Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Caine

Monday 8th February 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I want to ask about the route out of lockdown. I fear the Government are relying far too much on the vaccine programme to get us out of trouble and may be planning to ignore the need to reduce the prevalence of the virus in the community before easing restrictions. I hope that the Minister will reply to my noble friend Lady Barker’s question about a lot of test and trace being laid off. Surely this is the time to continue the effort to find out where the virus is and stop it in its tracks by supported isolation strategies? Can the Minister justify this reduction in testing staff? If he tells me that resources are being switched from the eye-wateringly expensive centralised system to locally based—and more cost-effective—test, trace and isolate services, I will be very pleased to hear it. However, the Government were so slow to make use of local expertise in favour of their expensive national system that I somehow doubt it.

Unless we bear down on incidence in the community, mutations will continue to occur and variants will result, with a possible consequence for the effectiveness of current vaccines. What lessons have been learned from what happened last autumn, when cases rose again after the summer easing of restrictions and we had a second wave worse than the first? What lessons have been learned from abroad, specifically Portugal, where there is now an even worse crisis for which it is having to get help from Germany and other EU countries because they had a free-for-all over Christmas?

Are the Government watching what is happening in Israel, where the level of vaccination is higher than here but levels of illness are not reducing as fast as expected? As Israeli epidemiologist Dr Ran Balicer has commented:

“Vaccines work, but the picture is more complex than that. Other steps are needed as well.”


Experts there believe that the lower level of adherence to lockdown in Israel is part of the problem, which should be a clear lesson for us here in the UK.

Can other noble Lords mute, please?

All this indicates the need for timely parliamentary scrutiny of any proposals for loosening restrictions, so that Members of both Houses will have at least as much notice as schools. Members need the opportunity to counter the pressure that the Government are clearly feeling from the so-called Covid Recovery Group, which does not agree with restrictions and seems to believe, mistakenly, that herd immunity can come from widespread natural infections. It does not seem to care about the deaths and long-term illness that would ensue from such a strategy.

Looking to the future, can the Minister say, first, what studies are being set up to monitor the ongoing level of immunity of those who have been vaccinated, testing against not only current variants but others that may arise? This will be essential if scientists are to advise on the nature and frequency of future booster vaccines. Secondly, do we have sufficient capacity in genome sequencing adequately to track new variants, which will inevitably come into the country until the whole world is vaccinated? We are world leaders in genome sequencing but capacity is different from expertise. Do we not need to scale up this work and perhaps do what they are doing in Denmark: sequence the relevant part of the genome of every positive case in order to detect new variants early? I am afraid that when I heard a little while ago that we have two cases of the South African variant I cynically suspected that we actually had many more but did not know about it. We can know this only if we increase our genome sequencing capacity.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Caine) (Con)]

Before calling the next speaker, I remind noble Lords to remain on mute when not speaking. I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes.