Government Contracts: Randox Laboratories Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Robertson of Port Ellen
Main Page: Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Robertson of Port Ellen's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(2 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberI used the word panic because I think everyone was panicking. People just did not understand what was going on. They did not understand the pace of coronavirus; they did not even understand the disease itself and the transmission of it. I was reading over the weekend a couple of books on the history of the virus so far, where it broke out and what people thought it was originally, and some of the reassessments of historical epidemiology. Clearly, we needed testing performance. Randox was the only company at that time, in March 2020, that was able to provide that capacity at the scale needed. As I said earlier, where we identified problems, we made Randox aware of them and it supplied new kit.
My Lords, the Government held a full-scale exercise in 2016 based on pandemic flu, Operation Cygnus. Anybody who reads the report of that exercise today can see that there was a looming problem with PPE. Between 2016 and 2020, the Government did nothing about that identified problem, so that, when 2020 came, we domestically produced only 1% of the PPE that was required in the NHS. Why was so little done to be ready for something that had been predicted in advance?
The noble Lord makes a point about predicting it in advance, but it is very easy to say that with hindsight. Let us look at a number of different countries and the WHO: some people argue that the WHO and Public Health England had only one job, and they were not prepared for it. Clearly, people were caught unawares; we were not the only country to be caught unawares.