Covid-19: Disparate Impact

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness. In fact, £4 million has been spent on communications translating public health information, along with 600 targeted publications to ensure that the messages reach various communities. Local authorities with those specific communities will be targeted, but I will take back the noble Baroness’s concern about making sure that materials are translated promptly. Every avenue is being looked at to ensure communication with different communities. We have also been making use of stakeholder groups, charities, community groups and places of worship; indeed, a task force has been set up because obviously, a very high proportion of black and minority ethnic people attend a place of worship. My honourable friend Kemi Badenoch has even written to a number of high commissioners in London about their diaspora, asking them to help communicate the information to their communities. We are seeking to get the evidence out through traditional means and using social media influencers where we can.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, the Welsh Government have explicitly included Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children along with other minority ethnic groups in their list of groups that are particularly vulnerable to Covid-19. That is absolutely right, both because of their legally recognised ethnic minority status and because of such data as exists on the disproportionate impact of the virus on the communities, reflected in my noble friend Lady Lawrence’s excellent report. What attention have the Government paid to these communities? Will their specific ethnicity be recorded on death certificates and elsewhere?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness. As Minister for Women, one of my specific concerns is the underachievement of Gypsy Roma in most categories. The Government are firmly committed to delivering a cross-government strategy to tackle these inequalities. I will have to come back to her on the specific point about BAME; I presume that BAME registration would include that as an ethnicity but I will double-check. My noble friend Lord Greenhalgh, who is the MHCLG lead on this issue, wrote to local authority chief executives in April to point out the specific support that those communities might need in terms of services such as water sanitation and waste disposal on their sites. We have been working closely with the various representative organisations to ensure, again, that the message gets out to communities that might be harder to reach than others.