Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) (No. 2) Regulations 2021

Debate between Lord Cunningham of Felling and Lord Framlingham

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cunningham of Felling (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Your Lordships will no doubt be delighted to know that, in January, I shall be leaving it—not by choice but because I have been cycled off.

At the heart of this dispute with the Department of Health and Social Care is the requirement, not option, that any department submitting secondary legislation—principally to this House, since it is almost never discussed at the other end of the Corridor in the House of Commons —should include an impact assessment. This is not an optional extra. It is not a take it or leave it. It is a requirement at the heart of the process. The committee is meeting at the moment—it may have concluded—and it has a Conservative chairman, who is very good. There is no predetermined disposition among its members to seek a confrontation with any government department. However, in this case, the Secretary of State and his department have point-blank refused to carry out an impact assessment. It is a challenge to Parliament and to the parliamentary process. That is what is taking place.

I agree with almost everything that the right reverend Prelate said about enforcing vaccination and I realise that there are some very serious problems to be resolved there. But that is not what the argument is about. It is about whether Parliament—in this case, your Lordships’ House—has the right to require any government department to produce an impact assessment about its proposals for legislation. It is quite a simple matter. It is not onerous in most cases. It is necessary for the committee to consider the impact assessment—along with other aspects of the legislation, of course—before reporting to your Lordships’ House. I did not hear in the Minister’s opening remarks a coherent explanation—and I have never received or seen one—of why that is not possible in this case.

As I said, your Lordships require their colleagues on the committee to analyse secondary legislation. That is our role and, if we do not have an impact assessment, we cannot fulfil it. That is the issue. I agree with what the right reverend Prelate said, but this is not about enforcing vaccination. It is about trying to learn to understand the impact, through an impact assessment, of this proposed secondary legislation. If committees are not allowed to take a stand on this, there is little purpose to them, because this is one of the fundamental issues of secondary legislation. That is our job and our responsibility and it is what we have been trying to do.

[Lord Framlingham (Con)]

My Lords, I had not intended to contribute to this debate, but I will say a few words. First, I am completely against any compulsory vaccination of any kind. It goes completely against all that we should believe in and I am totally opposed to it. Secondly, I recently put down two Written Questions to the Minister’s department: one about people who had been vaccinated and one about people who had tested positive with antibodies. I wanted to know the difference between the two; I wanted to know about protection from the disease and about transmission of the disease. The Answers that I got said, “We’re looking at it, but as far as we can tell at the moment, there is no difference”—it was 84% versus 85%. There is no difference between the protection that the vaccine offers and the protection given by antibodies in the normal course of events. Surely we are not going to vaccinate people who have the antibodies. It is absolutely pointless, particularly if they are thousands of schoolchildren. Can we not test people who have the antibodies and tell them that they do not need to be vaccinated? That seems to be common sense.