Covid-19: One Year Report

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 25th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I support the regret Motion from my noble friend Lady Brinton and echo the thanks that she gave. She highlighted how the Government have failed, which is why we should not trust them by giving them a blank cheque on our civil liberties. I also agree with points made in the Motion of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton.

The issue underlying both regret Motions is the incompetence of this Government in their handling of the pandemic. That is why it is the Government themselves who should be amending this Act, since we are unable to do so. There has been a failure to plan and prepare, decisions have been taken at the wrong level, there has been an overreliance on private sector providers at enormous cost and there have been failures of transparency and providing for democratic scrutiny.

It is incompetent for Governments not to plan properly. This involves horizon scanning and putting measures in place to adequately respond to identified risks. The horizon scanning by the national security risk assessment happened and still does, but a recent study by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk made several criticisms and recommendations. One criticism was that there is no process, body of expertise or oversight mechanism in place to ensure that departments’ risk plans are adequate. That had fatal results in the case of this pandemic.

The study also concluded that the UK’s pandemic influenza strategy, which was fairly detailed, did not make any plans for a lockdown, despite this being one of the dominant response strategies for Covid-19. Can the Minister give the Government’s response to this serious analysis and say how they plan to learn lessons about planning our risk identification and response in future? Simple mistakes were made, such as failing to ensure that stocks of PPE were in date and fit for purpose.

It is incompetent not to provide adequate basic resources for worst-case scenarios. We started this pandemic with 11,000 too few hospital beds, 5,000 too few doctors and 40,000 too few nurses. We had a fraction of the number of ICU beds and ventilators of other European countries, which is probably why our death rate is one of the highest in the world. Do the Government plan to provide the resources to correct this?

It is incompetent not to care for the most vulnerable in society, for whom the consequences are most serious. For example, it is extraordinary that the DHSC did not realise that sending older people back to care homes to clear hospital beds without first testing them for the virus was catastrophically dangerous. Many deaths occurred in the closed environments of care homes at the beginning of the pandemic that have never even been recorded as Covid deaths—people did not have a test, even when they fell ill. The death rate in care homes was double the rate in the wider community. It was incompetent not to provide care homes with PPE at the start and it was not true to say that care homes were safe—they were not.

The so-called NHS app was incompetent from start to finish. The first system did not work and was replaced. The second system did not pass on information about Covid hotspots to the authorities. People were advised by the app to isolate because of contact with a positive case, but they were not entitled to the £500 support at first, unless they also had a call from another authority —people did not know that because of incompetent communication.

Then there is test and trace—an exemplar of the biggest incompetence of all, which is making decisions at the wrong level. The Government relied on central decision-making and provision, aided by expensive management consultants and private companies, instead of devolving responsibility and decision authority to local government, where the skills and experience could do the job better. Indeed, in the end, when they started to get the necessary information, resources and authority, local authorities proved this very decisively. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, mentioned, management consultants have been marking their own homework and are being paid to do tasks that should be undertaken by civil servants as part of their job. We need answers about this. It was incompetent to delay taking action when advised to do so by scientific advisers. That was probably the most fatal incompetence of all.

Finally, it is incompetent not to understand your own Act of Parliament. It is not true that failure to renew this Act would remove good things such as the furlough scheme and measures to keep us safe, as some government spokesmen have suggested. That is not what this is about. It is about a blank cheque to control our civil liberties and reduce democratic scrutiny. We will not give that to anyone, especially not this incompetent Government.