Afghanistan

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2021 Commons Chamber

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

Given the high likelihood that China will now exploit the opportunity presented by the US departure by extending the belt and road initiative, buying off the Taliban and muting their opposition to abuses in Xinjiang, what approach will my right hon. Friend take, with our allies, to the resulting greatly strengthened Beijing-Tehran axis, with all its grisly potential impact on security, prosperity and human rights?

[The Prime Minister]

The Chinese are not as yet a very major player in Afghanistan, but my right hon. Friend is absolutely right: it is vital that the people of Afghanistan should determine their own future.

Armed Forces Bill

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Leo Docherty]

Absolutely I can, and I am very pleased to.

I turn to the technical amendments. Amendments 8 to 15 relate to the armed forces covenant, amendments 16 to 23 and 31 to 38 amend the service complaints provisions, and amendments 24 to 30 relate to the provision on driving disqualification.

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

Will the Minister give way?

[Leo Docherty]

I am delighted to give way to my right hon. Friend.

[Dr Murrison]

Can the Minister confirm, before he gets technical, that the overriding consideration in all this is that servicemen, servicewomen and their families should suffer no disadvantage by virtue of their military service? There will be test cases arising from the guidance to which he has referred in which people say, “Look, I’ve been disadvantaged because I’m in the armed forces.” The acid test has to be what they would have got from the system if they had not been serving. Surely that is the guiding star in all this.

[Leo Docherty]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely correct. That is the fundamental basis of all this, and that is at the heart of the statutory guidance. We are confident that local authorities will bear that in mind in the way they afford provision in the critical areas that I have described, but of course there may be test cases and we will take note of them if they arise.

A number of Opposition amendments and new clauses have been tabled. I want to concentrate on the key ones that specifically relate to the service justice system and the armed forces covenant. Amendment 7 seeks to ensure that the most serious crimes are automatically tried in the civilian courts when committed by a serviceperson in the UK, thereby undermining the current legal position that there is full concurrent jurisdiction between the service and civilian justice systems. The amendment would mean that the most serious offences, when committed in the UK, could never be dealt with in the service justice system, even though the Lyons review recommended that the most serious offences could and should continue to be tried in the service justice system with the consent of the Attorney General.

The Government have a more pragmatic approach. We are confident that the service justice system is capable of dealing with all offences, whatever their seriousness and wherever they occur, bolstered by improvements recommended by the Lyons review, such as the creation of the defence serious crime unit and improvement to the support to victims. The service police, prosecutors and judiciary are trained, skilled and experienced. Victims and witnesses receive comparable support to the civilian system, for example through the armed forces code of practice for victims of crime, which we continue to keep updated in line with civilian practices. The amendment would remove the valuable role of independent prosecutors in allocating cases to the most appropriate jurisdiction.

Clause 7 improves and strengthens the protocol between service and civilian prosecutors to determine where cases are tried. That improvement will bring much-needed clarity on how decisions on jurisdiction are made and will ensure transparency and independence from the chain of command and Government. To be clear, the aim of this approach is not to increase the number of serious crimes being tried in the court martial. The civilian prosecutor will always have the final say. I therefore urge the Committee to reject amendment 7.

Amendments 1 to 4 would create a duty on central Government and devolved Administrations. Clause 8, as it stands, covers public functions in healthcare, housing and education exercised by the local or regional bodies that are responsible for those services. Those are the key areas of concern for our armed forces community. Central Government’s delivery of the covenant is regularly scrutinised, as I referred to in my answer to the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), and the Armed Forces Act 2006 requires the Secretary of State for Defence to lay an annual report before Parliament. Devolved Administrations and other bodies are given an opportunity to contribute their views to that report. That duty to report will remain a legal obligation, and it remains the key, highly effective method by which the Government are held to account for delivery of the covenant.

Amendments 39 to 42 seek to ensure that all service housing is regulated in line with the local minimum quality. These amendments are unnecessary because, in practice, 96.7% of MOD-provided service family accommodation meets or exceeds the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s decent homes standard. The amendments would introduce an unhelpful disparity across the UK and would not achieve their intended effect, because local authorities that fall within the scope of the current duty are not responsible for the provision of service accommodation, so these amendments should be withdrawn.

The provision of high-quality subsidised accommodation remains a fundamental part of the overall MOD offer to service personnel and their families. Over the past decade, we have invested £1.2 billion in single living accommodation and another £1.5 billion will be invested over the next 10 years. Additionally, we are rolling out the future accommodation model to improve choice, and I am pleased to report that the forces Help to Buy scheme has helped more than 24,000 personnel to buy a new home over the past seven years.

New clause 9 seeks to introduce artificial timelines for the progress of investigations. These are operationally unrealistic. They do not take account of the nature of investigations on overseas operations and could put us in breach of our international obligations, including under the European convention on human rights, to effectively investigate serious crimes. The right hon. Member for North Durham will be aware, following my letter to him on 7 June, that the detail of this new clause has been provided to Sir Richard Henriques for consideration as part of his review into investigations, and I am confident that Sir Richard will consider this matter very carefully.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: the $100 billion is a totemic figure. We are doing everything we can to ensure that we are able to deliver it by COP26. I can assure him that I am having very frank discussions with donor countries—with developed countries —to ensure that they deliver on that commitment made in 2009.

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

Does the COP presidency share my concern at the reputational hit that the UK will take in the event that it continues to approve old-style carbon-belching waste incinerators such as the one proposed at Westbury in my constituency?

[The Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth (Anne-Marie Trevelyan)]

All energy-from-waste plants in England are regulated by the Environment Agency and must comply with the strict emissions limits set in legislation. I am aware that Northacre Renewable Energy Ltd has applied for an environmental permit from the Environment Agency to operate an incinerator in Westbury, Wiltshire, and the Environment Agency is considering responses to the public consultation.

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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Wednesday 24th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma]

What I would say to the right hon. Gentleman is that, like him, I am very proud of the work that successive Governments have done in supporting the most vulnerable around the world. At 0.5% of gross national income, the UK will still remain a leading international aid donor. On the issue of international climate finance, he will know that, over a five-year period, our commitment is £11.6 billion, which is indeed a doubling of the last figure.

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

Will there be an opportunity in Glasgow to debate so-called energy from waste? In this COP presidency year, surely we should be doing nothing to encourage old-style great incinerators that pump effluent into the great landfill in the sky in places such as Westbury in my constituency. Surely to goodness the waste hierarchy demands better than that.

[The Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth (Anne-Marie Trevelyan)]

I note and support my right hon. Friend’s concern and I will pass it on—particularly in terms of the UK leadership—to the Environment Minister. The work that we have done already in setting resources and waste strategy is leading the way and we as a country are looking to implement all avoidable waste by 2050. With so much of COP, it is about our leadership and proving that we are walking the walk by making these policy changes here at home. I will make sure that the Minister continues to work on that with him.

Armed Forces Bill

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 8th February 2021 Commons Chamber

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

The Select Committee on the 2011 Bill considered whether the armed forces covenant should be codified and contractualised and, after taking lots of evidence, decided that would be unwise. This Bill continues in that vein but places further duties on public sector deliverers that will be of practical help to the service community, including people I have the honour and privilege to represent.

Like the 2011 Act, the Bill does not create rights, but does reaffirm society’s responsibilities. Others have said that the covenant is a contract with country not county, but local councils, schools, NHS trusts and housing associations control things that servicepeople might be disadvantaged in securing by virtue of their service. May I probe the Minister on where this new obligation to have regard to the covenant stands legally—who arbitrates on whether local bodies have discharged the duty placed upon them, and what penalties may ensue if they are judged to have fallen short?

There is increasing public scrutiny of the separateness and differentness of the armed forces. Defence reasonably points out that its distance is necessary, important and enduring by virtue of the extraordinary things its people do. Nevertheless, Defence is not the total institution of even 10 years ago; the trend is for confluence with society at large, and this Bill reflects that.

Justice is done differently in the military. Government are right to have tested that difference with a series of independent reviews, and they have reflected most of the recommendations in clauses 2 to 7 and 11. Servicepeople should not be dealt with any more or less harshly than civilians in relation to the criminal law, either as victims or perpetrators; otherwise the central “no disadvantage” plank of the covenant is merely rhetorical. That is why in the debate on the 2011 Act I said the powers of service police should not be extended unless there is demonstrable service need, and Sir Jon Murphy’s recent review appears to share my caution.

The same goes for setting up service structures that are separate from the civilian mainstream. Lyons recommended a new Service Police Complaints Commissioner, which is in the Bill, but it needs to be tested against the obvious alternative: handing the job to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.

There will likely be detailed discussion in Committee and in the other place of the main Lyons recommendation that the MOD has, up to now, declined: that the most serious offences—murder, rape and manslaughter—should go to the civilian courts. We learn that a rape victim’s assailant tried at court martial is significantly less likely to be convicted than if the case had been heard in a civilian court. At the very least, that sits uncomfortably with “no disadvantage”. Service-necessary difference has to work hard to justify such a divergence of process, outcome and confidence in criminal justice from the civilian mainstream. I know that Ministers have worked really hard on this and considered it extremely carefully. It seems to me that the position adopted in the Bill was finely balanced. We learn that it is already under threat of judicial review.

I welcome the defence serious crime unit proposed in the Bill, which may well help to approximate service justice to the civilian mainstream in very serious cases. Nevertheless, one wonders where trials for serious crime will end up, if not in 2021 then in 2026 or 2030. Finally, as an active reservist and an ex-regular, may I say how helpful the Bill’s extension of the regulars’ part-time service opportunity to reservists will be to both individuals and defence?

Northern Ireland Protocol: Disruption to Trade

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2021 Commons Chamber

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

Does my right hon. Friend agree with me that we have to keep faith with the Northern Ireland protocol, which—long term—shows every sign of benefiting Northern Ireland in its commercial neighbourhood? Will he, however, signal early on to the Joint Committee our willingness to extend the grace period for food, noting the highly pragmatic easement that Dublin has applied? Long term, will he deal with the nonsense—the bureaucratic nonsense—of requiring highly qualified veterinary surgeons to do basic routine sanitary checks?

[Michael Gove]

Very good points. It is in the interests of the European Union to make the protocol work because, as I mentioned earlier, it is subject to democratic consent, and if it is not working then the people of Northern Ireland will reject it, but it is important. It is my responsibility, in the meantime, to do everything possible to make the lives of people in Northern Ireland easier, and my right hon. Friend’s points both about easements and grace periods I entirely endorse.

EU Withdrawal Agreement

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Wednesday 9th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

Absolutely. For Cumbrian farmers, and also for manufacturers in Barrow, we will be doing everything possible to get the best possible set of arrangements.

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

The temporary food waiver for trusted traders is very much to be welcomed and my right hon. Friend is to be congratulated on securing it, but may I press him a little on the detail of what will then follow, because businesses need certainty? What he has had to say will of course be welcome to the big supermarkets, but smaller operators, small shops and street traders, on whom the great Ulster fry depends so much, will still be left in a level of uncertainty, particularly if they are not signed up to the trusted trader scheme. Will he say to what extent the trusted trader scheme will extend to small operators of that sort?

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend, who was an outstanding Northern Ireland Minister, is absolutely right. Once the Joint Committee concludes, we will go into more detail on exactly how we can safeguard the interests of small and medium-sized enterprises as well. We will notify the Commission of those businesses that need to take advantage of the grace period that we have got.

Public Health

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Commons Chamber

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

I find myself more able to support the Government today than I was on 5 November, and the reason for that is that last month I was concerned about the lack of a plan B and the fact that we might have to have such a thing in the event of the prospect of a third, fourth or fifth wave of this terrible virus. It seems that we are now on the brink of a game changer, in a way that perhaps we could not be confident about last month. That is important, because in the event that we can turn this around in the near future, the need for protected isolation falls away. It is for that reason that I see the logic of what the Government are attempting to do on this occasion, in a way that was eluding me ever so slightly on 5 November. The other thing that probably gets it over the line for me is that the UK appears, with what is proposed for tomorrow onwards, to be doing more or less the same as other similar jurisdictions. That is not just followership; it is important because each one of those countries, with all their experts, will have been making similar assessments and coming to broadly the same conclusions.

We saw in the leaked documents in October that our hospitals in the south-west and the midlands would have been the first to go over capacity. There is a big difference between the two, however, in that the prevalence of the disease in the midlands was much larger than in the south-west. The documents suggested that the hospitals in the south-west would have been overwhelmed on 9 November and the Nightingales on 24 November. In the event, at peak, my largest hospital, the Royal United Hospital in Bath, had 70 cases, and that was on 24 November, 19 days after lockdown. That seems to vindicate the model, the action and even perhaps the broadbrush tiering approach now being proposed by the Government, apropos the point about the midlands and the south-west.

In all this, we have to understand that there is a huge margin of uncertainty. We also need to understand that the facts are changing all the time. I say to some of my colleagues that we have to accept that sometimes there is no evidence in the way that maths, physics and chemistry provide us with evidence, and that we have to deal instead with what appears to be biologically plausible. We have to look at outbreak studies, and we have to look at the application of common sense to anecdote. I, too, am disappointed that the proposed tiering system has so little granularity. We have found, to our dismay, that the tools to do comprehensive contact tracing that would have facilitated such granularity are simply no longer there. Even Germany is now finding that to be the case. In two weeks’ time, it is to be hoped that we will have been able to appraise the situation against the five points, plus the knowledge of human geography that we facilitated with the restrictive measures we put in place earlier this year, and that, where appropriate, boroughs and districts will be able to be re-tiered to the satisfaction of colleagues.

The fundamental problem is our lack of public health capacity, and that is something we need to address in the longer term, notwithstanding the positive early steps the Government have taken at pace in relation to things such as the Joint Biosecurity Centre and the National Institute for Health Protection. Finally, in agreeing with my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green), I would say that the Prime Minister is no natural Grinch, but we have to be very careful that we do not have five days of partying over Christmas only to regret it in January.

Public Health

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Keir Starmer]

I have looked at the Leicester figures frequently; they do go up and down, but Leicester has never come out of the restrictions. It is a point that I have been making, and it is not a party political one. The point is that if an area is in restrictions and does not come out, the restrictions are not working. If an area was in tier 2 restrictions and ends up in tier 3, tier 2 did not work. To go back to that system does not make any sense. For heaven’s sake, we have got to use the next four weeks to come up with something better than that for 2 December, otherwise we will do the usual thing, which is to pretend that something is going to happen on 2 December, and then, when we get there, find out that what we said would happen will not happen. I can predict what is going happen because it has happened so many times in the past seven months: the Prime Minister says, “x won’t happen”; x will happen; it does happen; and we start all over again. It is not fair to the British public to pretend that something is going to happen on 2 December.

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

Is not the right hon. and learned Gentleman confounding his own logic? He has spent the past several days berating the Government for not introducing a circuit breaker, but at no time did I hear him explain how we would leave the circuit breaker, which it seems to me was simply the half-term holiday rebadged.

[Keir Starmer]

The lower the rate of infection and the lower the admissions, the more chance there is to get the virus under control. That is why you have to go early. If you want to safeguard the economy, go early. How on earth has it helped the British economy to delay and to go into a lockdown for four weeks when, on 21 September, SAGE was saying it could be two to three weeks? How on earth has it helped the British economy to miss the chance to do lockdown over half-term?

All Members will have seen the data about schools. We all want schools to stay open. How on earth did it make sense to miss half-term? Most schools would happily have said, “We’ll get up early—the Thursday before half-term—and we’ll use Monday and Tuesday as inset days,” and we could probably have got the best part of two weeks of schools being closed naturally, because of half-term, and have the lockdown over then. I do not think there can be anybody in this House who does not think that would have been a better period for a circuit break, lockdown—call it what you like.

It has not helped the economy to waste three weeks. If, at the end of those three weeks, the Prime Minister could say, “Well, there we are—the tiered system is now working, and I’m going to stick with it,” that would be one thing, but the Prime Minister is now saying, “I am going to do the lockdown,” which is failure. That is failure.

The next four weeks cannot be wasted—cannot be wasted. We have got to fix test, trace and isolate. The last figures show that, in just one week, 113,000 contacts were missed by the system. Four in 10 people who should be contacted are not being contacted under the system. If you are not contacted, you cannot isolate. It is not just a number; that is 113,000 people walking round our communities when they should have been self-isolating. Hands up if you think that has helped to control the virus.

We have been on about the track, trace and isolate system for months. The promises come by the wheelbarrow, the delivery never. Only 20% of people who should be isolating are doing it. Something is going wrong. Just continually pushing away challenge and pretending the problem does not exist is a huge part of the problem. Those figures have got to turn around, and they have got to turn around in the next four weeks. If we get to 2 December and those problems are still in the system, we will be going round this circuit for many months to come. If this is not fixed in the next four weeks, there are massive problems.

The Government have also got to stop sending constant mixed messages: “Go back to work, even if you can work from home,” or “Civil servants, get to work,” only a week later to say, “Stay at home.” The constant changing of the economic plans is creating even more uncertainty. There have been huge mistakes made in recent weeks during this pandemic. We have been told so many times by the Prime Minister, often on a Wednesday afternoon, that there is a plan to prevent a second wave—it is working. Well, there was not, and it did not.

Now, less than four months after the Prime Minister told us that this would all be over by Christmas, we are being asked to approve emergency regulations to shut the country down. That is a terrible thing for the country to go through, but there is not any excuse for inaction or for allowing the virus to get further out of control, so Labour will act in the national interest, and we will vote for these restrictions—these regulations—tonight.

--- Later in debate ---

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

May I start by apologising for reading a newspaper during the Prime Minister’s contribution? Mr Speaker was quite right. However, I was not, in my defence, reading my horoscope, even if the Prime Minister kindly did. I wonder whether, in mitigation, I could bring to the House’s attention the headline that I was reading in the Metro this morning, which says, “Vaccine on front line in a month”. Just imagine my excitement at reading that. I hope that the Metro is correct, but I gently point out to those on the Front Bench that, in the event that it is not correct and we do not get a game changer soon, we will seriously have to think about a plan B. In the few minutes available to me, I shall explain why I think that is the case.

Irrespective of the Prime Minister’s kind remarks about my future career prospects, I will be supporting the Government this evening. I cannot think of a single issue since 2003 that has occupied me quite as much as this, and I have agonised over my choice. I am going to support the Government because it hinges on one thing for me, which is that schools are remaining open, which I have discussed with the Secretary of State. In the light of evidence produced by Ackland et al in Edinburgh, it seems to me that it would be foolhardy to close down schools based on deaths to do with covid, due to the consequences of such an extraordinary move. It is the right decision to keep schools open and prioritise them, and it is for that reason that I will be supporting the Government this evening.

I will also be supporting the Government this evening because it seems to me that, broadly speaking, they are doing the same thing that other jurisdictions are doing, and there is safety in numbers. I will be supporting the Government too because of the wide margin of uncertainty that attends all this and a sense of some humility in trying to examine all this complicated material and make sense of it. Finally, I shall be supporting the Government because I know that the Prime Minister, who shares many of the libertarian instincts that I hold, has pushed back as much as he can on some of the advice that has been given to him. I find that convincing, and if I was in any doubt, having analysed the data over the weekend, that has pushed me over the line in the decision I have made.

I am concerned about the clarity of data and the logistics chains for the vaccine that the Metro hopes will be with us within a month. As the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care knows, I am concerned because I have granular evidence from my constituency that the organisations that can provide the wherewithal to guarantee the cold chain necessary for the distribution of the vaccine have not yet been tapped into. I cite the company Polar Thermal in my constituency, which is a leader in this technology and has yet to be contacted.

I am concerned about the lack of a plan B. Plan B has been made all the more possible by the advent of lateral flow testing technology, which will facilitate focused protection if necessary, and we need to give much closer thought to that. I am concerned about places of collective worship. I am concerned about non-contact sports such as tennis and golf. I understand the logic behind proscribing those activities, but we have to treat the British public as adults and individuals with autonomy and agency. I respectfully disagree with the decisions that have been made on those fronts, and I hope very much, particularly if this sadly has to be continued beyond the beginning of December, that they are looked at again.