Coronavirus Bill

Lord Tyrie Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 25th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyrie (Non-Afl)]

I agree with everything I have just heard in support of these amendments. I hope your Lordships will allow me to say some of the things I would have said yesterday had I not been giving evidence to a Select Committee during the opening hour or two of the debate.

The UK is in lockdown. Of course, the pressure on the Government to act has been immense, but we are in very uncharted waters and tight sunset clauses are clearly appropriate. People are understandably fearful for their lives and their well-being, and the Government are right in response to that to try to flatten the peak to enable the NHS to cope and to address the fear that has grown in the wider public. The question now is not whether the lockdown was the right decision but for how long it can sustained. These amendments bear directly on that question.

I have two proposals that I think the Government might want to consider. They have a bearing on whether the sunset clauses might find themselves exercisable. We need to be clear why we have arrived in this position. The epidemiological evidence on which the lockdown decision was taken was very well summarised in the Imperial College paper, which shows that it is needed to prevent an 80% infection rate and between 250,000 and 500,000 impending deaths. What the paper does not contain is an analysis based on wider health outcomes or on wider economic and ethical considerations, as it readily acknowledges. In other words, the full health economics of this huge decision have not been developed or set out at all by the Government.

If, as is widely held, maintaining such a policy indefinitely is unsustainable socially and economically, it must follow, in the absence of an early vaccine or treatment, that an alternative policy will have to be put together very quickly. In order to establish that sustainable policy, we first need a wider analysis of the effects of the lockdown than we currently have in front of us on the basis of health economics, and in particular of the effect on morbidity and mortality that will come as a consequence of the disruption to economic life. Extensive research on earlier sharp interventions suggests that these effects could be very large, and this may be true for both the full and the partial lockdowns discussed in the Imperial paper.

A second piece of analysis that needs to be undertaken—

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I very much apologise for interrupting the noble Lord, who is making an incredibly valuable speech, but after my amendment there is one more amendment, which was put down by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford. We must get to it and debate it by 2.30 pm, which is jolly unfair, in a way. Can we get to that amendment and then perhaps have the Second Reading speech?

[Lord Tyrie]

I gladly agree to what has been proposed from the Labour Front Bench.

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, my colleague and noble and learned friend Lord Falconer has provided a cue that enables me to talk briefly about Schedule 8 to the Bill, which would allow a patient to be detained in hospital—or sectioned, as the phrase is—under the provisions of the Mental Health Act, on the say-so of a single doctor. The Bill would also provide for a period of extension to be extended, if I understand correctly, by the decision of a single person.

To put these matters in context, we might look back to the late Victorian era, when a problematic member of a family could be incarcerated in an asylum at the insistence of that family. They could be left there for a lifetime, and forgotten by the family, who could thereby avoid the stigma of having mental illness in their midst.

That stigma has been alleviated, but it still exists. The sufferer of mental ill-health may be a fragile young person, whose aberrant behaviour has been in response to some dysfunctional family dynamics. To avoid the hazard of inappropriately sectioning a patient in such circumstances, it is now understood that a careful assessment is required, which must involve more than one expert and judgment. This is not a fail-safe procedure, and I have been told of its failure in some tragic circumstances. Sectioning a person under the Mental Health Act can injure a person for a lifetime. Therefore, I wish to sound a note of caution, if not alarm, at the provisions in Schedule 8 to the Bill.

This is one of only many hazards present in the Bill, and I wish to make a more general comment about such legislation. Some speakers in yesterday’s debate expressed astonishment and admiration at the speed with which the Bill has been assembled to meet an unexpected crisis. However, it must surely have been sitting on the shelf for a considerable length of time. It is the product of the kind of contingency planning that we can expect of any competent system of public administration. There is no lesser need for contingency planning to cope with the public health crisis than there is for detailed military planning. However, whereas military planning is bound to remain largely secret, there is no need for such secrecy in the plans to address a public health crisis. The contingency planning that underlines this Bill ought to be permanently in the public domain, and its clauses ought to have been considered in detail, in the absence of any need to invoke them.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

My Lords, the Green group supports all the amendments in this group. I have two brief points to make.

Collectively, these amendments make this whole profoundly undemocratic, rushed but essential process that we have undertaken a little more democratic. Statistics show that in epidemics, death rates are lower in democracies than they are in autocracies. Those figures have been worked out over a range of epidemics. Democracy is an effective medicine. Your Lordships’ House has heard me comment often on what I see as the weaknesses of our democracy, both here and in the other place, but this is the best thing we have got. Let us not handicap it further: let us adopt these amendments and acknowledge that they bring the opportunity for more scrutiny and better decision-making through the involvement of more people.

I want to address particularly Amendment 7, about three-month reviews, and the timeframe for this. It was actually about three months ago, it is believed, that the coronavirus crossed the species barrier. This whole thing biologically started three months ago, somewhere in China—probably Wuhan. Two months ago, diplomats were just being flown out of Wuhan. Think about how fast things have moved. Just last night, we had a report from Oxford University—an epidemiological study that basically blew through and potentially redrew our entire understanding of what is happening right now.

Where we will be in three months’ time is utterly unknowable and may be massively different from where we are today. We need a proper, full debate in three months’ time. With regard to the other amendment and the ability of the other place to amend this legislation, we need a debate there so that it can put in and take out parts of it if they are not working. We cannot leave this for six months. That is more than double the time this entire situation has existed from its first biological moment. Six months is too long.

[Lord Tyrie]

I agree with those remarks too. Is it your Lordships’ will that I make my second point, or have people heard enough from me? I will do my best to be as brief as I can.

I said that there was one crucial piece of work to be done on wider health economics. A second piece of work that needs to be undertaken derives directly from the Imperial paper; we know that this is a very dangerous disease for the elderly but that it appears to have a very low casualty rate among young people without underlying respiratory conditions. There is no immediate prospect of effective treatment—reinforcing by implication the unsustainability of the lockdown—and no early prospect of a vaccine. It seems to me that it must be worth considering any means we can to get towards more normal economic life, and therefore not needing these amendments, by permitting young people, who are sharply less vulnerable to severe outcomes, to return to their workplaces.

Those who did this—it would have to be on a voluntary basis—would need to accept that a very high proportion of them might become infected and therefore have herd immunity develop among them. In an indefinite lockdown, massive direct financial support for the elderly would need to be maintained.

Understandably, the Government have not had time to assemble or publish elementary data for such an approach, but I do not think it would be appropriate to maintain this legislation without these sunset clauses or demonstrating an attempt to develop such approaches. The weakness of the data, in any case, is not an argument against developing such policies, any more than it is an argument against the suppression policy. Much of the data on which the current policy is based is very uncertain.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay]

If the noble Lord has made his second point, might he draw his remarks to a conclusion?

Business of the House

Lord Tyrie Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

The right hon. Gentleman will understand that, without prior notice of his question, I have been unable to ask my colleagues about the issue that he has raised, and I do not know the answer to his question about whether such a report exists. However, he will have heard my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary speaking at the Dispatch Box recently, setting out measures to promote the integrity of the police. I will ask her to respond to the right hon. Gentleman, but I think he should take considerable reassurance from the wide range of measures that she announced and that are being taken forward. They involve not only inquiries but proposals relating to the College of Policing and the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

[Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)]

May I reinforce the request from the Opposition Front Bench for two days on Report for the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill? I take it that the Leader of the House rejected that request; at least, that is what I think I heard. Some months ago, the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, which I chaired, recommended that the Report stage be taken in September, but that was rejected too. We have now produced a further report with more than 100 recommendations. Colleagues from all over the House have told me that they would like an opportunity to consider those recommendations and express their views on them before the Bill goes to the other place. Frankly, I simply cannot understand why the Government are dragging their feet on this, bearing in mind that they were the prime movers in the creation of the commission. Nor can I understand their decision, in view of the fact that the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill, the Justice and Security Bill and the Crime and Courts Bill all had two days on Report.

[Mr Lansley]

The Government, and the House, are grateful to my hon. Friend and his colleagues on the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards for the work that they have done and the excellent report that they have produced. That entirely justifies the decision that the Chancellor and the Prime Minister made to proceed by way of a parliamentary commission rather than a public inquiry. That is what has enabled us to reach this point at this time. I will not repeat all that I said to the shadow Leader of the House, but we should not regard two days on Report as anything other than the exception. We have allowed it more often than our predecessors did, but it must be—[Interruption.] It is not a matter of priority. It is a matter of judging the necessity for debating time on Report in the light of the amendments that have been tabled at that stage. I have announced the provisional business for the week after next. We are making rapid progress with the Bill and it is important that we continue to do so, but I will of course always listen carefully to what my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) has to say.

Cabinet Secretary Report (Government Response)

Lord Tyrie Excerpts

Wednesday 19th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I remind right hon. and hon. Members who came into the Chamber after the start of the statement—there were several of them on both sides of the House—that they certainly should not expect to be called. It would be much better if they did not stand. This is an Opposition day and there is pressure on business, so brevity is of the essence.

[Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)]

I warmly welcome the Leader of the House’s statement. In it, he said that senior civil servants “accepted that there should have been much tighter procedures within the Department”. Will he say specifically what is wrong with existing procedures, and what steps he is taking to ensure that the failing lies with those procedures rather than with the action or inaction of the civil servants themselves?

[Sir George Young]

I thank my hon. Friend for his endorsement. What went wrong was that the permanent secretary, having raised the matter with the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State having persisted in the behaviour that she found disturbing, did not take further action. The matter should have been escalated to the Cabinet Secretary, who would then have notified the Prime Minister. A specific recommendation is going out to all permanent secretaries today that should there be a recurrence in future, it should be escalated. Had that happened in this case, the issue probably would have been addressed at a much earlier stage.

Backbench Business Committee

Lord Tyrie Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr James Arbuthnot (North East Hampshire) (Con)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)]

I welcome you to the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, and congratulate you on your election.

The fact that motion 13 has been pulled makes my life a lot easier, and my main intention now is put down a marker to ensure that we do not get something that is almost as bad next week.

Before I talk about the size of Select Committees, however, I should say that we are fortunate to have such an enlightened Leader of the House—I am glad that he has just returned to the Chamber. If it were not for him, in his role as shadow Leader of the House and now as Leader of the House, we would not have made anything like as much progress on a business committee or the strengthening of Select Committees. A less enlightened Leader of the House would have found a reason to kick much of this into the long grass for the convenience of his ministerial colleagues, not least his blood brother, the Chief Whip—I cannot help wondering whether that is a sort a Jacob-Esau relationship.

I am, of course, very glad that the Leader of the House has pulled the motion that would have increased the membership of three Committees from 11 to 16, the ostensive reason for which was that we needed to provide better representation on Select Committees for minority parties. I strongly agree that those parties need appropriate representation, but the argument that an increase in the size of Select Committees is required to achieve that is completely bogus.

The minority parties must have adequate representation on the territorial Committees—I am appalled that they do not—and they should have three Chairs on the other Committees. [Hon. Members: “Seats, not Chairs.”] I am sorry—we would have Chairs sprouting everywhere. Those parties should have at least three members of the other Committees, and those places should come out of the Opposition quota. I know that this might be controversial among Labour Members but, by my reckoning, the Labour quota provides for 4.39 people on each Committee. When that number is rounded down, as it should be, it implies four members, although we will all have noticed that the Labour party is getting five members per Committee. The obvious solution is to provide the three Committees cited in motion 13 with a combined quota for the Opposition parties. There are 23 Members representing “others”, so their quota comes out as 0.39. When 4.39 is added to 0.39, the result is a figure of just under five, so that is reasonable justification for adopting such an approach.

[Pete Wishart]

I thank the new Chair of the Treasury Committee for giving way. I totally agree with his powerful point that the minority parties should get three Chairs. However, does he agree that we should be over-representing minority parties to ensure that their voices are adequately heard? Such parties get more seats than they are entitled to in the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, so surely we should follow that example here.

[Mr Tyrie]

As someone who comes from a large party, I will not rush to argue that the smaller parties should be over-represented, but I hope that the hon. Gentleman and I can make common cause that they should be adequately represented. I advise him not to over-egg things but to take the support that he is getting at the moment to justify increasing their membership—not Chairs—by three across the 24 Committees, albeit without wrecking those Committees by increasing their membership by too much.

The increase in the membership of some Committees to 16 must have been proposed by people who were determined to ensure that those Committees could not operate effectively. Anyone who has worked on a large Select Committee will know that that can be difficult. It is not easy to achieve cross-party consensus on such a Committee, and its members come together less and are less cohesive. I have served on the Treasury Committee twice. The first time was when it was a Committee of 11 and it worked very well. When I returned to the Committee a little under a couple of years ago, however, its membership had increased to 14, which led to several difficulties. Many of its members were unable to participate in the questioning of particular witnesses, and several hearings during which everyone wanted to participate were extremely long. It was impossible to hold a short hearing, and although we got by, it was with difficulty. That was why the Liaison Committee proposed limiting the membership of Select Committees to 11 and why the Wright Committee suggested limiting the membership to nine, although it said that it could live with 11. It was also why the Leader of the House concluded much the same, as we heard from the quotation that was cited earlier.

I note that the coalition agreement of 20 May states:

“We will bring forward the proposals of the Wright Committee for reform to the House of Commons in full”.

If that means anything, it must be that a Select Committee’s membership will be nine or 11, but not more. I am sure that I speak for all the newly elected Select Committee Chairs when I say that we should stick with nine or 11, but not more, and I hope that Front Benchers are listening.

Business of the House

Lord Tyrie Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

Short money is available only to Opposition parties; we have no plans to change that.

[Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)]

I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement that we will get the Back-Bench business committee, but I am concerned that the proposals of the Wright Committee, on which I sat, will not be implemented in full and we will not get the full 35 days. Will he reassure me that, if the business committee recommends that the remaining eight days in Westminster Hall should be transferred to this Chamber, the Government will accede to that request?

[Sir George Young]

I take the opportunity of congratulating my hon. Friend on his election to the Chair of the Treasury Committee. There is a resolution on the Order Paper, asking for a review of the scheme at the end of the Session. I am happy to have that debate. It is important to have it with the business committee because the more days we have in the Chamber, the greater the pressure on Report stages or on the House to sit for longer into August. We need a sensible debate between the business committee and the House about how exactly we re-engineer the House’s time to get the best possible outcome. I do not rule out having more than the initial 27 days, moving up to 35, but I want the House to be aware that there are real problems with putting a quart into a pint pot.

Dissolution of Parliament

Lord Tyrie Excerpts

Tuesday 25th May 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Heath]

It will be put on the Order Paper at the earliest opportunity. I cannot be more precise than that, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman understands that. There is much merit in people seeing clearly what is proposed as soon as possible, so that we can debate the matter.

[Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)]

Will the Deputy Leader of the House explain why he seems so reluctant to allow pre-legislative scrutiny? A measure of this type should be allowed such scrutiny, and we do not believe the coalition’s collapse to be imminent. Presumably, therefore, there is plenty of time for us to give the Bill the consideration that it deserves.

[Mr Heath]

May I remove any view that the hon. Gentleman might have formed that I am reluctant to entertain the possibility of pre-legislative scrutiny? We have simply not determined the treatment of the Bill yet, so I cannot answer his question, but I hear what he says. There is a strong case for pre-legislative scrutiny, but I do not want to extend the consideration of this legislation into the following Session, because that would not be appropriate.

Let me return to the 55% threshold, because that will allow me to deal with one of the questions asked by the hon. Member for Christchurch. He asked for the details of how the 55% was to be calculated. Again, I cannot answer his question at this moment. That will be a matter for further discussion. I will say to him, however, that the system for calculating the threshold needs to be absolutely clear, and that there must be no doubt about the number of votes required to pass the threshold in any specific set of circumstances. It is important to make that clear in the legislation.

The important thing is that the final result delivers our twin objectives of stability in Parliament and Government while making it possible to have an election if no party or combination of parties can command the confidence of this House. I look forward to the debates that we will have on the motion and on the legislation.