Covid-19 Update

Andrew Gwynne Excerpts

Monday 5th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The short answer is yes. My hon. Friend makes an important case. The restart of elective operations in the NHS is now proceeding apace. Of course, the more we can keep the virus under control, the easier that restart is. In any case, the NHS has done a huge amount of work over the summer to try to separate, as much as is possible, the NHS into “covid green” areas, where we have a high degree of confidence that there is no coronavirus, and “covid blue” areas, where there may be, so that people can get the long-term elective work done that is needed. That will include an expansion of rehabilitation. She might have seen that one of the 40 hospitals on the list that the Prime Minister announced was the DNRC—the Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre— which is to be built just outside Loughborough.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab) [V]]

The majority of Greater Manchester has been under local restrictions for more than two months, yet we now have some of the highest rates in England. The test and trace debacle once again shows that the national system is broken and that the Secretary of State’s measures are not working. He knows that the Greater Manchester authorities are keen to adopt a more localised approach, so if the newspaper reports are right that we are going to get a new tiered system, is this not the right time for the Government to give local areas control over test and trace systems, supported by extra financial resources?

[Matt Hancock]

I half agree with the hon. Gentleman; it is important that we put more testing resources into the areas where case levels are high, and it is very important that we continue to strengthen the local engagement with the national system—I was talking to the Mayor of Greater Manchester about this only this morning. The challenge is that we also need the scale of the national system, so that where there is an outbreak we can bring huge amounts of resources to bear and make sure that we can really target the support, for instance, for contact tracing. So it is the combination of the local and the national that will get us through this.