Pension Survey - Going Live!
Good morning everyone! It’s Cass here…
Following a bit of work over the past week, getting questions drafted, typed up, reviewed and edited, all this work has been uploaded to Google Forms and had its test run and review yesterday! Following some final edits, we think it’s going to gather the right data.
If you, or someone who’s asked you to complete this for them, have either applied for ill health retirement (IHR), have been told not to and have Long Covid, we would like you to complete this survey. Questions with the red asterisk are required answers - those without one are not (so you can skip bits as needed). You must be resident or have worked in the U.K. during the pandemic to answer this survey, as we are, regrettably, only able to campaign for those of us here. If you have long Covid and are still working/employed but off sick please can you also think about completing it? It would be hugely helpful.
You can find the survey here.
Now I admit that I’m not the best at getting links to Google forms correct - there is a strong chance that you’ll get some kind of message asking you to request access - if this happens can you please let me know so I can reach out to the hive mind (a pal here or there, you if you know how to sort this so anyone can complete it) and change this so we don’t have to check our email every five minutes to grant access. Yes, this could happen as it’s me posting right now.
We have used Google Forms because it’s a) free and b) because anyone with a gmail or Google account may be able to save their responses for a period, meaning if you can’t complete this in one go, you might be able to go back and not have to start from scratch. Please don’t quote us on this. Please note that this survey is anonymous and its settings do not send us your email. We would ask that if you want us to get in touch that you email us directly on keyworkerpetitionuk@gmail.com or via DM on whatever Twitter is this week. Please do not leave any personal data in the survey.
We may, as before, use anonymous quotes from free text answers in this survey in the case report. We will not identify any individual, their location or employer. By completing the survey, you are consenting to this, but this survey doesn’t collect your email address, name or other data. That’s why we ask you to contact us direct if you want to share your story with us.
We would still like to hear from Keyworkers in Wales who have either been turned down or told not to apply for their IHR pensions (ie in email or letter from occupational health), ideally (as before), you’ll be able to share evidence of this. This is purely to show that these issues are U.K. wide and you will be entirely anonymous. If you don’t have or wish to share evidence, that’s why we created the survey!
We would also like to hear from any individual who has now concluded pension proceedings, but had to appeal using legal services or to the ombudsman to obtain IHR. We have one case study, but one or two more would be useful.
Otherwise, we have had enough case studies and we would like to thank everyone so, so much for agreeing to participate anonymously - and yes, those of you assisting on that front may still complete the survey if you wish.
What you can do now is
1) Complete the survey
2) Share the survey on social media, with colleagues, in Facebook groups
We would like this to reach as many people as possible for a good dataset; last time we had over 500 responses, enabling us to close the survey in 10 days - can we get to 1000 this time?
I have already mentioned this survey and future report to some groups and there is a deal of interest in it. We think this story, once it’s out, is going to be shocking to the public.
Thank you for your support - and if you’ve written to your elected representative to get them to ask questions of the pensions ministers and agencies, we would really like to see the responses!
PS If you have any can you email links to research evidence or media stories about either Keyworkers not getting their pensions or on Long Covid likely to be a permanent or long term condition to us to help create our evidence base for the report - we think 7-10 pieces of research would be a good base? Any help is gratefully appreciated, as this report in itself is a massive piece of work and there will be a lot of work to do on it in coming weeks and we have limited energy.