Covid-19: Tracking

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Wednesday 30th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I reassure the noble Baroness that the use of non-official QR codes is rejected by the app. I have had personal experience of this. We have had downloaded 600,000 of the official QR codes—an astonishing figure. The use of those codes seems to have been embraced and adopted. I have one at my office and it works extremely well.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

I confess that I am very confused by the answer given by the Minister to my noble friend Lord Foulkes about older phones. I have a friend who was excited about being able to download the app; her phone is only two or three years old but it was too old to download the app. I have to say that I am sceptical of the figures that the noble Lord has given us. Certainly, some who may or may not be in the lower income bracket, may be older, or may just be careful and have phones bought in 2015, seem unable to download the app at all. Did the noble Lord say there were two apps? This is confusing and I am not sure that it will help.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I completely understand the concerns of those who may be struggling to download the app but I reassure the noble Baroness that the current app is supported by iOS versions 13.5 and higher, and by Android Marshmallow version 6.0. That covers by far the vast majority of phones. As I said, 89% of phones should support the app. They include, for instance, Apple iPhone 6S and above—a huge proportion of phones. We are debating a new initiative by Apple to bring in their own protocol that is particularly directed at developing countries which may not be able to support their own app. That initiative is not targeted at the UK. We believe that it may have some relevance in supporting downloads of the NHS app because the alerts created can perhaps be directed to the download site on the iPhone store to encourage those in the UK who have not yet downloaded the NHS app. The Apple initiative is a positive development that will be particularly well used in developing countries.