Coronavirus Act 2020: Temporary Provisions
Lord Greaves Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow my old friend, the noble Lord, Lord Hain. Although the Companion tells us that we should not all pile in and congratulate the maiden speakers all the time, I nevertheless particularly want to welcome the two new speakers who hail from north of the line between the Severn and the Wash. There are precious few of us who that applies to, including the Deputy Lord Speaker. In many ways we are a deprived minority in this House, so every extra one should be given a great welcome—so I do so.
I am minded to vote for the Motion to Regret from the noble Lord, Lord Robathan. I do not agree with everything he says or thinks on this matter, but it will be my own little shot across the bows of the Government. So many people, who come from completely different political perspectives, have real worries about the huge great pile of these “made affirmatives” which we are getting, and eventually getting round to discussing, in some cases after they have been—what is the word?
Lord Greaves (LD)
Thank you.
The country is dividing yet again into two tribes, just as we have been desperate to get over the division in the country over Brexit. A lot of people are frightened, hiding and confused. Great damage is being caused within families, as well as to their financial circumstances, and some people are being made poorly as a result of it. Others are angry and are becoming increasingly aggressive or getting out of hand. My own town has an increasing problem of school-age young people who are increasingly getting out of hand in local gangs. It is very difficult to deal with, and the Government had better not tell me that the police ought to do it, because they have absolutely no spare time to do anything at all extra.
However, many more of the angry people are just getting very worried and making themselves ill, and do not know what to do. This is not helped when people whom I call idiots, such as the people demonstrating in Trafalgar Square this last weekend, are going around saying that vaccination is a great plot, and all the rest of it. We could do without those people. That makes it more difficult to be constructively critical of what the Government are doing, but I believe that that is what we ought to do.
We need education, explanation, transparency and clarity, as the right reverend Prelate suggested; we need support and persuasion of people, as my noble friend Lord Shipley said, rather than control and legal threats, threatening to fine people £1,000, or whatever it is, if they get a telephone call from Test and Trace saying that somebody, somewhere says that they were a contact. The implications of that and the problems of people who dispute it are enormous. It seems to me that we are where we are, but the Government need to have a substantial rethink and reshift of their priorities in the way they do things, and I hope that these debates here and in the Commons will help them to do that.
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions on Gatherings) (North of England) Regulations 2020
Lord Greaves Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, yesterday I said quite a lot about a similar set of regulations which I will not repeat, but what I did do in the evening yesterday after our long discussions was attend a meeting of Pendle Borough Council. I was able to do that from my room in this building. I am obviously a member and I shall give a flavour of two resolutions that the council passed, which might be helpful. The first was to express the council’s thanks and gratitude to the staff of Pendle Council and all the other local agencies whose staff have “shown such fortitude in the face of unprecedented peacetime impacts on the daily lives of themselves and their citizens” and gone beyond the call of duty in what has been happening.
The council then passed a motion on test, trace and isolate, which in a sense was a little less positive. “The council notes with alarm that the chaos in the nation’s test, trace and isolate systems for Covid-19 is contributing to the disease accelerating.” The failures of the Government system have created a situation where they are locking us into lockdown in Pendle. These are things that I have said previously in the Chamber. The council believes that “oppressive” regulations—not all regulations, but oppressive regulations—are counter- productive to the fight against Covid-19 and are generating mental health issues and undermining social cohesion across the borough. I also talked about that to a degree yesterday.
The council requested that the Government should issue a simple set of principles setting out the steps that individuals should take. The Government think that they have got that, but we are asking that people understand it. The emphasis should be on supporting people to live their lives in accordance with the guidance, rather than a reliance on virtually unenforceable regulations and “Covid marshals” and—this is a point I have been making on behalf of all the councils in the hotspot areas—the Government should provide sufficient resources for Pendle Council and its partners to have an effective test, trace and isolate programme involving screening, targeting individual testing, a local end-to-end tracing programme and adequate support for individuals who are required to self-isolate, together with the monitoring of such isolation to ensure its effectiveness. The Government have been moving towards this, but I thought that this might be helpful.
Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I remind noble Lords of the two-minute time limit for Back-Bench speakers.
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Blackburn with Darwen and Bradford) Regulations 2020
Lord Greaves Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, we have come to Blackburn and Bradford, and tomorrow we will go on to where I live which is situated between the two, in the middle of the Pennines, in the north of England. It is the same thing everywhere really. We have talked about the complications in these orders. If and when there is a general sorting out of them, it would be helpful if places such as Blackburn and Bradford could be put where they belong in the north of England so that we have them all together so that if we look at the regulations, we can see what is going on. Whether it is Yorkshire or Lancashire is neither here nor there—the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, is a Bradfordian like me and I can see her muttering. However, that would be helpful.
I will say one or two things about local testing. Where I am, we have spent three or four weeks really trying to get to grips with local testing on the ground, including chasing up individuals in their houses, and it is not easy. In recent times, resistance to testing has grown. The Government need to realise that and understand that if the answer in hotspot areas is trying to get as many people tested as possible, whether or not they have symptoms, it is not easy.
The first problem was when the Government changed their mind last week and said that everywhere people without symptoms should not go to be tested because of the pressure on the testing system. That did not help, and I believe it has caused an increase in the incidence of the virus in east Lancashire. The second is that a general view was put around social media in a big way among people who do not really approve of testing at all that the more you test, the more cases you will get. It was not explained that what matters is the positivity of the people being tested, rather than the absolute numbers. By concentrating on absolute numbers, it was almost impossible to defeat that argument.
Then there was all the stuff on television about people on beaches, at raves and so on, which did not help, whatever the rights and wrongs of it. The single event that has done most harm was Mr Cummings’s trip to Durham. There is absolutely no doubt that it really hit home that if he can get away with it, why should we bother with testing or with all the rules and regulations?
Yesterday my noble friend Lady Barker mentioned confused messages and the careless use of statistics. She is absolutely right. In these circumstances it is important that the messages are clear, that people at local and national level are putting forward the same messages and that, at national level, people in the same party, Government and Cabinet are putting forward the same messages.
We have had a specific problem in east Lancashire that the willingness of people in the Muslim community to co-operate and be tested has become less than it was at the beginning. Whether it was right or wrong, the coincidence of the first lockdown with Eid caused a great deal of anger and resentment. In my experience it was largely held to, but it did not help. Subsequently, the testing that took place, at least in the two districts of east Lancashire I know best, showed that the wards with a high Asian population had the highest number of positives. That resulted in testing being concentrated on those areas, quite rightly, but it also resulted in a belief, combined with “the more you test, the more cases you get”, that the Muslim and Asian community is being targeted and victimised, particularly younger men. It is very easy indeed to get that response. It will be difficult to overcome that and to do all the necessary testing in those areas.
I said I would say something about Lords procedures, and I will. I do not believe that the present system under which we are here today is satisfactory. It is serendipitous that there are not many people taking part today. Debates, including the debate we are having on Monday, are just a series of short statements by people, not proper scrutiny or investigation, as noble Lords have said. I do not go quite as far as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, who said parliamentary democracy was being closed down, but it feels a bit like that. We are running to catch up.
I suggest that the time has come when the Government and the people who run procedure in this place need to look hard at what can be done to improve things. I have two suggestions. First, I suggest that the Merits Committee, which looks at these measures, sets up a special sub-committee that deals with them very quickly as they arrive, almost day by day, rather than waiting for the whole committee. Secondly, I suggest that it would be sensible for the business managers here to timetable a period each week for us to deal with these measures at much shorter notice than we normally do. I accept what the Minister said—that the normal procedures of the House are being followed and so on —but these are not normal times.
I want to add to what the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, said in the previous debate and refer particularly to households. The Government and the scientists believe that household transmission is a major part of the growing transmission of this virus. That may be the case, but it may be that household transmission is more of a secondary transmission than a primary one and that the real places where transmission is now beginning to take place are commercial premises, entertainment premises and, unfortunately, schools. I follow what the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, said this afternoon: we really need to see the Government’s technical evidence on this rather than simply taking what they say as gospel.
It is the impact on families that is causing most of the mental and emotional damage to health that the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, referred to earlier. My noble friend Lady Walmsley said yesterday that people are fearful, anxious and depressed. When I heard her say that, it reminded me of John Keats’ words:
“The weariness, the fever, and the fret.”
This is a major problem now, and it is growing. In the early days, people thought, “It’ll only be three months or whatever; we’ll batten down the hatches and see it through”, but when the restrictions on grandparents seeing grandchildren, on sisters seeing each other, on families helping each other out and so on seem to be going on and on in the more restricted areas, people are not just getting weary and fretful; they are getting angry. This means that getting these measures adhered to is going to become more difficult as time goes on, so we need clear messaging, explanation and understanding.
The Government need to realise that the lockdowns on families that existed previously simply cannot be brought back again. The Government have business and education at the top of their priorities, but families have to be at the top of their priorities too.
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Leicester) (No. 2) Regulations 2020
Lord Greaves Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I too thank the Minister for yet again coming to explain another sheaf of affirmative instruments about faraway places that most noble Lords probably do not know much about. However, some do.
I shall comment on one or two points that have been made. First, the Minister said that in Leicester, local people, local authorities and other agencies had made herculean efforts. That is true of other areas, but people are now being threatened with another six months, and it feels like a threat, though I understand it is not meant as such. Their energies and resilience are being severely tested, and more practical support, including money from the Government, would be very helpful.
The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, both referred to the fact that the process we are using to deal with the regulations in this House is not satisfactory. It is not. I will have more to say on that later today.
The noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, mentioned black and minority ethnic involvement. I come from an area with a substantial ethnic minority population, and I wonder if the Minister will have more to say about that in this discussion.
Neither Leicester nor Blackburn, nor even Bradford, which shares a border with Pendle on the moors, are part of Pendle. Nevertheless, I should declare an interest as a Pendle councillor; I may refer to it from time to time in this debate and the next.
The other points the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, made—although I suspect we come from a different ideological starting point—are very important and will become more important. We should discuss them.
The Leicester regulations demonstrate the extraordinary complexity of this whole thing. This is the sixth set of regulations, as my noble friend Lady Bowles mentioned. The three amendments to the original regulations were a complete rewrite, and now there are new amendments. One gets the impression that, with the best will in the world, much of the Government’s decision-making on this, which affects local areas, is being done—I will not say on the back of fag packets, because they are out of fashion nowadays—on whatever they use nowadays. Week by week, people who live in areas that have the highest rate of Covid-19, which include east Lancashire, are on tenterhooks to see what is going to happen next. Sometimes, it is what the local people have put forward, as the Minister suggested. In other cases, things seem to come out of the blue. Although the situations have been changing a lot, more stability would be welcomed by all the people who are doing their best to deal with this on a local level. Working out the interrelationship between new national rules and local rules, as they come and change week by week, is extraordinarily difficult, although people do their best to explain it. I wonder whether, sooner or later, some national rules will come which will be more restrictive than local rules and will then apply in a particular area.
Testing is crucial. We all know that testing is crucial. The comments from the Prime Minister two days ago were not helpful, and they have been more or less rowed back on. But it is not just how many tests are done or how many testing kits are sent out, it is the speed of the results and the follow-up of the contacts—at the local level—which is often so important. This still needs a great deal of work. The Minister said yesterday that things were getting a lot better in this respect, but it is not always obvious on the ground.
Finally, yesterday I asked the Minister a couple of questions about the new regulations which provide people with £500, under certain circumstances, if they are isolating, and also about the evidence of enforcement. What the Minister told me was that this would be done by the normal processes by which public benefits are handed out, and that the enforcement would be by local agencies and the local police. What he said was very vague and general, and I wonder if he has some specific ideas on exactly how this is going to be carried out.
Covid-19 Update
Lord Greaves Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Bethell (Con)
The noble Lord makes an extremely good point. I am grateful to him for alerting me to this question in advance. We take the contribution of pharmacists to the battle against Covid extremely seriously. I am not sure, right now, why pharmacists have been taken off the list and I would be glad to look into the matter and respond to him shortly.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, turning to the new proposals affecting people advised to self-isolate, on the one hand, an isolation payment of £500 is being offered, which is an incentive; on the other, there is a new legal duty, the enforcement of which could result in some quite swingeing fines if people do not do it. It is a two-sided thing. I have two questions about this. First, what involvement will local authorities have in this process? Will it all be done centrally or locally—like the payments in the pilot areas—or will it be both together? Secondly, there is obviously a lot of scope for disputes about this—about individuals and how they are treated and so on. What documentation will be involved? It is rather more than simply getting a telephone call and being asked to do something. It is an offer of quite a bit of money, and it is an instruction to do things. Will they be sent pieces of paper or will it be done by email or whatever? Will there be documentation to back all this up?
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, implementation of both the payment and the legal sanctions will run their course through exactly the same channels as any other social care payment or the implementation of any other social duty. That will be led by local authorities, as it would be with any other social penalty. The police will be involved. The courts will be involved. Appeal processes will be involved. We hope that there will not be many sanctions, and that the payments will make a big difference to isolation protocols.
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (No. 2) (England) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2020
Lord Greaves Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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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.
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Wearing of Face Coverings in a Relevant Place) (England) Regulations 2020
Lord Greaves Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I support the amendment and thank the Minister for his thorough explanation of the new regulations and how they will work, which is very helpful. I particularly support the part of the amendment that
“regrets the delay in bringing forward the Regulations”
back in the spring. Indeed, I regret the fact that the Government were not advising people to wear face masks even earlier—in particular in the early days of the virus, when there was a lot of concern about the lack of PPE generally and face masks were a substitute for people in care homes and so on who could not get hold of proper PPE. Nevertheless, face masks were better than nothing.
I congratulate people all over the country who set about making them on their sewing machines at home and distributing them—particularly a group in Colne who call themselves the Maskateers and ended up producing thousands of face masks initially for free distribution to local care homes and so on when they simply had nothing else. It was appalling that this was necessary but highly commendable that they did it. When the care homes began to get proper equipment, they continued making them and made them available to the general public for a donation, which has been to the great benefit of the local hospice—so not everything is bad in what has happened as far as Covid is concerned.
When I was cut off by time in the previous debate, I was talking about the fact that in our borough we had got to the top of the league table of the incidence of positive tests and were working very hard indeed to bring it down. In his reply, the Minister talked about the need for dedicated local outbreak plans. The point I was making was that that was exactly what we had. A lot of people were working very hard, based on the accepted mantra of “test, test, test”, then “track, track, track” the contacts and follow up to make sure that they were are isolating. That is what we were doing.
That effective local work was destroyed in one day when the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State went on television and appeared to be blaming people who were not symptomatic for wanting tests. In our part of the world, with the full agreement of people at national level, we had been encouraging everybody to go and get tests so that we knew what was happening and where the problems were, and then—in the streets and areas where the main problems were—going and knocking on doors and getting people to do it. That is what I meant when I said that the Government had pulled the rug from under the work that was being done locally—and unfortunately our numbers are now going up again.
Covid-19 Update
Lord Greaves Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, I am here to support the regulations before the House, not to comment on the issues about which the noble Lord asks.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord has previously congratulated people in my part of Lancashire on how well we are doing, which I do not quite agree with; we are working hard. Why are people, whether in our borough or the surrounding ones, still not able to book tests locally when we usually have three testing stations going? Some are being told to ration the number of tests they do each day, which involves gaps of perhaps two hours when they will not accept any bookings, even though the testing kit and the people are there, and the tests could be carried out. However, people are not being allowed to use them.
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, the amount of testing we are doing is increasing enormously. Most people who book a test do get it locally, and that test is delivered quickly and on time. The result arrives within 24 hours and we are doing a million tests a week, which is well within the bounds of our business capacity.
The noble Lord is right that the system is under scrutiny and pressure. Not everyone is getting a test where and when they want it. However, overall, it is reasonable to ask people not to make frivolous demands upon the tests, and to ask that those who are asymptomatic wait until there is further test capacity before they step forward to ask for their test.
Covid-19
Lord Greaves Excerpts(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Greaves (LD) [V]
My Lords, yesterday the Minister praised Pendle Borough Council—I repeat my interest—for its work on Covid, which now includes local tracking of positive cases; that is, the kinds of cases that the national system has failed to reach. Can the Minister explain why passing cases to the local level, which should be done within 24 hours, has in some cases taken four or five days? Furthermore, when a case has been reached, and more local contacts have been discovered, why do they have to be passed back to the national level and not quickly followed up locally? They might even be in the same street. Why are district councils such as Pendle not being provided with sufficient funding to cover all the costs of this work?
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, once again I pay tribute to Pendle Borough Council, which is an absolute model of local collaboration in the handling of a local outbreak. I am greatly encouraged that Pendle has stepped forward to do local tracing. I do not know the precise details and will not pretend otherwise, but the story the noble Lord tells illustrates a harsh truth: not everyone wants to be traced. Not everyone participates in the system with the kind of enthusiasm one would like. It sometimes takes persistence and determination to track people who may be recipients of some very difficult news about their isolation and how they are going to spend the next 14 days—news that may either have an economic impact on them or seriously disrupt plans for them and their family. It is tough to track and trace people. That is why we work with local authorities to do it, why I was proud to announce the numbers earlier and why I am grateful to the noble Lord for illustrating the point with his story from Pendle.
Covid-19: Self-isolation Payment Scheme
Lord Greaves Excerpts(3 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Bethell (Con)
The noble Lord is entirely right. The decision to isolate is extremely tough for a great many people, both economically and psychologically. The importance of isolation is absolutely critical in our battle against Covid. We have to think of ways of supporting people in every way we can. That is the responsibility of local authorities, and we have provided them with £300 million of funding to support their isolation, test and trace programme. I would like to pay tribute to local authorities that are doing a fantastic job of putting support in place for those who are isolating in expectation of the winter.
Lord Greaves (LD) [V]
My Lords, I speak from Pendle, and declare my interests, where council staff and the council leadership are working heroically in the front line of the Covid battle. This is a welcome although very small step. Is the Minister aware, though, that our determination to test, test, test and find positive cases is greatly hindered by the inefficient and failing national tracking, contact and isolate system and by the complex, obscure and bureaucratic way in which decisions on local restrictions and support are being made? Will the Government give much more authority and resources to local people with the skills and local knowledge that are needed, particularly in tracking down local contacts and persuading them to co-operate? Give us the tools and we will get on with the job.
Lord Bethell (Con)
The noble Lord gives fascinating testimony, and I pay tribute to the council in Pendle, which is well known for its energetic approach in dealing with the epidemic. I honestly say a massive thank you to all those in Pendle who are working so hard. Despite what the noble Lord has just said, they are being successful. The strategy is working and they are fighting the disease and breaking the chains of transmission, and we are all hopeful that Pendle will be restored to normal life as soon as possible. Our approach is to give those on the ground the tools they need, exactly as the noble Lord asks. I am hopeful that that is happening. I hear reports that it is, and that is very much the emphasis of our approach.