
The government has stated that it will contact the organisations identified as having critical workers to confirm the logistics of the scheme and roll out of the tests will start from Monday 10 January. Though the details of the scheme have not yet been publicised, given that the government press release for the announcement reads that “Critical workers will be able to take a test on every working day and the provision of precautionary testing will be for an initial five weeks”, it may be that the instruction for key workers to test daily will amount to a change in guidance rather than a new legal requirement.
Although the provisions for daily testing of critical workers are intended to isolate asymptomatic cases and limit the risk of outbreaks in workplaces, thereby lessening the strain of staff shortages for key industries, employers will no doubt be concerned that encouraging daily testing whilst also tightening self-isolation rules for those who test positive on lateral flows may exacerbate staffing problems.
In a second key development this week the government has changed testing rules so that those who test positive on lateral flow tests (but who do not have any symptoms) will no longer need to seek a follow-up PCR. Instead, these individuals will need to isolate for at least seven days and register their LFT result on the government website so that NHS Test and Trace can follow up. Designed to reduce the burden on the PCR testing regime (when the current government view is that a LFT positive test result is almost certainly likely to be accurate) this change may concern employers who were previously insisting on sight of the PCR test result as confirmation that their employee did indeed have Covid and could not work.
