Covid-19: One Year Report

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 25th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I first pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, for his resilience in surviving a very tough and demanding year. He has faced lots of questions from us and answered them in a fairly straightforward and direct way. I suspect that he will not agree with much of the rest of what I will say.

I particularly endorse the critique made by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, of the lack of proper parliamentary scrutiny. As he said, we are on a slippery slope, I fear, to a model of elected executive populism at the expense of what we understand to be parliamentary democracy. I support these regulations, though somewhat reluctantly. What the noble Lord, Lord Beith, said in his extremely thoughtful speech should be taken to heart.

The Government are right to feel satisfaction about the vaccine programme, the success of which is a stellar example of the kind of industrial strategy that Governments should have been pursuing for a long time: public investment in a ground-breaking search and imaginative use of public procurement to see development through from the discovery of the science to manufacturing and production based in the UK. It is deeply regrettable that Kwasi Kwarteng this week or last week abandoned the industrial strategy that Greg Clark put in place—we now do not know what environment we are operating in.

However, the success of the vaccine cannot hide the multiple failures of the last 12 months: one of the worst death rates of nations in the developed world; the lack of preparation for the probability of a pandemic, despite the Government having previously identified this as a real risk; the consequent scramble for PPE, causing massive waste, incurring massive costs and using questionable methods of procurement; the lack of testing capacity properly in place; and, for all the billions spent, the failure of the tracing system last autumn, when it was most needed to try to curb the rising infections locally.

Of course, as a Cumbria county councillor, I feel the neglect of local government to be very serious. We have had pathetic sums to help us to provide effective local tracing, despite the fact that we have shown that that is more effective than the national system. Wrong political decisions have been made, such as the Chancellor’s Eat Out to Help Out policy—remember that? Was that a Covid-secure thing to do? What about Boris Johnson’s refusal last autumn to act quickly to introduce a circuit-breaker when cases were clearly rising far too fast?

As such, we need an investigation into what went wrong, but we also need to examine what Covid tells us about our own social fabric in this country: an NHS stretched beyond reasonable limits, a social care system at breaking point, and a welfare safety net set at levels where families cannot afford to feed their children and that has numerous holes in it, meaning that there are people with insecure jobs and low pay who cannot afford to isolate and too many people falling through the net.

We need to learn the lessons with an inquiry into what went wrong. I also hope that we will take the opportunity to think about what a new Beveridge in the 2020s would be for the United Kingdom. It should be something that all of us in politics could support, just as the consensus was established in the 1940s. This has been a crisis of the state and we have not managed it well.