Contingencies Fund (No. 2) Bill

Anthony Browne Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 11th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I welcome the Opposition’s interest in this motion. It is incredibly important. I particularly welcome their conversion to the importance of value for money. It is the Conservative party that has always been the party that realises that we are just guardians of public money. It is not the Government’s money. It is taxpayers’ money and we should treat it as carefully as if it were our own.

I arrived at City Hall after Ken Livingston was there and when the current Prime Minister was Mayor of London. We went through the accounts and were absolutely shocked at the staff’s attitude towards money—it was just there to be shovelled out the door. We imposed a very strict control regime, which dramatically reduced costs and improved value for money. If Labour Members want to learn more about value for money, I would welcome them to the Conservative Benches, so that we could discuss it.

This whole debate reminds me slightly of discussions that I have often had with environmental activists about nuclear power. They come out with lots of arguments against nuclear power. One by one, those arguments are knocked back. Finally they say, “Well, it costs too much.” When they resort to that argument, we realise that they have lost the argument. The reason the Labour party is focusing so much on value for money is, I fear, not because it has converted to this cause, but because there are no other lines of attack for it to follow.

If we look at the progress of this pandemic since it started, we will see that, at the very beginning, we were really worried about not having enough ventilators. We now have 22,000 ventilators. We have far more ventilators than we need at the moment. Then there was the personal protective equipment crisis—remember that? There was shock, questions and attacks the whole time from the Opposition, who were saying that we did not have enough PPE and asking why we did not have it in stock. Actually, we only made 1% of the PPE in this country. We did not have manufacturers that we could turn to and say, “Can you ramp up supply?” There was a global shortage. We now have, as my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Saqib Bhatti) said, 32 billion parts of PPE in stock and 70% of it is made in this country. There is no line of attack that the Labour party can make on PPE.

Then we come to vaccination. The Labour party previously made many attacks on vaccination. What can I say? We all know, everyone knows, the voting public know that it is a great success. It is an absolute triumph and truly world leading, as is so well documented, thanks mainly to many teams across the NHS and the public sector, but also to the vaccine taskforce led by Kate Bingham.

The Labour party has raised test and trace because of the Public Accounts Committee report yesterday. The report said many things. It did not say that 80% of the cost of test and trace is on the testing. On the testing, we are very much a world leader. I was looking at the figures for the G20 countries—the 20 main countries in the world—and we are doing twice as much testing as any other G20 country in the world. According to Our World in Data, we are doing 10.54 tests per 1,000 people a day in the United Kingdom. The next highest in the G7 is Italy, at 5.2. We are doing four times as much as Germany, and three times as much as Canada. We are truly world-leading in testing and that costs money. It also means that all the children can go back to school. We did 1.5 million tests on the day that they went back to school. It is only because we can do the testing and the tracing that follows that children can go back to school to regain their education and we can slowly return to normality.

All these are great successes and the Labour party should welcome them. The British public can see it: we can see the mood of the nation changing and, fingers crossed, that will continue. However, we are still in the middle of the pandemic. It is not over yet. It is too soon to take the hands off the brakes and say, “Let’s roll down.” Things could go the wrong way and it is absolutely right that the Government continue with their contingency policy, with 12% of supply, in case other things flare up. This is not about spending more money. It is about giving us the ability to spend money should it be needed and I fully welcome it.