Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Greencore) Regulations 2020

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Friday 25th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, for the clear way in which she introduced this statutory instrument. It is rather strange to be debating an instrument that applies to just one company.

The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, mentioned that there have been other similar outbreaks, such as at the 2 Sisters food processing plants in Llangefni and Coupar Angus. I imagine that they were dealt with by the devolved Administrations. When she comes to answer, can the Minister talk about how similar outbreaks are being handled by the devolved Administrations and what is being done to co-ordinate the intelligence and learning that comes from them?

The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, is also correct that there have been a number of international examples; I think in particular of a meat processing plant in St Cloud, Minnesota, that was in the news over the summer. Are the Government, working with directors of public health—and, crucially, environmental health professionals—now in a position to say what the risk factors are? The Minister mentioned car-sharing and socialising. Okay, but are there also particular risk factors relating to large-scale food processing? Or is it just that these are buildings in which people work in high temperatures and intensively together?

I mention the role of environmental health officers because I spent some time looking at the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health website in preparation for today’s debate. It is interesting that, on 12 August, the CIEH said:

“CIEH has welcomed the Government’s decision to move the NHS Test and Trace system for combatting the spread of COVID-19 in England away from a centralised model and towards focussing on local knowledge and expertise.”


One of its former environmental health officers said:

“We saw very early on that EH were key to the effective delivery of the service, because obviously we do a lot of contact tracing through our day to day involvement in food poisoning investigations and zoonotic infections.”


So, CIEH has an existing level of expertise.

Interestingly, an article on its website talks about what CIEH has done in different local authorities. In effect, it has had to set up its own 24-hour teams—with, for example, librarians setting up information systems and so on—so that they can supplement the cuts made to environmental health budgets over the years. Does the Minister realise that local authorities have had to come up with a lot of make-do-and-mend solutions because of the urgency here, but that those solutions will not be sustainable in the longer term? Does she realise that, for the foreseeable future, we will require strong environmental and public health resources in a way that we have not before?

I want to ask the Minister about the role of local health authorities. They did not figure much in her list of people—presumably because they were still focusing largely on what was happening in hospitals at the time—so I wonder whether she can say something about the local role of the NHS in horizon-scanning work and epidemiological research. Also, what has happened since? What research has been done into, for example, levels of non-compliance and the overall effect, as well as the economic effect on the company? Will these regulations be a template for future ones?

In advance of our debate on Monday, I want to ask why these regulations were necessary. What powers did the Government or local authorities not have that required them to have these particular powers to deal with what they could all see was a rapidly emerging health problem? We have already given people so many powers. I wanted to clarify that.

Finally, since these regulations were laid, the Government have announced that people who have to self-isolate will now be eligible for a payment of £500 on loss of earnings. Will the people who were affected by this regulation now have a retrospective right to that, because I gather from what the Minister says that a lot of them were low-paid workers? She mentioned the production of information in different languages, because a lot of people from BAME communities were involved. What has been done to make sure that that expertise is collected and replicated in future?

Finally, we now have an app. All that app does—if it works properly—is tell you that you have been in close proximity to somebody who has been diagnosed. It does not do anything more than that. Are the Government now going to talk to employers about how that might work—or not—with their workforces, as good employers seek to put in place preventive measures that will protect their staff, because good employers will?