Polio

Lord Walney Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that question. There is routine surveillance that happens anyway. However, in this case they have detected it in more than one surveillance. Quite often, it is seen as a one-off and then not seen again for some time; in this case, it has been detected at each interval of the surveillance. We know it is from the Beckton Sewage Treatment Works—in that part of London. I must be careful about the words I use here: clearly, it is mixed up with a lot of other stuff, and we must now work out how we go along the pipe, as it were, and investigate individual pipes to see whether we can locate the source. In theory, it might be possible to find individual households or streets but it is too early to do so. What we are doing here is really world-beating: it is a first and shows that we are ahead. However, one issue in being ahead is that we detect things that would not have been detected earlier, and people are worried about them.

[Lord Walney (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister recognise the stark difference at the moment in the quality of vaccine records’ availability? I declare an interest in that a consultancy of which I am a director works with Palantir, which has been part of the extraordinary change in the Covid vaccine records. Does he recognise the need to update the rest of the NHS so that the information on hand to patients, which has been so valuable in the system here, is more widely available for polio and other vaccines?

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a really important about the future of the NHS and our health services. Last week, the Government published the Data Saves Lives strategy, which is what it says on the cover. One of the first issues we must tackle is digitising the NHS as much as possible. Digitisation is one of my three priorities, alongside sharing data. First, this will ensure that we can identify population health issues and patterns in conjunction with AI; secondly, giving appropriate access to researchers allows us to continue to be world-beating in identifying such issues. In future, it may well be that we can get a sample, use a bit of AI—thanks to other data sets—and locate more accurately. At the moment, we are really at the cutting edge of this. What will be vital to it is the digitisation, sharing of and access to data across the system.