Coronavirus Bill

Lord Oates Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard - continued) & 2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 24th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

As many noble Lords have noted, this Bill contains unprecedented powers, but we recognise that it comes before us in unprecedented times. Its purpose is to protect the lives of the public and to provide the National Health Service with the best chance of minimising the death toll from this virus. We owe NHS staff, the staff in our care services and all key workers who are working so hard and taking many risks to keep all of us safe, an immeasurable debt of gratitude. Among all the debts that we as a country will run up in tackling this virus, that will remain by far the greatest debt.

I support the Government in bringing forward this Bill. My noble friends and other noble Lords have set out a number of concerns about some of the measures it contains, which I share, in particular covering the duration of the powers and procedures for bringing them to an end, the variants to the social care duties of local authorities which were spoken about so powerfully by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, the changes to sectioning powers, the wide powers to detain people under Schedule 20, the issues around prisoner management, immigration detention, the hostile environment and data sharing. I hope that the Minister will be able to address the important questions which have been raised in these respects on all sides of the House.

Personally, I would have preferred a Bill which was of a much shorter duration—perhaps three months, as my noble friend Lord Scriven suggested—with robust arrangements for scrutiny and review, but which also contained further powers in three specific areas. The first is the powers to regulate the food supply industry, including retailers; secondly, the powers to support the self-employed and to protect renters from eviction; and thirdly, the powers to direct both supply and labour across the economy to ensure that we can meet the urgent demand for critical equipment and, going forward, for the manufacture of a vaccine, when it is discovered—hopefully, in the near future.

At the weekend, an elderly woman asked specifically that I raise with noble Lords her experience of trying to shop for essential food items last week. She went to a dedicated shopping hour for the elderly in a major supermarket in my home town of Surbiton. She had to stand in a long line of people packed close together; the majority of them not elderly. When the shop opened, the staff had no powers to prevent people who were not elderly from entering the store. As a result, she was pushed and jostled in a congested and unsafe environment as she tried to shop. She has a husband at home with underlying medical problems and she is desperate about how she can look after him and keep them both safe.

It is not enough for us all to decry the obvious selfishness and irresponsibility of those who act in this way. What this elderly lady wanted from the Government was not more censorious words but actions to enforce and protect. I therefore hope that the Government will consider introducing powers to direct food retailers and the supply chain to ensure that there are sufficient supplies in the shops, because the actions of some of these people are driven not just by greed but also by fear. They should also allow police or designated council officers to enforce dedicated shopping hours for NHS staff and the elderly and, if required, powers to require controls on the price of goods and the quantity that may be sold to individuals.

Secondly, the Bill needs to provide sufficient statutory authority for the measures that the Chancellor will need to take in the coming days and weeks—in particular, the urgent need to provide support for the self-employed. I raise the specific case of a self-employed neighbour who is working in NHS hospitals constructing the additional wards and isolation partitions needed to expand NHS capacity to deal with the crisis. He is taking risks every day by going into hospitals and yet, when this work is completed, his only recourse will be to the benefit system. That is no way to treat someone who is doing so much to ensure that the NHS is able to cope with the virus.

That is a particularly resonant case but, all over the country, as the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, highlighted, self-employed people are seeing their livelihoods disappear overnight due to government restrictions. It is right to impose those restrictions, but we must stand by the self-employed who are impacted by them just as the Chancellor stood behind those in employment. The Bill should also contain powers to introduce a rent holiday and impose a moratorium on evictions in the rented sector for rents not paid during this crisis, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, mentioned. We cannot have one rule for owner-occupiers and another for renters. That is the way to division, not unity.

Thirdly, the Government need greater powers to direct both supply and labour across the economy to ensure that we can meet the demand for critical equipment, testing kits, personal protection equipment, ventilators and any other equipment needed to fight this virus and protect NHS staff and other frontline workers and volunteers while we do so. Cabinet-level Ministers of supply and labour should be designated to direct this work and, in time, to ensure that we have the manufacturing capacity for the vaccine that we hope will be discovered very soon.

The Bill contains unprecedented powers that in normal circumstances this House would not dream of entertaining. But these are not normal circumstances. Therefore, with a heavy heart, a plea to the Government to shorten the duration of powers in the Bill and to review the procedures for renewal, I support the Bill and commend the hard work and dedication of Ministers and civil servants in assembling it so rapidly. Most importantly, I thank once again all our frontline NHS staff and all key workers who are working to keep us safe.