Covid-19

Alex Norris Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to close this debate for the Opposition.

There have been very good contributions on both sides of the House; I cannot cover them all, but want to highlight a few. First, on this side of the House, my hon. Friends the Members for Easington (Grahame Morris), for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy), and for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) made excellent points about the inequalities in our country that covid has highlighted, and I will cover that in my contribution, as I will isolation pay, which was mentioned by my hon. Friends the Members for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) and for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood).

Excellent points were made about exams and education by my hon. Friends the Members for Newport West (Ruth Jones) and for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe). There was welcome cross-party consensus about the need to extend and improve business and tourism and travel support from the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald), my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar), my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western), the hon. Members for Bolsover (Mark Fletcher) and for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall), the right hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke), and the hon. Members for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) and for North Devon (Selaine Saxby).

Colleagues on the other side of the House also made important points about the NHS: the hon. Members for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer), for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), and for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), as well as the hon. Member for Ipswich (Tom Hunt), latterly regarding children with special educational needs.

It is a feature of today that the Prime Minister has rather stared down the caution to the wind group on his own Back Benches, and there were contributions from some of those colleagues—the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), the hon. Members for Bolton West (Chris Green), for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker), for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg), for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham), for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) and for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller)—again with some sort of agreement, but generally pointing at the fact that they do not agree, and frankly they have been wrong the rest of the way so what is one more to complete the set? Finally, the hon. Member for Rushcliffe (Ruth Edwards) made the excellent point that a new, improved and exceptionally promising vaccine is being developed at the University of Nottingham, showing once again that things are just that little bit better in Nottingham.

On the day on which the Prime Minister has outlined the future road map, there is rightly a sense of optimism, but in that context we cannot forget the terrible toll this last year has had on our country. Across the UK, over 120,000 people have lost their lives to covid-19; that is a tragically high number of lost loved ones, and the impact is felt everywhere across every community. That is an awful lot of empty places at the table and lots of grief that will last a lifetime.

The roll-out of the vaccine is a beacon of hope and a source of national pride. It shows once again the strength of our national health service. I thank everyone involved in that programme—we are very lucky to have them—and it stands in contrast, I am afraid, to the failures of the test and trace system, which has had to be propped up in recent months by the interventions of local authorities. These two events together show us that a decade of selling off public services is not what we needed in the past 10 years and is certainly not what we are going to need in the next 10 years.

However, even following a long statement and a four-hour debate there remain a few points to resolve. The Opposition have a number of constructive ideas that we think would strengthen the nation’s efforts, and I hope the Paymaster General will be able to address them in her closing remarks.

Sick pay and isolation support need to be fixed. Without that, the Government’s plans to roll out millions of lateral flow tests as we reopen will be useless. The news that only three in 10 people who have a positive diagnosis self-isolate should scare us all; imagine how much more quickly and effectively we could manage this virus if that figure was 100%, or even somewhere in the middle. Again, the lack of news today from the Prime Minister on this was a glaring miss and a significant hole in the fence. I hope that there might be more news from the Paymaster General.

However, that lack of support has been the reality for all those 3 million people who have been excluded from the Government’s financial support all year. It is worrying, surprising and quite hard to understand that the Chancellor has still to heed their calls and make the simple creative amendments necessary to plug the gaps in these schemes and relieve their anxiety. I understand that as these schemes needed to be created at pace there may have been gaps, but I cannot understand, a year on, why we have not acted to close them. Again, the message was wait for the Budget, but they have been told, “Demand, demand, demand” for a long time. They have real-life costs to meet and are stretched to their limits, so I hope that there will be good news for them shortly.

I hope the Minister can clarify something for indoor hospitality. We are told that that will be opening up, but not before 17 May. That will be a month after business rates resume and two weeks after furlough. Will there be news for them about how that gap will be bridged?

Of course, the big and welcome news is the reopening of schools. That is a collective priority across this place. We now must use the time available to do this as safely as possible. It is a shame that the Government resisted our calls to vaccinate teachers; however, in the absence of that, will the right hon. Lady at least commit to working with the sector to deliver a credible plan for getting all the pupils back into school, with mass testing, better ventilation, Nightingale classrooms where possible, and reviewing financial support for covid adaptations? Our schools have done an incredible job throughout this pandemic. They have never actually shut—they are open as we speak—and they have had to do that by being very creative, but we should not ask them to be creative alone; in order to get things back to normal we have to help them. Those are immediate steps that, if taken, would lead to a significant improvement in our country’s attempt to beat this virus, and I hope the right hon. Lady will take them in the spirit intended.

Multiple references were made to the alarming news that the Health Secretary broke the law earlier in the pandemic. The Prime Minister seemed to have no concern about this, which in itself is quite worrying. I will not rehash that point, but I will ask the Paymaster General, as a minimum, in the interests of decent government and in line with British values, to commit to publishing the details of the VIP lane schemes and how they are used. The Prime Minister has total confidence that everything is appropriate, so I think it might be time to share that information so that we might all have some of that confidence.

As we seek to safely navigate these next few months, we have to learn the lessons not only of the past 12 months but of the previous decade. Covid has thrived on the deep inequalities and injustices in our country. Building back is not what we need; we need to be genuinely different. The pandemic has shown that profound inequality is not just bad for those on the sharp end of it, but bad for everybody. It has shown too that some communities in our country have thrived while others have struggled to get by. People who live in one of the poorest communities are twice as likely to die, and people from minority ethnic groups have an increased risk of 50%. We could also say that about their access to decent housing and about whether they have to leave their community to access better employment chances. These inequalities exist across our lives, and that is the legacy of 11 years of choices made by this Government. These groups have paid the real price for the 2008 economic crash, which they did not cause. As we face the future and choose what comes next, we must not repeat those mistakes, so I hope to hear from the Minister today that there will be a break from the past decade and that that will be replicated in the upcoming Budget.