Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (No. 2) (England) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2020

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Friday 18th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I am a member of Pendle Borough Council and I have to say that I consider today’s proceedings something of a farce. If my council ran proceedings like this, the Government would come and close us down. Nevertheless, it is one of the councils in the country and in Lancashire that is trying to get a grip. I have not been directly involved, but local people are very disappointed by the Government, who they see beset by general chaos—a shambles day by day, with confusing and confused messages as far as they can see. We have to cope with national rules, Lancashire-wide rules, borough-wide rules and even rules that apply to particular wards. How people are supposed to understand all these different rules for different places is not clear to me. An inordinate amount of time is spent understanding and publicising the rules and then negotiating with the various levels and the confusion of bodies.

This is a process that takes place every week. At the beginning of the week, the local task force starts looking at what should be done with the next round of changes that the Government want to make at the end of the week; then it goes to various county-level bodies. I have not got my mind around the number of different county-level bodies involved, and what their responsibilities are, but there is something called Silver that seems very important—I am not quite sure who is on Silver, but there it is—then it goes to national level, to Gold. I asked, “What is Gold?” and was told, “Oh, it’s Matt Hancock”. All I said was, “All that glisters is not gold”.

We used to be top of the league; we have got it down now, so we are going down, but the Government have pulled the plug on everything we are trying to do.