Health Protection (Coronavirus, Local COVID-19 Alert Level) (Very High) (England) Regulations 2020

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Moylan on his maiden speech, and I particularly welcome a fellow Brexiteer to our ranks.

I have my name down to speak on all three sets of regulations this afternoon. I would have preferred to take all three together, as was done in the other place, so that we could make more considered interventions, but the horrible hybrid House rules prevent this.

I support the amendment put forward by my noble friend Lord Robathan. The Government have said that they base their decisions on scientific evidence, but it is not clear that they are doing this. The advice from SAGE on 21 September was a shopping list of immediate interventions that included a circuit-breaking lockdown and the immediate closure of all pubs, restaurants and hairdressers. The Government very wisely ignored that advice.

The most interesting thing in the record of the SAGE meeting was as follows:

“Overall, the evidence base on which to judge the effectiveness and harms associated with different interventions is weak”.


There we have it. There is no real evidence for the biggest infringements of civil liberties in peacetime, no real evidence for a harsh penalties and enforcement regime, no real evidence for the biggest act of self-inflicted economic harm, and no real evidence for the actions which have caused so much collateral damage for the mental and physical health of non-Covid patients. I shall be saying more about that in the next debate.