Could 11 November 2021 be a game-changer for occupational health?

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Today (11 November) is not just Remembrance Day. It is the day when a little-noticed change to the regulations around the Health and Social Care Act will come into force that, OH practitioner Ian Houston argues, could end up delivering access to occupational health for every employee in the UK as a legal requirement. But has the government even recognised what it has potentially set in motion?
The year is 1943, prime minister Winston Churchill’s plan for post-war Britain is broadcast to the nation on 21 March outlining a vision for a new ‘National Health Service’. Fast forward to 23 March 2020, and prime minister Boris Johnson is addressing the nation, outlining in grim terms the need for a national lockdown to protect the very same NHS from Covid-19. The ‘unknown unknowns’ variable – that phrase made famous by former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld – is now reality to humanity through a ‘new normal’ of abnormal.
We have of course all just lived through what happened next. The first national lockdown (March to July 2020) witnessing all non-essential business closed, followed by a second lockdown (November to December 2020), a third (January to March 2021) with various tier systems evaluated over the 12 months coupled with various legislation introduced by Parliament. But did prime minister Boris Johnson and his advisors understand the road their subsequent legislative introductions were taking them/us down? I would argue not, and this article intends to outline why.
The introduction of the Coronavirus Act 2020, with its wide scope of legislation in separation from the lockdown laws in England, would change everything again in July 2021 (House of Commons, 2021), with England moving to step four of its road plan to recovery. The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (No 3) Regulations 2020 required employers to risk assess premises and employees in managing risk to public health, summarily backed by section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 (HSWA) (Health and Safety Executive, 2020) designed to protect employees under their employer’s ‘duty of care’ responsibilities.