Health Protection (Coronavirus, Wearing of Face Coverings) (England) Regulations 2021

Baroness Altmann Excerpts

Wednesday 1st December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, I like to spend an evening at the Royal Opera House. In fact, I have been a couple of times in the past three weeks and noticed from where I was sitting that enormous numbers of people were wearing masks—including one John Major, sitting just in front of me. I cannot see that there is any problem with sitting in the Royal Opera House and wearing a mask. In the area where I sat, there was very high compliance. It is not even just that there have been these announcements. The fact is that there was an announcement from Antonio Pappano every evening before the performance, encouraging people to wear masks. My own view is that it would have been much better if we had never stopped people wearing masks. We would not then have to start every time from a lower base to encourage people to take it up. The noble Lord, Lord Robathan, said that it may have stopped transmission on some occasions. Is that not good? That is what we want to happen.

My second point is about schools. The fact is that schools are not generally well-ventilated buildings. My daughter is a year 4 primary schoolteacher and, for the whole of last year, she had to teach with the windows open. This year, they have come back and again had to do so. It is not easy for a child to learn in a very cold classroom where they have to wear their coats, hats and gloves. It would be so much better if we had managed to get in a programme to bring in ventilation or some kind of air filtration scheme. Although there was a big concern about whether young people would be oppositional to the idea of wearing masks, people I know who are teachers—I do know a great many of them—have found that when you have the discussion with young people, they absolutely understand why it is important to wear masks: it is about protecting themselves, each other and their grandparents, who they may see out of school.

While a great number of things have been done too slowly, the reinstitution of wearing masks has been done in a speedy way. I hope it will continue beyond 20 December.

[Baroness Altmann (Con)]

My Lords, on a personal level, I do not have a problem with wearing a mask. I understand that the Government are in a difficult position, because they are almost damned if they do and damned if they do not on issues of this nature. My concern is that we started off following the science but now seem to be anticipating what the science might show, in the absence of evidence that this omicron variant is any more deadly than previous variants. We seem to be ignoring the fact that, unlike when delta started, so much of the population is now vaccinated; they are therefore protected. The Government should be given enormous credit for the vaccination programme and the booster programme.

Looking at the evidence from the delta variant, as the virus progressed it became much more contagious, as all viruses tend to, but it was much less deadly. The people for whom it was particularly dangerous were those who were unvaccinated. Since we have given everybody who could have an opportunity to be vaccinated the chance to do so, and that some people have—for reasons that they know best—refused to accept the vaccine, it seems there are implications for the wider public in continuing to try to protect those people. I recognise that there are clinically vulnerable people who cannot be vaccinated, which is an issue in itself. But I am seriously concerned about wider society, particularly as the self-isolation rules will not run out until next March and have a psychologically damaging impact on society. They frighten the public and could cause, I believe, significantly higher numbers of deaths from loneliness, mental ill-health and illnesses such as cancer, which the public may be too frightened to see their doctor about, or for which GPs may now again say that they cannot see people face to face, and therefore miss the symptoms.

I hope that this mask-wearing SI will be lifted at the end of the three weeks. We need to trust the public. I agree that we need to help people understand the risks and that they need to consider them, but it is perfectly valid for people to decide that they do not consider the risks too large to stop them seeing friends and family. I have significant concerns about mandating and fining them for not doing things, when we do not have evidence to suggest those are as damaging to the public as we previously considered them to be.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I would like to make a few comments about the mask-wearing regulations, which I strongly support while feeling that wearing masks should never have been abandoned in England. It is with great sadness that I have to tell the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, that at exactly this time last year I attended the funeral of a friend of mine, the exact same age as me, who died from Covid. I wonder what the families of the over 1,000 people dying from Covid each week would think if they were listening to our debate now.

The questions I would like to ask the Minister are primarily about compliance and enforcement. When I got on the Tube yesterday, it was clear to me that the message had not got across to quite a few people. I was concerned that there was no one standing at the Tube station to point out to people that it was now a legal requirement and that there were no notices making it clear that that was so, rather than a condition of passage. Those things are different. Can the Minister please explain the responsibilities for enforcement, particularly on public transport, as between, for example, Transport for London staff and the police or transport police?

It is going to be hard to get the messaging back on track after people have been told that they did not need to wear masks; now they are being told they need to again. There is a good reason for it but the bit I have not heard so far in the debate today is that mask-wearing is primarily about protecting other people. Yes, I believe scientific evidence says that it confers a degree of protection on the wearer but it is primarily about protecting others—and we do not know the medical vulnerabilities and risks of the people we sit next to, be it in this Chamber or on public transport. That is the main reason I feel mask-wearing should never have been abandoned.

I also want to ask the Minister about people who genuinely have medical exemptions. Clearly, there are people who do. Yesterday on the Tube, I was standing next to a lady who was wearing a green lanyard and a badge; personally, I found that very helpful. She was making it clear that she was exempt. To help with the compliance issue at the moment, what plans might the Government have to encourage people who are genuinely medically exempt to have badges, lanyards or exemption cards, or something like that? However, it was clear to me that a number of people not wearing masks on the Tube, yesterday and today, were certainly not genuinely exempt.