Covid-19 Update

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My noble friend’s comments are very much appreciated and taken on board. On his question about daily lateral flow testing, he is very perceptive and correct. This is an area that we have been exploring for some months, and we are working extremely hard to bottom it out with rigorous clinical trials—clinical trials are difficult to nail down, by their nature, but we have invested substantially in them. He is right that, for schools, for international travel and for contacts—those three things—daily testing may well offer an alternative to 10-day isolation. That would be a huge relief to many in the country, and it is something that we are very focused on delivering.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I welcome the change of tone when the new Secretary of State said that the big task ahead is to restore our freedoms—freedoms no Government should ever wish to curtail. Regime change is a bit disruptive, so I ask the Minister: are all the department behind this new approach, because it is in rather stark contrast to the Secretary of State’s predecessor’s more doom-laden, illiberal approach? As we have seen in this debate, there seems some reluctance, at least within Westminster, to allow fellow citizens to embrace freedom.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Baroness is quite right to ask the question, but I would say to her that it is not actually the regime that has changed, although the regime has changed; it is that the data has changed. Last Tuesday, I sat through Covid Gold, which is our big set-piece data session—a two-hour deep dive into national and local data. Every week for the past 70 weeks, that has been a very chilling experience where we have looked at the progress of and tactics of this awful virus, and I have often left it with a very heavy heart. Last week, I genuinely felt that we had reached some kind of turning point and, on Friday, when I sat in my kitchen, I felt a great weight beginning to lift off my shoulders for the first time in a very long time. I cannot disguise from your Lordships that there may well be more surprises left in this virus. I cannot promise that I will not be standing at this Dispatch Box giving bad news at some point in future, but, right now, I am more optimistic than I have ever been, and I think that the Statement by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State reflected that.