Emergency coronavirus legislation will empower the government to “provide indemnity for clinical negligence liabilities of healthcare professionals and others arising from NHS activities carried out as part of the response to a coronavirus outbreak.”
The proposed Coronavirus Bill will, if it becomes law, provide the state with sweeping, authoritarian powers to regulate the public’s behaviour throughout the emergency, in order to mitigate its potentially devasting effects.
By providing “indemnity for clinical negligence liabilities arising from NHS activities connected to the diagnosis, care and treatment of those who have been diagnosed as having coronavirus disease or who are suspected, or who are at risk, of having the disease” through the Secretary of State for Health or “a person authorised by the Secretary of State”, the bill aims to “ensure that, in the exceptional circumstances that might arise in a coronavirus outbreak, sufficient indemnity arrangements are in place to cover all NHS activities required to respond to the outbreak,” according to explanatory notes provided by the Department of Health and Social Care.
The Coronavirus Bill will also scrap the requirement for juries at inquests, ostensibly for fear this would overburden coroners who may find themselves struggling to process a large caseload of deaths.
“In the event of a severe coronavirus outbreak, the number of deaths would increase; the requirement for all inquests involving such deaths to have a jury would therefore have a significant impact on coroners’ workload and local authority coroner services and other resources,” explain the Department for Health notes.
“In addition, given likely sickness rates among the general population, the need to identify and convene a jury in each such case would be unlikely to be sustainable and, in any event, could exacerbate the spread of the coronavirus outbreak,” they added.
The document also provides for the establishment of a body of so-called emergency volunteers, with the introduction of special statutory leave for emergency volunteering work, effectively obliging employers to allow their staff to take time off work to contribute to the programme. The document explained that “local authorities and relevant health and social care bodies” would be able to draw on a pool of volunteers to “fill capacity gaps”.
The move towards building a body of emergency volunteers would itself fill a gap in Britain’s preparedness for civil emergencies like pandemics, industrial accidents, and natural disasters.
Most developed nations have established civil defence organisations that tend to date back to the early days of the Cold War, which operate on a similar basis to military reserves but train in emergency management rather than warfighting support.
Britain’s Civil Defence Corps and National Hospital Service Reserve were stood down by the Labour government of Harold Wilson in 1968.
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