Oral Answers to Questions

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I think my hon. Friend has just made his heartfelt plea and it has certainly landed with me, but I am not surprised because he has made this case to me on behalf of his constituents over and over again and he is quite right to. We are in the process of considering which hospitals will be in the eight additional, on top of the 40 that we committed to in our manifesto. I am grateful for his representations and we will certainly consider Airedale and its full needs for the local community.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab) [V]]

I wonder whether the Health Secretary would agree with me that coronavirus has not only changed many of the ways that we have to do our lives, but it is fundamentally going to have to change the whole structure of the NHS re. That means we are going to have to recruit more pathologists in this country for ourselves; we are going to have to have far more intensive care unit capacity; we are going to have to have UK manufacture not only of PPE but of vaccines if we are to be able to be self-reliant; we are going to have to have much better long-term rehabilitation for people with brain injuries; and we are going to have a complete review of our care homes, aren’t we?

[Matt Hancock]

We will need to draw many lessons from the pandemic. For instance, my brilliant team who have done all this procurement of PPE have also built an onshore PPE manufacturing capability. With regard to almost all items of PPE, 70% of it is now made onshore in the UK, up from about 2% before the pandemic—likewise for vaccines, where we did not have large-scale vaccine manufacture and we now do, and for a host of other areas, including some of those that the hon. Gentleman mentioned.