Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (No. 2) (England) Regulations 2020

Lord Snape Excerpts

Friday 24th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Snape (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I will confine my few words to a plea on behalf of local authorities throughout England for information gleaned under the Government’s much-vaunted test and trace programme to be properly shared with those authorities. In the borough of Sandwell in the West Midlands, the public health director, Dr Lisa McNally, has been campaigning for weeks for better access for her team to original data about affected people, including names and workplaces. This would enable her team, and teams countrywide, to swoop in and contact trace in the community instead of having to rely on the flawed national test and trace operation.

So far, her calls and those made by other public health directors across the country have been rejected because of data protection. It is a strange system of data protection that shares information with private companies such as Serco yet refuses that information to local authorities. If that information is not shared, it is not a question of whether we will see a second wave but when.