Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) Regulations 2020

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, I am angry about the main instrument before us today. I am particularly angry—and hereby declare my personal interest—that the whole of my home county of Kent has been placed in tier 3.

Last Tuesday, the chairman of the Science and Technology Committee in the other place asked the Secretary of State for Health whether real patterns of community and movement, including the fact that in Kent movement is typically east-west and not north-south, would be reflected rigorously in decisions made on tiering. Three times in formal evidence he said, “Yes.” Two days later, the decision announced clearly did not reflect that. If that does not amount to misleading Parliament, I do not know what does.

The Government continue to take Parliament and the country for fools. Before the last lockdown, they used some graphs to scare us into submission. The basis of those graphs disintegrated once the underlying models and assumptions were forced into the public domain. It was so bad that the Office for Statistics Regulation issued a strongly worded rebuke. This time we have again been told that, unless the new tiered version of lockdown hell is voted through, NHS hospitals will be overwhelmed. This is clearly not a fact, as our hospitals are not currently overwhelmed. They are operating much as usual for this time of year, and the Nightingale capacity remains unused.

I was not surprised to hear the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, telling a different story, but I just say to him that the NHS never says that it is not under pressure: it is almost a badge of honour to be under pressure at all times. Not only is it not a fact, it is not even a reasonable forecast, because when the R rate is already below 1 and cases are falling and not rising, nobody could forecast an overwhelming. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster tried an elaborate defence of that over the weekend, but it has already unravelled.

It looks quite likely that infections were already falling before the last lockdown, and they are certainly falling now. We were promised that if we complied with the current lockdown and got the R rate down below 1, things would be better from this week. That was a false prospectus. The vast majority of the population of the country from tomorrow will be in a worse position than at the end of October because of the indiscriminate use of tiers 2 and 3.

Many of us have complained, as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe has elaborated, about the lack of a proper impact assessment for the various Covid measures. This impedes Parliament’s ability to decide whether the Government are making the right decisions. Late yesterday afternoon, the Government released a document which was supposed to provide this analysis. It is difficult to find the right words to describe that document.

[A noble Lord]

Try!

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

“Uninformed” and “superficial” are the most polite that I could find. The document does not even scratch the surface of what Parliament ought to be given. It ducks the question of whether alternative policies would have resulted in better or worse outcomes. It proceeds on the basis that the only alternative is one of no action, which is a deeply flawed counterfactual advocated by no one. There is nothing concrete on costs and benefits in terms of health, the economy or the wider societal impacts. The lack of economic analysis, apart from a bit of lift and shift from the OBR last week, is really frightening. We learned from the Times this morning that further analysis does exist in Whitehall on the impact on business sectors, but that has been suppressed.

The hospitality sector has been brutalised by the various lockdowns and restrictions since March. Those still standing wonder whether they can survive tier 2 or 3, which will wholly or partly kill the profitable Christmas trading period. This morning the Government have promised £1,000 for pubs forced to close—but it would be a Christmas miracle if that had more than a marginal impact.

Nobody is pretending that it is easy to decide on the trade-offs between Covid and non-Covid health outcomes, the economy and wider impacts. The Government have a difficult task. But they are letting everyone down by constantly framing the arguments in terms of modelled extremes, such as overwhelming the NHS or exaggerated numbers of Covid deaths. We need a grown-up conversation. Society may well be better served by outcomes which increase short-term Covid deaths but do less long-term harm to the economy and to non-Covid health outcomes.

I wanted to be able to support the Government, as I normally do with enthusiasm, but I cannot do so in this case and will support my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe if she chooses to divide the House.