Covid-19: One Year Report

Baroness Andrews Excerpts

Thursday 25th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I support these regulations but I am also glad to have the opportunity to support the regret Motion in the name of my noble friend. A year ago, we were shocked to hear that 20,000 deaths would be considered a good outcome. What, we asked, would be a bad outcome? Sadly, we know that now: 126,000 deaths, which is a dreadful figure, with so many of those deaths being avoidable. I remember vividly our first meeting with Chris Whitty in early March last year. He told a packed meeting of this House—packed into Committee Room G—that some people would have to go into isolation for three months. A year later, we are counting the costs which had not been identified at that point—in terms of mental health, domestic abuse, jobs, loss of learning and loss of life.

Vaccination is an act of solidarity as well as one of personal protection. The Motion identifies the urgent need to support those groups which are still fearful and will bring further risk to their communities. It would be fatal if Covid were to become a residual disease of poor communities. My first question to the Minister is: can he give us an update on how effective the latest campaigns have been in reaching those who are still reluctant and what other plans does he have in mind?

The Motion also recognises the challenges facing the NHS going forward: increases in waiting times and staggering waiting lists. Can the Minister tell us what the modelling shows about the relationship between bringing waiting times down within the next year and the funding that has been made available? In simple terms, how long will it take someone who has now been waiting for over a year for a hip operation, previously done in three months, to get that done?

Beyond the Motion and the many detailed and specific questions which have already been put to the Minister, I want to raise a few longer-term issues. This is indeed a moment of reflection. As we move into a cautious freedom, the exam questions include: how can we ensure that the progress that has been made is sustained and that we can mobilise quickly against dangerous variants? Here I share the anxieties of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. Perhaps the Minister can answer the question that the Minister in the other place failed to address at all. Why is it that, according to the Explanatory Memorandum:

“Our assessment of the risks is not fundamentally changed by new Variants of Concern”?


This is particularly perplexing. This morning another scientist, Sir Jeremy Farrar, emphasised that the greatest risk currently is from imported variants. Given our vulnerability to variants, does the Minister agree that it is absolutely essential that we maintain the agility of our research base so that our amazing scientists and medics can anticipate and respond? This is a global task.

Is the Minister also aware that one of the reasons, in all probability, that we were so unprepared for Covid was because after an initial spike in funding in response to SARS and MERS in 2005 and 2015, research funding, especially in public health, dropped like a stone? I argue that if that funding had been maintained, we might have had a better understanding of Covid-19 and have had a vaccine closer to hand. Does the Minister agree that the planned cuts to the science budget of more than £1 billion—equivalent to the research and innovation budgets for the MRC and the Science and Technology Facilities Council combined —is madness? How will this help the country prepare for the next pandemic? Can he also say how the planned cuts of £120 million to the UKRI ODA funding will help the world fight further pandemics? So much for being a global science superpower and so much for being prepared for the next pandemic.

The Government did not plan for the Covid pandemic because they were too busy with Brexit, so I would like to have some confidence that they will plan for the next. That is precisely why we need a public inquiry as soon as possible, not least to clear up some of the confusions that the Prime Minister in particular seems so gifted at creating.

The Prime Minister has been saying for some time—indeed, as far back as July last year—that one of the reasons the pandemic got out of control was because the one thing nobody knew early on during the pandemic was that the virus was being passed asymptomatically from person to person. This is simply not true. The issue of asymptomatic transfer was known to SAGE in February and mentioned in the Chris Whitty meeting with us in early March. The Prime Minister was challenged on this in July. No retraction was made and he repeated it again this week at his press conference. Will the Minister correct this and put the record right in this House?

It is to expose the truth behind some of these assertions, which seem to be the Government building a case for exoneration, that we need a public inquiry as soon as possible. We need answers about how the Government intend to plan for the health security of this country, not just for the rest of this year but for the next decade at least.