Thread by @KellerZoe

#PartyGate 🧵

Is this the Workplace Guidance potentially breached?
theiabm.org/wp-content/upl…

What I find here is:
1. a fundamental principle: employers have a duty to reduce workplace risk to the lowest reasonably practicable level by taking preventative measures.

2. a rule of keeping people 2m apart "wherever possible" (page 10)
3. the duty to take mitigating actions that are not rules but advice: "the recommendations in the rest of this document are ones you should consider …"

Hence this is not even a normative text. It’s made of pieces of advice: “recommendations”.
Among them:
- page 14: Holding meetings outdoors whenever possible
- page 15: Using safe outside areas for breaks.
- page 15: Encouraging workers to bring their own food

A search for “party” or “parties” in the document gives “No results found”. "Parties" are not mentioned: not forbidden, not defined. For all the Cummings' fury about that word, it’s an irrelevant qualification.

There is nothing in this Guidance that brings to the conclusion that the “socially distanced drinks” in the garden mentioned in the infamous mail (as a one-off pause from working) were forbidden. Work “breaks” were contemplated and advised to be held in outside areas.

And it is obvious: it’s not the ’20 Prohibition, it’s a Covid pandemic. There was no reason to prohibit drinks or fun or people in the same work bubble to be allowed to relax and have chat and drinks outdoors.

A puritanical attitude in the press has framed any joy or fun as forbidden, just because people (including No10 workers) were forbidden to enter a hospital Covid ward to visit their loved ones. But that's not in the Workplace Guidance.

No10 of Downing Street is Crown Property and it is up to the Civil Service to apply the Guidance and manage the workplace and the staff. Certainly not the job of the PM.

This is the full statement by the PM to the HoC on the 6pm event on the 20th of May 2020. "I believed implicitly that this was a work event".

This is the way Cumming, in his blog, describes the work habits of Downing Street in the 2020 spring and summer (referring to the 15/5/2020 meeting in the garden captured by the leaked image).

In the same post, Cummings suggests that the 20/5/2020 mail invitation to "socially distanced drinks" was (in his opinion) against the rules. But does not explain why and what was the noticeable difference between these drinks and the usual meetings-with-drinks in the garden.

Cumming's description of the work habits in the garden during 2020 Spring makes it credible that the PM actually did think the "socially distanced drinks" in the garden were a work event or an allowed work break event, not so different from what they were used to do.