Debate on the Address

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Tuesday 11th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

Mr Deputy Speaker, I will endeavour to do the same. I very much welcome the Gracious Speech. I am in awe of the person who delivered it and in awe of its delivery. How fortunate we are in our Head of State.

I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for North West Cambridgeshire (Shailesh Vara) and for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) on delivering wonderful speeches, full of good humour and good sense, and kind and generous.

Covid mercifully appears to be retreating in the UK, at least faster than Darius from Alexander, but every day that passes has been chipping away at our liberties, the prospects of our young people, our mental health, our health in general, the economy and our institutions great and small, including this one. It is a terrible price to pay and it is time to bring it to an end. More than two-thirds of adults have now been jabbed. One-third have been jabbed twice. Yesterday, more people will statistically have died on the roads than of covid. There is no prospect of our national health service being overwhelmed, and if I am worried about a virus this wintertime, it is seasonal flu, not a covid third wave.

The Prime Minister made it clear earlier, in answer to an intervention, that there will be a full review—a comprehensive inquiry—into the management of this pandemic, and I very much welcome that. It would be remarkable if, after all of this, we did not review what had gone on and learn the lessons from it. I do so hope that it will not be a witch hunt; there is nothing to be gained from that. Throughout this, we have been in uncharted waters; there is no route map for this, and people have done the best they can in the circumstances that face them and with the information available to them.

It is important that we learn the lesson because, just around the corner, it is more than likely that we will have a new variant or new variants. It is equally likely that something else even worse may crop up. I think it is also pretty apparent that in the early stages of this pandemic, we were not as well prepared as we should have been. I have been critical in particular of our public health institutions that were, to my mind, not fit for purpose, focused, as they were, on modern pandemics to do with lifestyle in particular, which are very important in themselves, but which I think also took our eye off the ball when it came to traditional, old-fashioned public health around infectious disease.

That is a pity, because in this country we have a very strong tradition of public health. We have a very strong history in dealing with infectious diseases, and our institutions around infectious disease, bacteriology and virology are world-beating. This country, of course, was the home to west country doctor Edward Jenner and west country farmer Benjamin Jesty—less well known—who really set the science of vaccination afoot and made this country the world leader. In recent times, perhaps, we have unfortunately not learned some of the lessons as well as we should have done, and forgotten others.

I am also very sympathetic to Health Ministers who, in the early stages of this pandemic, pulled levers and found that nothing really happened. That is a perception from the Back Benches, but it is why I think that I would likely support those things contained in the Gracious Speech that hint at strengthening the ability of Ministers to control some aspects of healthcare in this country. That is a difficult thing for me to say, because 10 years ago I was a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Department of Health when reforms were going through that, in the full light of day, perhaps we might have done somewhat differently and, in my opinion, have not always been helpful in managing this crisis.

I am particularly keen on further reforms to public health. I think I am the only Member of Parliament with a postgraduate qualification in public health and I take a very close interest in it. There is no question in my mind but that our public health institutions need to be strengthened in order to face down more effectively the infectious disease threats of the future. This country faces many threats. It faces threats from Putin’s Russia, from cyber and from fundamentalist terror. However, the greatest existential threat that this country faces at the moment is more at home in a Petri dish, and we need to make sure that we bend every sinew of our national life and institutions to protect the public from that threat in the future. Any Government who fail to do so will suffer the consequences. I am heartened by what I have heard in this Gracious Speech and what I have heard Ministers talk about recently in relation to building those institutions, strengthening them, and making sure that we are much better placed to face down these threats in future.

I have spent the past 10 weeks or so leading vaccination teams in south-east London and the south-west of England, and will have done or supervised thousands of those vaccinations that come up on our screens every evening to tell us how we are doing. It has been one of the greatest privileges of my professional life. Through Operation Rescript and Operation Broadshare, its overseas iteration, the armed forces have, in my opinion, done extremely well. The warmth with which soldiers, sailors and airmen have been greeted in communities—many of those communities that now have a very small military footprint, and some of them communities that are not necessarily naturally sympathetic to defence—has been extraordinary. It is my view that the participation of our armed forces in helping our NHS through this pandemic has been far more effective than any number of armed forces days with which I have been associated, and has massively advanced civilian-military relations in this country. I pay tribute to all of my colleagues in the reserves and regulars for their service in support of our national health service.

I commend the Government for bringing forward an Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill—a bit of a mouthful, but nevertheless—and I am very pleased that research features large in the Gracious Speech. I particularly commend Ministers for awarding £30 million for covid research at the MOD’s Porton Down facility near Salisbury. That is money well spent: I have no doubt that it will be met with rewards in the future, not just in this country but worldwide, where we are world leaders in this technology. I am very pleased that the Gracious Speech highlighted the Government’s leadership in promoting access to vaccination worldwide through COVAX and the UK’s approach to vaccine development and acquisition. However, just a small word of caution: we can ship out as much vaccine as we like to developing countries, but if they do not have the infrastructure with which to deliver that vaccine programme, we will be largely wasting our time, and we will find that outside the big urban centres and the élites, our good work will not be felt. It is very important that, especially when delivering surplus vaccine, we also make sure that we use expertise in this country—particularly in the national health service, and maybe even in the armed forces—to ensure that the logistics for delivery are there.

I would like to mention Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom that I have grown to love and respect very much indeed over the years. I listened with great interest, as I always do, to the comments on that subject made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). She is right: sometimes, in government, we have to do things in the greater interest that may seem alien to us, even uncomfortable. We all know the realpolitik that has caused many of us to be discomfited with the way members of the armed forces, some of them our constituents, have been handled in recent times, and none of us wants to do anything that would allow terrorists to go unpunished—allow them to get off the hook. However, that ship sailed in 1998, and we have to acknowledge that there has been a generation of relative peace since. Like my right hon. Friend, I remember those images when I was growing up, night after night. A line must be drawn so that this wonderful, wonderful corner of our country can move on, looking to the future and not the past.

Although there was no Bill in the Queen’s Speech that dealt with social care specifically, I nevertheless commend the Government for their recent language around a social care Bill. I would have liked to see a firmer commitment to it, but nevertheless I have the sense that it is a piece of work that will be done in this Parliament. I very much hope that that will mean in part a Dilnot-style cap on the cost of care. We pool risk in our national health service —that is what it is all about—but we did not do that in the 1940s. That is a piece of unfinished work, and while we will certainly debate integrated care, which is important, we also need to grasp the nettle of who pays. Mercifully, most of us will not end up needing extensive social care, but some of us will. At the moment, the costs of that fall disproportionately. The Government have an opportunity now to stamp their mark on one of the great outstanding challenges of our age. They must seize the day.