Coronavirus

Lord O'Shaughnessy Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for repeating that Statement and providing that reassurance. We all respect that this is an incredibly difficult and finely balanced decision, and, to some degree, we all need to trust in the process and those who are leading it. We have great scientists who are doing so.

Will my noble friend do two things? First, can he talk a little about the welcome funding that was in the Budget yesterday to support the economy and the health system through this outbreak? What exactly will that be spent on and what can be spent quickly to good effect? Secondly, to pick up an issue that was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, but was also mentioned yesterday about capacity in the system, particularly in care homes, I am very worried about vulnerable people who require domiciliary care whose workers might get sick. Who will care for those people? We may need to think completely out of the box in how we do this. Can we stand up a volunteer army of post-infected people who have DBS checks to take on these kinds of responsibilities? Going about things in the ordinary way will not deal with the consequences of this crisis when it really hits. I would be grateful if my noble friend could expand on some of the plans the Government are making for these consequential impacts, which are not to do with the virus, but are very much to do with the impact on the health system.

[Lord Bethell]

I thank my noble friend for those questions. In terms of funding, the Treasury has provided immediately a £5 billion contingency fund to ensure that not only the NHS but local authorities have the resources necessary for both clinical and social care. The kinds of items that the money can immediately be spent on include boosting staffing, particularly in the NHS, which might include re-employing retired doctors and nurses and recruiting and offering compensation to volunteers who agree to help provide health and social care services full-time for the period of surge.

The precise arrangements for how that volunteering army can be put together will have to wait until we have the legal provisions for that army because there are important questions of indemnity, legal registration and DBS checks, all of which have been raised in this Chamber previously and which we take very seriously. But it would be premature to describe plans that are being worked on at the moment until we have tabled the sorts of legal requirements that we will need.

Funding will also ensure that we have the right drugs, supplies and equipment. Lastly, there will inevitably be a backlog of care after the virus has passed. We are conscious that this backlog will put a long-lasting strain on our medical and social care arrangements, and we are putting in the resources today to ensure that the backlog can be addressed in the future.