Coronavirus Act 2020: Temporary Provisions

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Monday 28th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, this place is a place of great privilege, but people outside often mistake the privileges we enjoy—they think we get excited about things like robes. The real privilege is to be here on a day when we have excellent maiden speeches such as we have had today, and to welcome new people to take part and bring their experience to our deliberation. You are very welcome.

In March of this year, we sat on these Benches with the noble Lord and we debated this Bill. It came to this House accompanied by reports from the Delegated Powers Committee and the Constitution Committee which, frankly, were excoriating in their criticism. The Constitution Committee said:

“The Bill contains a range of delegated powers. They are broadly framed, include Henry VIII powers, and are often subject to limited or no parliamentary scrutiny.”


The Delegated Powers Committee said:

“Given the speed with which the Government need to act and the significance of the powers needed to address the emergency, we have, on this occasion, chosen mainly to highlight points of concern rather than make definitive recommendations. Whilst in no way resiling from the appropriateness of this exceptional approach, we nonetheless believe that it is important for us to state clearly that, had the country not been in the midst of a developing national emergency, there are powers in this Bill … about which our commentary would have been far more trenchant and our recommendations far more robust.”


This Bill was introduced, in the words of the Government, to save the NHS. We are now in a very different place in terms of our scientific and medical knowledge and society’s behaviour. Back in March, my noble friend Lord Scriven asked the Government—as he has repeatedly—why there was no general power of competence for local government. We said then that local government would be the most important organisation in getting the long-term management of this virus right once the NHS had managed the initial pandemic.

Last Friday, the Government issued the Coronavirus Act analysis. It is a rather amazing document but it is not an analysis. There is no analysis whatever. There is no data at all. It is simply a list of the powers the Government took unto themselves with a small note at the end saying, “We would like to keep them.” That is no longer acceptable. I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, that this legislation must be open to scrutiny. I want to know how many of these powers have been used, when, by whom and how often, and what the effect was. None of that information has come to Parliament for six months. Week after week, noble Lords, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, sit here, with the regulations long since passed, and ask the Government what has happened—and answer comes there none. That is not acceptable.

Whatever noble Lords choose to do today, I hope that we have set the groundwork here for the debate in the House of Commons next week in which Members of Parliament—who are elected and will have to bear the consequences of their decisions—will challenge the Government to stop behaving in such a cavalier way with Parliament.

It will come as no surprise to noble Lords, least of all the Minister, that I believe that the Government’s approach has been fundamentally flawed. They have often ignored and underestimated the importance of local government and people in local public services. Nobody goes out to clap for environmental health inspectors but they are the people who, in the absence of leadership from central government, built their own call centres and sent out people with experience in investigating outbreaks of ill health and zoonotic illnesses and with the skills to talk to local businesses about what they needed to do to make sure that their businesses remained safe and open. Would that a fraction of the money wasted on some of the national schemes—Covid marshals; I ask you—had been put from the outset behind the people who know about this and have experience.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, was quite right to say that there would be a huge amount of good advice in hindsight, but it is not hindsight to say to the Government that abandoning Public Health England in the middle of the worst health crisis we have ever faced was never going to be anything more than an unnecessary and temporary disruption. So, too, it is fair to say that whatever faith the Government have put in their ability to develop apps in ways that other people around the world have chosen not to—and no matter how many people have downloaded them, as the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, said—understanding what it means in a poor community to sign up for an app that may mean that you cannot go to work, whether or not it is right, is something that local professionals know about. We should work with them more.

We said at the very beginning, back in March, that it was wrong of the Government to make this legislation unamendable. It was always going to be the case that some powers would be needed and some would turn out to be unnecessary, and the situation could not be foreseen. We did not know back then, but might have thought, that we might by now have the vaccine. If we did, that would have changed the whole landscape, but we do not. We also do not know what will happen over the next six months, but we know that we in this Parliament should insist that the Government start listening not just to scientists but to professionals, and using their experience and wisdom not only to craft legislation which has a chance of working in the first place but, when they get it wrong, to admit it and change.

I want to pick up one thing on mental health. The Government brought in legislation that swept away safeguards for people detained under the Mental Health Act. Organisations such as Rethink have talked to people who were detained under the Act during lockdown and they were actually very pleased—they felt very safe and thanked the staff who looked after them. They continued to feel protected. We also know from Rethink that, with the expected upturn in unemployment, we can now say there will be a huge demand for mental health services. The more money that local authorities and health bodies are allowed to put into preventive mental health services, the better. My colleagues in Sutton Council have put a mental health nurse into every school from September because they see the value of that and talked to people who know how these things work on the ground.

Above all else, the reason I have taken this tack is not to glorify local government but because local government not only has the relevant experience but has had a duty throughout this whole thing to keep open basic public services and to enable businesses to stay open and thrive. That is what we must do across the whole country. Noble Lords say that we need to balance health and the economy; without the basic health infrastructure that works and is backed up by very clear, well understood and transparent messages to the public, the economy will always struggle.

I say this to the Government: they should promise now that, within three months, they will bring new and revised legislation which will be the product of discussions that are both cross-party and with people who have clearly not been involved in the making of this, rather than taking and keeping for the next six months a bunch of powers, some of which they do not need and some of which undermine public confidence. We have to get through this together. This Bill is no longer the basis on which to do that.