Unemployment international comparisons: Economic indicators
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A Westminster Hall debate on an e-petition calling on the Government to prohibit employers from requiring staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19 is scheduled for 24 January 2022 between 6-7.30pm . The subject for this debate was determined by the Petitions Committee and Martyn Day MP will open the debate.
E-petition on prohibiting employers from requiring staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19 (208 KB , PDF)
The title of the petition is “Prohibit employers from requiring staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19”. It had received 174,365 signatures as at 20 January 2022 [9.05am] and will close on 1 May 2022. The full text is as follows:
Make it illegal for any employer to mandate vaccination for its employees. This should apply to all public sector (including the NHS, armed forces, care workers), third sector and all private sector.
We believe making vaccination a condition of employment undermines the principle of informed consent. All British people should have the right to bodily autonomy and must never be coerced into receiving a medical intervention they may not want.
Any medical intervention must always be with properly informed consent (awareness of risks vs benefits) and be free of coercion (whether explicit or implicit).
The Government responded on 25 November 2021. It focused on the “strong public health rationale” for making vaccination a condition of deployment in limited high-risk settings and reiterated that employers proposing to require staff to be vaccinated would need to consult the “existing legal framework”.
There is no law mandating Covid-19 vaccination in the UK.
There is no general or blanket law requiring employees to be vaccinated; nor is there any general law requiring employers to mandate vaccination of their staff.
There is no general law prohibiting employers from mandating vaccination for their staff, but there are some laws that would apply to this approach, including employment law and equality law. This is discussed further below.
The UK Government is encouraging vaccination as the best defence against Covid-19 and asks employers to encourage staff to get vaccinated.
There are some specific workplace settings where the Government has legislated to mandate vaccination.
There is a legal requirement for employers to ensure staff entering care homes in England are vaccinated.
From April 2022 employers will need to ensure that all frontline health and care workers in England are vaccinated.
An employer’s policies must be lawful and must not discriminate.
Within the existing legal framework, it is for individual employers to decide whether to ask staff to show their vaccination status. In the absence of a legal requirement for vaccination, an employer cannot force an employee to be vaccinated without their consent. However, they could (for example) decide to implement policies which restrict unvaccinated employees’ duties or prevent unvaccinated employees from entering the workplace.
There are certain legal constraints on what employers can do:
E-petition on prohibiting employers from requiring staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19 (208 KB , PDF)
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