Covid-19

Baroness Henig Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Bethell) (Con)]

My Lords, I am enormously grateful for the questions from the two noble Baronesses. By way of introduction, both the noble Baronesses are entirely right that the variants of concern have been a massive game-changer and the reason for this profound inflection point in our approach to border control. Having invested so much in vaccine deployment, having got it right so emphatically, having been ahead of the world in the identification, development, purchase and now deployment of vaccines, and having got so many people who were at threat of sickness and death into a position of safety, it seems entirely right that we now protect the country from mutations that might escape the vaccine by taking tough measures on the border.

That is different from the situation of a year ago: we had comparable infection rates and were all facing the same virus, which did not seem to mutate for months on end. At that point, the priority was to keep our borders open in order to keep the flow of goods, medicines and essential supplies in the planes, trains and boats that are necessary to support Great Britain. But the variants of concern have completely changed that view. That is why we brought in this new, robust and emphatic regime. It depends, in very large part, on existing legislation, but I reassure noble Lords that our plans are to bring in new regulations, where necessary, at the earliest moment. I hope that that will be very soon.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, asked about international surveillance. That is an important part of our overall plan. In Britain, as noble Lords know, we have the most advanced investment in genomic sequencing anywhere in the world, by far. We are hugely investing in a great dash on capacity, turnaround times, accuracy and the geographic distribution of that surveillance in the UK. But we are also investing in international systems. We have made an open-hearted, big and generous offer to the countries of the world to do genomic sequencing for them, wherever necessary. If anyone wants to send their specimens to the UK, to the Sanger at Cambridge, we will do that for them. We are sending machines, often from Oxford Nanopore, the British diagnostic company, to diagnostic centres in countries that have some genomic capability, to enhance their testing and speed up their turnaround times.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, asked about the enhanced measures we are putting in place to check when people arrive in the UK. I can reassure her massively, because the system for the passenger landing form has been digitised and hugely enhanced. We have dramatically increased the amount of validation of the data put into the PLF. The pretesting certificates are linked directly to the PLF, and we are working on linking it to the hotel booking and testing forms. We are also putting in enhanced surveillance of those isolating at home, which includes phone calls, SMSs and an increased investment in police time to follow up where there may be suspicion of a breach. We are also making a crystal-clear communication to those who have access to private jet travel that we will not tolerate those who have the resources to pay the fines but feel that they can, or want to, get around these measures.

The application of the hotel quarantine measures to all countries—both red list and amber—is something that we keep under review. There is a rolling review of the red list, and we are putting in place the necessary infrastructure, should it be required, for a blanket hotel quarantine protocol on all travellers to the UK.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, kind of answered the question on the number of hotels, for which I am enormously grateful. We have currently booked 16 hotels with 4,600 rooms. However, I reassure her that this is an on-call framework, and we will have access to a massively increased number of hotel rooms if that should prove necessary.

But I have to be clear: the signal from the British Government and the instruction from the Home Office and the Department of Health and Social Care is that there should be no need to travel other than under the most exceptional circumstances. We are not trying to encourage anyone to travel, and we expect the number of people travelling to and from the UK to remain at a low level for the foreseeable future. For those who are currently overseas and seek to return but are experiencing some hardship because they were not expecting, did not plan for and cannot afford the considerable cost of the hotel quarantine, we will publish schemes to spread the payment of that to help people out.

Regarding the legislation, the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, made a big point of saying that a sentence of 10 years was too long for a breach of contract. I remind her that Section 1 of the Fraud Act 2006 creates a general offence of fraud and introduces a number of ways of committing it, including fraud by false representation and fraud by failure to disclose information. Committing fraud is a very serious offence. Not everyone who commits their first fraud will get a custodial sentence, but if people repeatedly breach these restrictions or put the lives of others at risk, it will be up to either the magistrates’ court or, ultimately, the Crown Court to decide on the sentence. The maximum sentence is 10 years and it is quite right that it should be. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, made a very good point when she referred to Taiwan, which I shall mention in a moment.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, asked about the data flows on undocumented migrants and the temporary amnesty. I reassure her that it is absolutely our intention to get everyone in the UK vaccinated, whatever their status. We are completely status blind when it comes to distribution of the vaccine, but we need to know who you are before we inject you with drugs—that is a basic clinical need and one that we cannot avoid.

She asked specific questions about the flow of data and whether this would be a temporary amnesty or would last longer. I do not have access to the precise answer to that question but am happy to commit to write to her on that important point.

The noble Baroness asked about prisons. She is entirely right to be concerned. We have had a terrific track record on protecting prisoners from this disease over the year, but she is right that in recent weeks epidemics have emerged in prisons. We are working incredibly hard to deploy a very large amount of testing and, where necessary, implementing isolation, and the vaccine has been rolled out to those who are qualified.

Turning to Sitel managers, I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, that we are enormously thankful to all those who have contributed to the tracing operation. We balance the workload between a variety of providers, and Sitel is just one of several that we have. There is no question of our backing off from our tracing operations—quite the opposite. Test, trace and isolate remains an important part of our armoury and it only increases. In recent times, we have doubled up on our commitment to the Lighthouse labs, which have proved cost-effective, accurate and fast. The genomics turnaround in tracking variants of concern has been remarkably efficient. On tracing and VOCs, Project Eagle is working extremely well and I saw incredibly impressive numbers on that this morning. Pharmacovigilance around the vaccine is being supported by test and trace, and the creation of the NIHP is apace.

Finally, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, mentioned Taiwan. Given that I am married to a Taiwanese wife, I can absolutely bear testimony to the remarkable achievement of that island nation. Taiwan was hard hit in 2003 by SARS, a time I remember well, since my Christmas was cancelled. It learned the lesson and applied important measures. The island has the advantage of social cohesion, but both the stick and the carrot were thoughtfully used, as the noble Baroness rightly pointed out. It created a green list country with a remarkably low level of infection and death, and that is a lesson we can all learn from.

The public are doing their duty and absolutely understand the threat of variants of concern. It is incredibly impressive and I am optimistic for the future.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Henig) (Lab)]

We now come to the 30 minutes allocated for Back-Bench questions. I ask that questions and answers be brief so that I can call the maximum number of speakers.