Covid-19 Update

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 19th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise this important issue. I know that this is an important announcement for him and his constituents, representing as he does a significant number of constituents from the Indian diaspora. We have managed to reduce somewhat the turnaround time for the sequencing of positive tests, but we are also introducing a new type of test that can detect not just whether someone is positive but whether they have one of the known variants without having to go through a full sequence. That can give us a snapshot much, much faster—within a matter of hours—of whether a positive result has one of the known variants, before sending it off to sequencing so that we can see any new variant that we do not know about. We are introducing that technology. It is starting in the Lighthouse lab testing facility in Glasgow and we are rolling it out across the system. It is an important tool to make sure that we can get the turnaround time of spotting the variants down faster.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

It is quite astonishing that the Secretary of State’s statement had absolutely nothing to say about the Government’s plans for vaccine ID cards—something that has apparently been trialled. Only last week, the Equality and Human Rights Commission told us that vaccine ID cards, and possibly even the mandatory vaccination scheme that he is trumpeting today, could be unlawful, yet this House has had no opportunity to express a view on them at all. When are the Government going to come clean and share their plans for vaccine ID cards with this House?

[Matt Hancock]

I refer the right hon. Gentleman to my previous answer, which is that the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is leading a review on this area that will report in due course.