Health Protection (Coronavirus, Collection of Contact Details etc and Related Requirements) Regulations 2020

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Wednesday 7th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

I begin every discussion of statutory instruments these days with a preamble outlining our serious concerns about the way in which decisions have been made, announced and brought into law. Somebody said, “Groundhog Day”—I think it might have been me last time—and it sort of feels like that.

In the case of these regulations, there is no justification for their having been laid at the eleventh hour using an urgent procedure. In his introduction, the Minister used the word “housekeeping”. That is an inappropriate word for what is democratic accountability. The app has taken six months to roll out and, in that time, thought should have been given to these regulations and key stakeholders should have been consulted. Those stakeholders should have included the industries affected by them, and local government, as several noble Lords have mentioned. That can only help the Government to allow time for those who are going to have to implement the regulations to review them, which would prevent mistakes and reduce the need for amending regulations. As noble Lords will be aware, we have regulations that have had been amended and regulations that have been revoked. A bit of thinking about this could avoid wasting our time and that of the Minister and his officials. Lead-in time to prepare new regulations is vital.

The NHS Covid-19 app was finally rolled out across England and Wales on Thursday 24 September; it uses Bluetooth technology in smartphones to keep an anonymous log of people with whom an individual comes into close contact. However, as we know, it has been plagued with problems, including the fact that up to 70,000 users were blocked from logging their positive test results. Can the Minister explain how that was able to happen? There was never an issue with test results from Public Health Wales labs. I understand that that oversight has now been corrected, but I fear that confidence in this technology is being further eroded.

I am concerned that the UK’s contact tracing apps are not cross-compatible. Plenty of people regularly cross the border between England and Scotland, but the NHS Covid-19 app and Protect Scotland do not seem to work in conjunction with one another. Positive test results from one nation cannot be entered into another nation’s app—is that true?—and alerts can be received from only one app at a time. This is obviously worrying, so what steps are the Government taking to develop interoperability—a terrible word, but I could not think of another one—between the three UK apps to ensure that contacts between citizens are reliability identified? Does the Minister acknowledge that this could be important to citizens in the border regions of England and Scotland?

It is of course great that 14 million people, including me and my family, have downloaded the NHS Covid-19 app in England and Wales; that is some 24% of the UK population of 66.5 million. However, public health bodies the world over have said that Covid-19 contact tracing apps need to reach a 60% adoption level to give the population effective uptake, so it seems to me that more work needs to be done to reach the 58 million smartphone users in the UK, which is far more than 60% of the population. Why do the Government think that people have not downloaded these apps? Can the Minister confirm that one of the main barriers to the wider use of these apps is compatibility? One in five iPhones and 8% of Android smartphones currently in the use in the UK are deemed to be too old, a matter I have raised with the Minister before. Moreover, I understand that the newest models of Huawei smartphones, launched in May 2019, will not be able to run the app due to a ban on sharing technology. Is that true? Does the Minister share my concern that significant numbers of smartphone users are locked out of digital test and trace?

I now turn to the use of the QR code as a precondition of entry. I shall add to the questions that have already been asked. Has the Minister and his officials read the Big Brother Watch brief on this? It is very interesting and says that those of us on the Parliamentary Estate are not complying with the Government’s rules and the laws in these regulations, so that is a matter of some concern. I confess that I have not used a QR code on entering our canteen. I will do if that is what I am required to do, but I did not realise that I was supposed to. I would hate to think that we on the Parliamentary Estate are in breach of these laws. However, people who are older, on lower incomes or are less familiar with this technology are sometimes being humiliated because business owners do not understand the regulations or are applying them in an inappropriate way. There are a series of questions that the Minister needs to answer to make these things work.