Companies will have to pay for testing and decide policies on self-isolation for staff, a business minister has said in advance of Boris Johnson’s formal announcement that all remaining domestic Covid restrictions in England will end.
Ahead of the prime minister’s scheduled statement on the government’s long-term strategy for living with coronavirus, Paul Scully said free testing would be phased out, arguing the money spent on it could be used better elsewhere.
“We don’t test for flu, we don’t test for other diseases, and if the variants continue to be as mild as Omicron then there’s a question mark as to whether people will go through that regular testing anyway,” Scully told Times Radio.
“But if employers want to be paying (for) tests and continuing a testing regime within their workplace, then that will be for them to pay at that point,” he said, adding that while the impact on the virus on clinically vulnerable people was a concern, “we’re not going to be having a testing regime for the next 50 years”.
Under a plan being rubber-stamped by the cabinet on Monday morning, and outlined by Johnson in a Commons statement and subsequent press conference, the legal requirement for anyone with Covid to isolate will be ditched a month earlier than planned.
Free PCR and lateral flow tests for all will be axed to rein in public spending as ministers attempt to restore people’s confidence that life can return to normality. The tests will reportedly be kept for the over-80s. The national contact tracing service is expected to be wound down and schoolchildren will no longer be told to get tested twice a week.
In a separate interview with Sky News, Scully said it would be down to individuals and employers to decide over self-isolating.
“I would say that it’s like any illness, frankly, any transmissible illness that you would say stay at home,” he said. Asked what staff could do if forced to work when ill with Covid, Scully said: “This is why we need to make sure that we’ve got really good guidance for employers.
“But as I say, there will come a time when the pandemic moves to more of an endemic approach to Covid, in the same way that flu and other viruses are treated, and that’s what we’ve got to get back to.”
Saying people should not “work and live under government diktat for a moment longer than is necessary”, Scully said the £2bn spent per month on free lateral flow tests could be better used elsewhere.
“If you think what that £2bn might go towards, there’s a lot of other backlogs in the NHS, other illnesses in the NHS, that that money could otherwise go for,” he said. “So for every person that is worried about a test, there may be another person that’s worried about a cancer diagnosis, for instance.”
