Going to work?

Update: Fixed on 13th May

Drafting legislation is obviously a complex issue, and needs a lot of work.

As we have seen, the regulations for COVID-19 are badly drafted, with many things people consider "loopholes". The original legislation was, after all, done in a rush.

Thankfully the civil servants have has several weeks now to carefully draft some amendments to fix some of the issues, so these should be really good now, obviously.

Some issues:-

• Previously you could leave home for one reason but then did not have to have a reason for being "outside". I.e. you could leave for exercise and then decide to go and have a picnic. As long as not a gathering of more than 2 people not from the same household in a public place, that was legal, even if the police said it was not and fined people.
• Previously if you have a party at your home with lots of friends, it was clearly a gathering, but not in a public place, so you (at home) were not breaking the law. Any of your friends that left where they live with reasonable excuse and then decided to come to your party would also not be breaking the law. Even so, police would break up parties and fine people.
• Previously if you left home for exercise, went to the park, you could sit on the bench for a while, even have lunch. What mattered is why you left home.

The changes at 11am today address some of these, and are listed here.

They fixed interesting things like in paragraph (1)(b), for “over the age of 18” substitute “aged 18 or over”; and in sub-paragraph (i)(iii), for “Department of Work” substitute “Department for Work”.

But one of the changes is this :-

(4) In regulation 6—

(a)in paragraph (1), after “leave” insert “or be outside of”;

This means that it now reads :-

6.—(1) During the emergency period, no person may leave or be outside of the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.

This covers a lot of previous loopholes. Now you no longer just need an excuse to leave where you live, but to be outside (yes, your garden is still counted as inside your home for this). So the picnic is not longer valid, and neither is the house party (not because a gathering, but because the people there have no reasonable excuse for being outside their own home). Sadly it may also mean the rest during a long walk is a problem. I am actually a tad surprised that "returning home" is not in itself a reasonable excuse.

However, what concerns me is that they did not update the actual list of reasonable excuses having now changed the context.

Notably the reasonable excuse: (f) to travel for the purposes of work or to provide voluntary or charitable services, where it is not reasonably possible for that person to work, or to provide those services, from the place where they are living;

Now, previously, it was OK to leave home to "travel for the purposes of work" (if you could not do that work at home), and, having left home with reasonable excuse, you could, well, do the work!

Yes, the list is not exhaustive, but given how the police seem happy to fine people when they were covered by the list it is tricky doing anything not on the explicit list. Arguably the specificity of the use of the word "travelling" for work in the list highlights anything other than travelling as not being "reasonable". A simple fix would be to remove the "to travel" part, so "for purposes of work" (where you can't do it from home) would be covered, including any travelling.

But the excuses don't list actually "doing work", or "being at your office", or anything that is not actually "travelling". And this reasonable excuse has to cover not just leaving your home, but being outside your home.

So now it seems they have plugged the loophole allowing a picnic, but made supermarket workers illegal sat at their tills. Indeed, if you are an MP sat in parliament right now, which of the reasonable excuses do you have for not being at home?

Really? This is the competence level of our current parliament?

Business as usual, or is it?

Obviously, to slow the spread of COVID-19 cases and reduce burden on NHS, we need people to stop interacting as much.

TLDR; governments have given five different messages about going to work, from yes you can, to only key workers, shutting down the economy almost entirely, with no clear message. It is causing confusion and will cost businesses and livelihoods.

The message from the government last night seemed clear...

Don't go out, but you can get food, medicine, and importantly you CAN GO TO WORK. Ideally, you work from home if you can, but all that was being shut down is the face to face shops and places where people gather and spread the virus a lot with other random people. Indeed, stopping all contact probably does not help as the spread just comes back as soon as you relax the lockdown - this is all about statistics - reduce contact enough to allow the NHS to cope.

It was, otherwise, for all those offices and factories and businesses that keep the economy going - business as usual (working from home if you can).

Now, assuming this is enough to slow the virus, that is great, well done UK government.

So, yes, please follow advice, stay at home, let's slow this spread enough for the NHS to still work.

My issue, however, is the horrible mixed messages from the government, which is really causing a lot of confusion.

First the message was, you can go to work, but try and work from home where possible.

Then, No10 twitter tweeted (image below) that you can go to work (if you're a key worker).

Now that is a massively different message. That is shutting down the whole UK economy in one go over night with no notice. That is HUGE!

They deleted the tweet, and changed so you can go to work (but work from home if possible) as per the speech. OK, good.

This was however a massive mis-direction and confusion by a tweet that was up for a while last night.

But it gets worse, a document about the lock down (here) says, in bold and underlined: "Non-essential businesses and premises must now shut!" We think this is meant to be a heading, and wording like "Non-essential businesses and premises that must now shut:-" or some such, but that is not what it says.

Again, confusing and mixed messages.

But now they are SMSing everyone with a link to gov.uk/coronavirus which says not to go outside except for "essential work", which is yet another unclear term, and again suggests a complete UK economic shutdown.

So what the hell is the message meant to be - is this business as usual apart from shops, or what?
Why the hell are the government not giving a CLEAR MESSAGE?

P.S. Obviously offices and factories have some duty of care, so things like people being able to keep apart and hand sanitisers and so on are an important step as well.

P.P.S. as per final image below, they have now changed the web site to say "work (where this absolutely cannot be done from home)". This is a total shambles!

P.P.P.S. the BBC have yet another, subtly different wording: Travelling to and from work, but only if it is "absolutely necessary", which is not clear either, is it necessary for you to still be paid, or is it "necessary work", i.e. key worker stuff?

P.P.P.P.S. as of this morning (25th) they have finally changed the PDF guidance document. That is three separate bits of government information that have changed now, having initially given misleading or wrong information.

Here are the messages:-