Covid-19: Businesses and the Private Sector

Baroness Buscombe Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe (Con)]

I join others in thanking my noble friend Lord Dobbs for this opportunity to celebrate the many who have worked through the lockdown to deliver vital goods and services across the country. Small businesses have applied amazing ingenuity to work at pace in a relatively safe environment, and others have risked their lives, entirely unsung, such as my friend Ralph who works nights cleaning Chiltern trains and making it safe to travel. Ralph asks: who cleans the trains for the cleaners?

Food shops and hardware stores are thriving, as well as online shopping, with people preferring to avoid supermarkets and stay at home. But my heart goes out to their neighbours on the high street who cannot yet reopen. Some will not be able to afford to reopen after years of developing their businesses, delivering a service and paying their taxes.

We must be proportionate and reduce the distance rule in line with the WHO advice to one metre and reopen our schools to free up the workforce to stem the tide of what is frankly, with respect, cultural and economic suicide. Over 13% of working-age households in the UK were entirely workless before Covid. I stress as a former DWP Minister that we cannot afford this disproportionate approach to the risks. Otherwise, unless we are prepared to radically reform our generous welfare system, the private sector and the taxpayer cannot afford to support the fallout from this crisis.

On a brighter note, let us celebrate those exceptional minds developing a vaccine at the Oxford Jenner Institute, aptly named after Edward Jenner, who developed the first vaccine for smallpox in the 18th century. In praise of British innovation and business, could its deal with AstraZeneca, which said this morning that it has the capacity to manufacture 1 billion doses of the vaccine, be a launchpad for rebuilding our manufacturing base post Covid? For the sake of our young people’s future, I very much hope so.