Proceedings During the Pandemic (No. 4)

Christopher Chope Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Sir Robert Syms), and also with my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), because this motion is over the top. It was only at the end of July that we agreed to extend the arrangements until the end of September. What has happened since the end of July that has caused us now to feel the need to extend them until the beginning of November?

The motion is consistent with the knee-jerk way in which the Government are dealing with many of our constituents. Take, for example, last Saturday when at 24 hours’ notice the Government introduced an extension to the restrictions on evictions of tenants from 20 September until March of next year. That six-month extension was implemented without any impact assessment and without any notice. Now we are talking about having a much longer period of notice before we introduce changes to the way in which we operate in this House.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden made an excellent point in saying that we are on the cusp of being able to have a testing regime of the type that was spoken about by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care yesterday.

He said that a 90-minute testing regime would soon be in place. If that is in place in the next two or three weeks, which I very much hope it will be, that would negate completely the purpose of the motion before us.

I hope that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, who is generally a great facilitator of parliamentary and legislative scrutiny, will agree that although the motion is likely to go through this evening there will, notwithstanding what is in the motion, be a review in which the Procedure Committee will be able to express its own opinion, so that we can take into account the emerging evidence and the ability to provide us all with tests. If we were all tested and those tests were pretty accurate, we would be able to set a much better example to those people who are going back to schools, the people we are encouraging to go back to factories, the people we are encouraging to get back on to public transport.

I will not speak at greater length now because I have a very similar subject on legislative scrutiny for this evening’s Adjournment debate and I would not want to eat into my own time.