Coronavirus

Aaron Bell Excerpts

Thursday 25th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con) [V]]

It is a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes). I have been privileged to serve on two Select Committees during the pandemic, the Science and Technology Committee and the Procedure Committee, both ably chaired by hon. Friends who spoke earlier in the debate. I therefore have quite a lot to try to say in these three minutes.

I have supported the Government on their measures throughout the pandemic and I will do so again, with some reservations, tonight. I said in the debate in this Chamber in September:

“By the spring, we will need a new plan, informed by the scientific evidence at the time and by what we learn over the winter, because we simply cannot continue to live like this forever.”—[Official Report, 28 September 2020; Vol. 681, c. 109.]

We cannot live in fear. Luckily the vaccine works, but even if it had not, we would still need a way out of lockdown.

We now have a new plan and, to echo my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), I think it would be churlish of me to reject it because it might not be as fast as I would like or what I think would be manageable given the data. We have heard a lot about “data, not dates”, yet there are a lot of dates in the legislation and not a lot of data. My right hon. Friend the Health Secretary and the Prime Minister both describe the plans as “cautious but irreversible”, but I think there is a tension there with what we could achieve. The scientists told us in the Science and Technology Committee that they needed four weeks to assess the effects of each step, and the Government want a fifth week so that we can make preparations. I think the Government could consider scrapping that fifth week and taking the associated political risk, not the scientific risk, on to their own broad shoulders.

I also feel that there is an overall sense of mission creep. We have protected the NHS, which is how the lockdowns were sold to us, but the sooner we have our lives back, the better. I was glad to hear my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) that the way forward in step 4 is personal responsibility allied to the vaccine and to test and trace. I should pause to praise my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary. His belief in science and in the possibility of rapid vaccine development has been rewarded in spades, and his wisdom in ensuring that Oxford tied up with AstraZeneca is clear from the contrasting experiences we see across the channel and in other countries.

Turning to the procedural elements of the motions, I have been glad to serve under the excellent chairmanship of my fellow north Staffordshire MP, my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), but I was also glad to support the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg) in that Committee. It is a matter of honour for many of us that we return, as we promised, to how things were before the pandemic. There may be many things we can learn from the procedural innovations that we have seen, and I think we should have the chance to do that. I welcome what the Prime Minister said in his response to the Chair of the Committee that we will have a debate on this, but I fear that there has not been enough time for us to debate these procedural innovations. It is a matter of honour that we return as promised, and it is also a matter of honour that this House aligns what we are doing with what we are asking the country to do.