Covid-19 Update

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Tuesday 6th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab) [V]]

I thank the Minister for this Statement, which was made yesterday in the Commons, and for the one made on Thursday in the Commons. It seems like a good idea to take them both together, since the news about the unreported and untracked positive tests needs urgent scrutiny, and the Minister does not have to suffer double the pain of explaining the very real problems we face with the winter and the second spike.

For example, today, we see another increase in positive tests—14,522 cases reported, with two-thirds of those in the north and north-west. To summarise, we have had people being told to travel hundreds of miles for a test; hundreds of children out of school unable to get a test; tracers sitting idle, watching Netflix; care home tests taking days to be processed; the Minister’s hyperbole, saying this could be a moment of national pride, like the Olympics; and a Prime Minister in a complete muddle over the rules. The Prime Minister seems to be able to learn large chunks of Greek by heart, so why, when he does regional media, could he not at least learn which lockdown rules apply where? It is not much to ask.

The questions from my honourable friends Jonathan Ashworth and Stella Creasy in the Commons yesterday were very pertinent. The reason why they needed to ask what the contractual teams were for the contracts supplying test and trace is that they are not working well and a large amount of public money is being spent on them. Is it not sensible to ask if there is a break clause if goods being purchased with public money are faulty or not working properly, given that they have been sold to us as world-class and planet-beating? What did the Secretary of State say to these questions? Unfortunately, he reverted to the government line of blaming Public Health England. Can we see the terms and conditions and profit margins on all these contracts? Is it true that there is no break clause addressing whether these contracts do what they are supposed to? As the former chair for a few years of the procurement committee of a local CCG, at a very lowly level in the NHS, I can tell the Minister that these are vital questions which have to be asked—questions for which I would expect to be held to account.

Does the Minister agree that transparency would ensure proper governance and accountability for those charged with the stewardship and responsibility of spending public money? Let us examine this for a moment. Is it true that Public Health England’s older version of Excel has a 65,536-row limit, meaning that, in the data transfer from the big CSV file, rows were chopped off? Can the Minister confirm that the data could not be handed over to Public Health England due to the size of the Excel spreadsheet files? Why are critical databases in a national pandemic being hosted on Excel spreadsheets? Is it true that the upgrade to a later version of Excel, which copes with just over 1,000,000 rows, costs about £100? Is this an issue with one particular lighthouse lab or across all the lighthouse labs? Public Health England’s sources say that they report the data when they get it from NHS Test and Trace, so if the information is coming in incomplete, they cannot do their job.

We know that the budget for test and trace is in the region of £10 billion to £12 billion, and it seems to me that an IT audit might have been a good place to start. Was there one? What did it say? We know it is true—so, presumably, does the Secretary of State, who is ultimately responsible for Public Health England—that Public Health England’s budgets were cut by 40%. So, is it the case that Public Health England had no IT upgrades of any kind recently? Given what we know, is it legitimate to ask where all that money has gone?

Why in October, after all the promises of the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State and the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, are we now facing the possibility of 60,000 people unknowingly spreading Covid in their homes and communities, which might account for some of the sudden increases seen today? Have all those people been contacted, traced and isolated?

These are not irrelevant, disloyal or silly questions: they are vital if these matters are to be remedied. They are vital if the Government are to dispel what communities are feeling, described on Sunday by the leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, as

“This deep sense of despondence, anxiety. And actually, what they want is hope.”


We on these Benches want the Government to do that: to give hope. Assuring us that they have everything under control will, however, not work anymore, because it is clearly not true.

Surely, what is needed is transparency and a strategy, expressed with clarity, that everybody understands and supports. It is, furthermore, urgent. Tonight, a group of leaders of the largest councils in the north—Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Liverpool—has written to the Prime Minister asking for, among other things, significant local control and support. I beg the Minister not to chant the mantra that test and trace are working closely at local level, because clearly they do not believe that it is. Again, it does not seem to be true. I hope that the Government will respond positively to these councillors.

Yesterday, Jeremy Hunt asked whether responsibility for NHS and care home staff testing should be moved to hospitals and laboratories, and that idea was repeated by the Nobel laureate Paul Nurse, of the Crick Institute, on the radio this morning. The fundamental problem is that there is no strategy: there is a vacuum. That is because there is division in the Cabinet over which strategy should be followed. This needs to be remedied and a clear way forward explained.

Finally, with regard to the part of the Statement concerning treatment: will the Minister clarify whether the establishment of Orbis will be in co-operation and collaboration with EU medicine protocols or in competition with them? Will Parliament scrutinise Orbis, and when?

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

I thank the Minister for yet again turning up at the crease to defend what is becoming increasingly indefensible: the poor performance of the NHS Track and Trace system.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, was right to note the admission in this Statement that 16,000 positive results had not been uploaded, and that by yesterday only 51% of those people had been contacted, despite the injection of resources into NHS Track and Trace over the weekend to try to make up the deficit. Given that we know that each person who tests positive is likely to report between four and five contacts, that is potentially 60,000 people who last week were walking around, not self-isolating and possibly infecting others. It is not their fault—they did not know. It is a really significant breach of trust.

In the part of the Statement that I find most curious, the Secretary of State said that the Chief Medical Officer’s analysis of the Government’s assessment of the disease as a result of the new data was that

“its impact has not substantially changed.”

Can the Minister give us further detail about that? The omission of 60,000 people not having any impact does not add up at all. The Secretary of State went on to say that the Joint Biosecurity Centre had confirmed that

“it has not impacted the basis on which decisions about local action were taken last week”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/10/20; cols. 625-6.]

When will that data come through and when will we be able to see the impact on local areas? As these statements make clear, the virus is beginning to have different impacts in different places. Can the Minister say at what point directors of public health were informed about this breach? Six months in, it is clear that, when local authorities are properly resourced and given correct and timely information, the virus is managed and contained. The major problems come about when decisions are made centrally, poorly communicated and badly executed.

Time and again, it comes back to track and trace, whether it is about a lack of skills and capacity or a lack of foresight. Who could not have foreseen the impact that hundreds of housefuls of students moving around the country in September would have on transmission?

Yesterday when this Statement was debated in another place, speaker after speaker, mostly from the Conservative Benches, got up to complain about the effect of the 10 pm arbitrary cut-off. They explained how well-run businesses, especially in the hospitality sector, will be going to the wall because of continued use of blunt instruments designed nationally and applied over wide geographical areas. How long will it be before the Government realise that local people—local professionals, directors of public health and environmental health officers—have detailed knowledge about businesses in their area, their hygiene ratings, their previous breaches of licensing conditions and where crowds congregate? When we can get decision making to a more local and granular level, we will be better able to protect good businesses without jeopardising public health.

I welcome the announcement of hospital funding for upgrades to A&E departments. We need a greater capacity for A&E. However, could the Minister give the House the definition currently used by this Government of what constitutes a new hospital?

On the Orbis project, we go into this having left a safe and highly effective system of medicines regulation, one where patient safety is paramount. How does the Government propose to withstand the commercial imperatives of American pharmaceutical companies in these circumstances?

The public are getting very worried about the extent to which the Government continue to wing it. It is time for them to bear down on the fundamental flaw in their strategy—thinking that they know best in the centre, above people who are professionals at a local level.