Public Health

Debate between Adam Holloway and Maria Eagle

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Adam Holloway (Gravesham) (Con)]

First, I pay tribute to the continued amazing performance of NHS staff and, indeed, to the Government and Kate Bingham’s team for the incredible developments in respect of the vaccines.

I do not underplay the difficult and complex decisions being made by people in the Government and, of course, the terrible toll on families affected, but it seems to me that with every difficulty and milestone reached the Government are acting on largely uncontested information. It feels like there has been a serious lack of diversity of opinion, analysis and evidence when it comes to many of these restrictions. The Covid Recovery Group does not want to “let it rip”; they just ask for proper economic impact assessments.

Let us take, for example, the hospitality industry. We are talking about using an enormous amount of taxpayers’ money to pay the industry not to open or to pay people not to go to work, but the payments will go nowhere near the losses that the businesses will make, and many of them will still go to the wall, despite that money. Why are we looking at not keeping them open, given the very limited evidence for closing them?

Prior to this latest lockdown, I joked with the proprietor of the Compass Alehouse in Gravesend that going into his place was like being put under his control: “Stand there, scan here, anti-bac your hands, walk along that path, sit down there” and so on—Members get the picture. The point is that the hospitality industry has spent an absolute fortune and thought long and hard about how to run establishments safely. We should be reopening well-run pubs and restaurants such as the Reliance fish bar and Bartellas in Meopham, and the authorities should be merciless in closing and fining pubs that risk NHS capacity.

I would much rather my constituents socialise in well-run venues than squeeze on to the sofa back at home with their friends. I would have thought that mixing in venues was much better than mixing at home in tiers 2 and 3. I would have thought that encouraging personal responsibility was rather better than the nuances of how much people have to eat with their beer. As others have said, we must make sure that restrictions make sense, or we will drive down compliance.

We have to have a bit more diversity in the advice—perhaps there should be a few people with private sector experience, and perhaps even some more diverse scientific voices. I do not understand why we are using infection rates and not intensive care unit occupancy to guide policy. Why can we not move people around the country? I do not understand why we are preventing millions of people from working when we have not even made a dent in the surge capacity of the Nightingale hospitals—

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

There are no staff!

[Adam Holloway]

Intervene if you like.

[Maria Eagle]

I will. The hon. Gentleman talks about Nightingale hospitals, but there are not enough staff to staff the Nightingale hospitals. We would have to take them out of the hospitals that they are trying to give some relief to. That is why they are not being used.

[Adam Holloway]

I thank the hon. Lady for intervening and giving me a bit more time, and that is where I would like to see money spent. I would like to see money spent on surge capacity in the NHS, rather than on paying people not to work.

You know what, like it or not, my constituents are going to be thrown into more weeks of extraordinary lockdown, and there is no possibility of this not now happening given the Opposition’s decision to abstain. Well, I am going to support the Government’s decision and message to comply and, indeed, our remarkable Prime Minister in particular, but I will be hard pushed to support the Government in future if there is a realistic possibility of the Government being forced to seek a different path. Churchill himself had a wide mix of generals and advisers.