Business of the House

Barbara Keeley Excerpts

Thursday 2nd March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank the hon. Lady for raising that. Our business sector is incredibly resilient. We obviously supported businesses through the energy bill relief scheme, and as she will know, we are bringing in the energy bills discount scheme from April this year for the following 12 months. She will also know that the Budget is coming up, and I know that the Chancellor will be wanting to support local businesses in many ways. I encourage the hon. Lady to make representations to the Chancellor before the Budget.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

Yesterday, during the urgent question on testing of care home residents during the covid pandemic, I asked a question of the Social Care Minister, the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately). I raised the fact that on 2 April 2020, I wrote jointly with my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) to the former Health and Social Care Secretary, the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock), highlighting the urgent need for testing in care homes for staff and residents, and for patients being discharged from hospital. I also highlighted that in June 2021 I asked the right hon. Member for West Suffolk why the Government had not taken up the offer, made early in the pandemic by care providers, of new and unused care facilities to isolate people discharged from hospital before admitting them to care homes.

I have to say that the reply I got from the Social Care Minister yesterday was perfunctory, and overall her responses were lacking in empathy with the bereaved. These questions need to be debated now, in order to help the grieving families of the tens of thousands of residents and hundreds of staff of care homes who died after contracting covid. Will the Leader of the House arrange a debate in Government time on matters around the heavy death toll of residents and staff of care homes from covid?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. She will know that I am very aware not just of the formal correspondence that she received but, having spent much of the first year of the pandemic on the phone every day to colleagues from across this House on those early-morning calls, of all the concerns, representations and ideas that were forwarded by Members from across the House to the Government throughout that time.

I agree with the hon. Lady that it is important that we have the covid inquiry, which will look at all of these matters. We also need, as has happened with the national resilience team in the Cabinet Office, to ensure that if—God forbid—a situation like that occurred again tomorrow, we would be in the best place and best prepared, and had had those immediate learnings. It is crucial that the covid inquiry is able to address those matters; speaking as someone who may be a witness to that inquiry, I think that is incredibly important. I will make sure that the Department of Health and Social Care has heard what the hon. Lady has said.