Public Health

Lord Beamish Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

The Government’s response to the pandemic has been incompetent, shambolic, arrogant and, alas, corrupt. The centralised, top-down approach they have enacted would be the envy of any former Soviet bloc country during the cold war. Local directors of public health have been sidelined and ignored, making way for expensive management consultants and members of the Conservative party’s chumocracy. The £12 billion test and trace system has failed. The Prime Minister and Ministers keep trumpeting out figures saying that we have got more tests done, yet what is important is not the number of tests but what we do with them in terms of tracing people, and the rates for national test and tracing are below 60%, compared with local test and tracing rates of 90-odd per cent. Clearly, therefore, the system has failed.

The right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) asked what the solution is. Well, the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) gave the answer: what we need is locally based strategies for test and tracing. We do not need mass lateral flow testing, because there is no evidence at all from the Liverpool experiment that that has worked and the logistical exercise of implementing that across all the required tier 3 areas would prove impossible.

On the vaccine, the Government have put the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), in charge; well, nothing can go wrong there then, can it? What has he actually done? He has threatened people who do not have the vaccine with not being able to go to pubs and offered a supermarket voucher for people who have it, instead of doing what my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) said, which is to make the argument and work with local government to deliver it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) is right: people have lost faith in the tier system. The Prime Minister and Ministers said that science would dictate the agenda, but it is not doing so; politics is. That is why London is in tier 2 and the north-east is going to be put in tier 3. So much for the levelling up agenda of this Government. The north-east is this country’s poorest region; the idea that jobs there mean less to this Government than jobs in London speaks for itself. That is why I cannot support these measures tonight and will be voting against them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Felicity Buchan (Kensington) (Con)]

After much soul searching, I will vote with the Government tonight, but it has been a difficult decision. I will vote with the Government for the following reasons. First, I have always advocated a regional approach as opposed to a national approach, and that is exactly what we are doing.

Secondly, the vaccine is close—it is not certain, but it is close—so we should not jeopardise all our gains when we will potentially have the vaccine within a few months.

Thirdly, clearly we are coming out of lockdown, so although my constituency will be in tier 2 and I have lobbied for it to be in tier 1, the restrictions will be less. However, I will continue to lobby for my constituency’s tier to be reviewed and for us to come out in a lesser tier. Once we roll out the vaccine to the elderly and the vulnerable, I will ask for restrictions to go, because we need to get life back to normal.

We need to be able to manage risks. We have been absolute about our only focus being coronavirus. Clearly, we do not want anyone to die or suffer from coronavirus, but we need to think about the implications of what we are doing for not only the economy but non-covid health issues. There are parameters within which we can do that analysis, such as quality of life indicators.

I wish to make one final point. I have heard various Opposition Members saying that London in some way got special treatment to be in tier 2. That is absolutely not the case. If Members look at the 26 November NHS—

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Look at the figures.

[Felicity Buchan]

That is exactly what I am looking at. The graph shows tier 1 at the bottom left, tier 2 in the middle and tier 3 at the top right, and London is around about the middle, so please do not misrepresent what is going on. This is way too important to be political. These are people’s lives and livelihoods.