Government Response to Covid-19

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Richard Drax]

The good reason why a few of us voted against those measures was that there was no evidence to support them.

The 10 pm curfew only further destroyed the hospitality sector, while the rule of six broke up families. I cannot think of a modern crisis in which family and families are more essential and more important. Surely, their support is common sense, despite the risks. It is for them to make decisions about who they see and when, not the Government.

Depressingly, we have been warned that this lockdown might go on after 2 December, putting family gatherings at Christmas at risk. Nowhere in the debate, as far as I can recall, have we heard the word “risk”. The reason, I fear, is that we have become risk averse. Personally, I think that has made the sleepwalk into an invasion of our civil liberties even easier.

All appears to hang on the introduction of a vaccine, but the history of vaccines does not bring much comfort. An all-out effort is being made to create a vaccine, but how effective will it be? Who will it help? When will we actually have it? All these questions are still unanswered, although I welcome every effort to get one. I have spoken to quite a few medical experts and they tell me that pandemics end naturally, mitigated by better treatment of those who suffer, a vaccine and immunity in the population. Like flu, we must learn to live with this virus and not let it destroy us.

In the meantime, we are leaving a devastated landscape, economically, financially, physically and mentally. My own constituency of South Dorset, the prettiest in the country, relies heavily on the hospitality sector. Those in that sector responded to calls to make their facilities safer, only to now see them shutting again.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend mentions the financial aspects of the crisis and the financial devastation we are going through. Does he recall that, in the last 10 years, the Labour party has repeatedly lambasted us for what they call austerity, which was us trying to balance the books, reducing the deficit from £152 billion a year to £20 billion a year? Does he agree that if we had not pursued that fiscal discipline the situation now would be catastrophic?

[Richard Drax]

I am always delighted to hear from my hon. Friend. He sounds like the former Chancellor of the Exchequer on Radio 4 just the other day. I concur; when there is no money in the coffers, savings have to be made or taxes raised. I pay tribute to the coalition Government, who did their best to get our economy back into a place to face circumstances such as we face today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) for securing this important debate. I want to spend my five minutes touching upon how devolution stands up at a time of national crisis. Many of us had severe reservations about the devolution process when Mr Blair started to change our national makeup and constitution. I speak as someone who represents an English seat that borders Wales.

In Shrewsbury we are very proud of being the gateway to Wales. We have so many Welsh people living in our constituency that when England and Wales play against each other in rugby, we have both flags flying side by side throughout the town. Many people in our community have homes, businesses and land on both sides of the border; most importantly, many have families on both sides of the border. It has been devastating to see increasing divergence between the jurisdictions of London—of Westminster—and Wales, throwing up a great deal of uncertainty, misery and paralysis for border communities such as mine. It was really brought home to me by Councillor Hignett from Pontesbury, who has grandchildren just across the border. He can see some of his grandchildren who are on one side of the border, but not others, although Powys and Shropshire have an almost identical R rate.

I am also very disappointed with the Mayors, and the one I am most disappointed with is Andy Burnham. I believe that his grandstanding, pontificating conduct on the television has destabilised to a certain degree the tiered system that was starting to show results. Has his conduct contributed to the fact that the United Kingdom is now moving from a tiered system to a full-blown national lockdown? I would argue that the sheer refusal from him and his like to understand the common need to come together in a national crisis has contributed to making sure that areas such as mine with low R rates are now being forced into a national lockdown.

[Richard Drax]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Richard Drax]

This is devolve and divide. Would it not be wise for the Government not to go down the mayoral route in the future for other areas of the country?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I absolutely agree. This is something that historians will be looking over for many years to come. We have to learn from these mistakes during the national crisis.

We have a very low infection rate in Shropshire in comparison with other parts of the United Kingdom. We are a large rural county that is very spread out. Salopians—people from Shropshire—have been following the rules, but as a result of what has been going on in other parts of the United Kingdom, we now have a lockdown, which will have devastating consequence for many of our businesses. I will be voting for the legislation on Wednesday, but I am sure, Sir Charles, that you have listened to your constituents and many small businesses, which have put so much energy and effort into creating livelihoods. So much is at risk now, and it really pains me to see that suffering.

As I said earlier, I am proud of the fact that when we came to office we reduced the annual structural deficit that we inherited from Labour from £152 billion to £20 billion a year. My hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset will remember the vilification to which we have been subjected for the past 10 years, with talk of savage Tory cuts and austerity. My goodness me, at a time when we are borrowing more than £200 billion, when we have a debt ratio of more than 103% of GDP, when we are already spending £53 billion of taxpayers’ money on debt interest and when the crisis has not even finished, I dread to think of the economic situation that we would now be in if we had followed the policies of the now suspended former Labour leader and gone for massive borrowing when we did not have a crisis.

I want to ask the Minister about something that a Conservative candidate in the forthcoming local elections has asked. Mrs Susan Coleman wants confirmation that everything is being done for ladies who are pregnant so that when they go through the process in hospital, their partners are given covid tests as quickly as possible and can be present throughout the whole process of giving birth to the child.

Finally, the leader of the Conservative group in Shrewsbury Town Council wants me to ask what happens if the R rate falls below 1 during this lockdown. Will it be possible for it to be lifted sooner than 2 December?

[Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

Mr Hunt will get 5 minutes if Mr Green takes just 5 minutes and colleagues do not intervene on him, and then everybody will be treated fairly.

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[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Charles.

I am grateful for the opportunity of this debate on the Government’s response to covid-19, which was not particularly effective. Unusually in debates in this place, there is cross-party agreement that their response was not particularly effective, albeit perhaps not always for the same reasons. Conservative Members and I might not agree on many other things, and we might not agree today, but there is agreement in this room that the UK Government’s response to coronavirus was not particularly effective.

We can see that in the figures, the latest of which appeared today and showed over 1 million cases recorded across the UK and 46,853 deaths. Those figures should chill us and give us cause for reflection. We could always have done more to prevent those deaths and the upset and suffering caused to so many people. My thoughts go out to everybody who has been affected, including my friend the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who spoke of his family circumstances. It diminishes those deaths to say that we should get back to normal. We should not do that. We should try to protect more people in the weeks and months to come.

The UK has among the highest number of deaths and of cases in the world, so we have done something wrong. I fully accept that we did not know what we were dealing with—everyone muddled along and did the best they could—but we have now had many months to get this right. The UK Government spent lots on Serco’s ineffective track and trace system, and money has been thrown at the wrong kind of PPE that could not be used, yet we still do not have a proper plan. We saw the image of the Prime Minister hustling on to the television and disrupting Saturday night’s TV schedules because his plans had been leaked, only for him to announce lockdown not because of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland or northern England, which had asked for and needed it given what they were going through, but because the south of England needed it, showing the chaos the Government are in.

The Government were told time and again to plan ahead. Only the other week I asked the Chancellor to plan ahead, to extend the furlough and to accept that things are not going back to normal any time soon. Businesses in our constituencies need that additional support in the weeks and months ahead because we cannot go back to normal.

Sectors of the economy—hospitality, leisure, tourism, transport, culture and the arts, conferences and exhibitions, weddings; the list is endless—cannot go back to normal because it is not safe for them to do so. In many cases, the Government seem to have ignored that reality, but they should not do so.

The other issue raised by my friend on the Treasury Committee, the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), is the gaps in support. The Committee highlighted those gaps in its work and offered suggestions on how they might be addressed by the UK Government, who of course have the powers and the money to do so. The gaps remain. Those who run their own businesses—company directors and freelancers—have been advised by the UK Government to take up freelance roles and organise their businesses, only for them now to find themselves with no support and no prospect of it, because following the Prime Minister’s announcement at the weekend it does not seem as though those gaps will be plugged. The Government know about this. They have been told about this. They have been offered solutions, yet still they ignore a significant group of at least 3 million people. How the Government expect those people to pay their bills and feed their kids I do not know, because they cannot.

The hon. Member for Strangford mentioned the financial pressures of people on the minimum wage, who cannot survive on two thirds of their wages—nor should they be asked to do so. People on benefits are struggling. There has been no guarantee that the welcome £20 uplift to universal credit will be extended. It was not extended to people on legacy benefits—many millions across the UK—who are struggling and need that additional support.

I welcome the announcement made today by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on extending the minimum income floor to April, I believe. If that extension has been made and the DWP has accepted that there needs to be a change to the minimum income floor, why not to everything else? Why pick this one aspect that needs additional support and extend it to April, but nothing else? The furlough for the self-employment scheme runs until December. Why not extend it? Why not look at the reality we face? If the Government do not need to use it, that is fine, but it would be in place if it was needed. That is crucial in enabling families and businesses to plan.

I was disappointed to hear the comments made by the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski). He accused devolution of being about division, and the Mayors—particularly Andy Burnham—of grandstanding. They are not. They are representing the people who elected them. That is their job. That is their duty. That is their role. It is the UK Government’s role to listen. If the UK Government had listened and reacted in kind, there would have been no need for that grandstanding, and no need for those Governments to be calling for more. It would have been something that would have been put in place in partnership. It should not be that these things have to be conducted in the media. These things should have been agreed well ahead of that having happened. The Government failed by not listening to those directly elected Mayors and devolved institutions, and that is why we have ended up in this situation.

I dispute the point made about the ten years of austerity that we have seen. I read an article on the website of the British Medical Association, which said that austerity had actually made the UK more vulnerable to coronavirus and its effect. In an article about experiences from the front line, it described austerity as “covid’s little helper”. That should also give cause for thought.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

You always run out of other people’s money.

[Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

Order.