Covid-19 Update

Baroness Bull Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for looking forward. She is entirely right: the experience of this vaccination programme cannot stop when we have finished the initial rollout and we have to look to the future. As I said in my opening remarks, I am extremely hopeful that this can be an inflection point where we double-up on our commitment to rid the country of as much contagious disease as we possibly can. That will include booster shots, to which my noble friend alluded. It will also include a greater commitment to flu shots, and we very much hope that we can increase dramatically the take-up of flu shots at all ages, to stop not only illness itself but transmission.

[Baroness Bull (CB)]

Following on from the noble Baroness’s question and the importance of overall and ongoing vaccination coverage, can the Minister say how many people living in the UK are not registered with an NHS GP and therefore cannot be contacted for vaccination? We know that socially excluded groups, such as rough sleepers, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities and vulnerable migrants, are less likely to be registered, and there will be people registered only with a private GP. What assessment have the Government made of the scale of this challenge—how many people are affected—and what efforts are under way to find them and offer them vaccination?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness makes her point extremely well. It is an area that we have looked at extremely carefully. The proportion of people who are not registered is remarkably small, but the phenomenon does exist. For this particular vaccination round, we have put in procedures so that those who turn up at a GP or vaccination centre who are not registered can be registered on the spot, and I thank colleagues at NHS D, who have put the necessary arrangements into the NIMS programme to make that possible. There are also others who do not know their NHS number—well, an enormous number of them now do know it. That is one of the blessings of this vaccination programme. We are also working extremely hard to reach out to the people the noble Baroness alludes to—the homeless, the Roma community and those who are recent arrivals in the UK—to make sure that the vaccination is offered to absolutely everyone in the UK, whatever their immigration status, whatever their living arrangements and whatever their medical history.