Public Health

David Davis Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

The right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) leaves me with an interesting image to start my speech.

Let us look at the facts. The Government tell us that this is all about protecting the national health service. Fine—so let us start with the hard UK numbers. The number of covid-19 patients in hospitals reached a peak of 16,612 in the UK, out of 127,000 hospital beds nationwide, a week or two ago. The number of patients in critical care beds reached a peak of 1,489, with a UK-wide capacity of at least 4,500. At the recent peak of the virus, the national health service had 13,000 free hospital beds and 18% of critical care beds free, which is significantly better than it usually is at this time of year —so, cause for concern, because of the potential growth of the virus, but not cause for panic.

The Government, without doubt, have to act, but they should do so on the basis of hard facts. Today, we are talking about what the Government think of as a localised lockdown: tiers 1, 2 and 3. However, we know from other studies, and other countries, around the world, what does and does not work. We do not have to guess—there is hard evidence. Some of the Select Committees have covered that hard evidence.

What works is very narrowly targeted interventions, with intensive testing and tracking of contacts, and highly localised lockdowns. Take Germany, which has its fair share of densely populated areas, but has a death rate of one quarter of ours. Their concept of a local lockdown, perhaps at its biggest, is the city of Gütersloh, with a population of 101,000, or Warendorf, with 37,000, or one meat-packing factory, with 7,000, or even one block of flats, with 700 people. That is what they think of as a localised lockdown.

Compare that with us. We locked down Liverpool city region, 1.5 million, Greater Manchester, 2.8 million, and Yorkshire and the Humber, 4.7 million—anything but a precise lockdown. Other countries, such as South Korea and Vietnam, have used a similarly targeted approach to contain the virus, with spectacularly better results than we have achieved. South Korea has just 10 deaths per 1 million of population; Vietnam is even more successful, with about half a death per 1 million of population.

The measures will, without doubt, go through today, but I will not vote for them. When we come to vote on them next time—in early February, according to the Prime Minister—I hope that they will be massively more targeted. Restrictions on a local authority level, which is what we have now, are not enough. We must follow the example of Germany, South Korea and others by having restrictions imposed on a much smaller area. They work better, they are fairer and they cause much less economic damage.

We do not know for sure whether blanket lockdown restrictions work to suppress the virus, but we do know for sure the economic damage caused by such restrictions. The impact on people’s livelihoods and even their mental health is absolutely clear. As my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Sir Graham Brady), the chairman of the 1922 committee, said, in this country we do not give up our freedoms lightly. What we need today is a policy of maximum protection for minimum damage. This policy is not it. I hope that the next iteration in February does a much better job.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). I agree with him, and I will be voting against these regulations. He has persuaded me to change what I was going to say by the power of his speech. We do not have to look to Germany and Vietnam to see what it is necessary to do. We have to look at 200 years of public health in this country, which has always been done at a local level.

One of the problems with the systems that the Government have followed is that, like all Governments, they want to centralise things—they want to take control. It is not just the fact that people suffer financially and will not isolate. It is that the central system is so slow at getting the information out to people that they need to isolate that, by the time it gets there, the £22 billion or whatever we have spent on it has been wasted, and the information is useless. We have also seen evidence that Public Health England has withheld information from local public health authorities. If we want to get this right when we come back to it in two months’ time, we must decentralise the expenditure and get it into local public health systems.

What I was going to say, before the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden spoke, was that there is not a way forward where people do not die in this situation. That is tragic, and everybody in this House wants to minimise the number of deaths, but we sometimes speak as though if we have the most restrictive measures, which will undoubtedly stop people contracting covid, it will be fine. It is not. The first lockdown led to people dying from cancer as cancer services were withdrawn. People did not go to hospitals, and if they did, they often did not get treatment. The number of people dying at home increased dramatically over that period. The proposals before us will lead to more of that withdrawal of health services from some people. They will be extraordinarily damaging to the economy of Greater Manchester and other parts of the United Kingdom. We must remember that poverty kills. It is not just cancer and covid that kill—poverty kills. People commit suicide. Children have had their education withdrawn, and suicide rates among children are up by 40%. There is huge damage done across the board.

People say that these decisions have been informed by the science. I cannot see that. The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care appeared before the Health and Social Care and Science and Technology Committees on 24 November for our joint inquiry. When we asked him what criteria he was going to use to determine which areas went into which tier or whether there had been a cost-benefit analysis, he could not tell us. He could tell us that, because Greater Manchester leaders told him that he had got his figures wrong, in effect—he did not use the word “punish”—Greater Manchester was going to be punished for taking time to put him right on the science and the detail of what was happening there.

[Mr Davis]

The science is not the same as the opinion of a single scientist.

[Graham Stringer]

I could not agree more, and one can go right the way from the Great Barrington group to the people advising the Government. The science to send a rocket to the moon is exact. The science on epidemics is not exact. It is open to different opinions.

The Secretary of State showed his prejudice against Greater Manchester, and his proposals will wreak economic havoc on Greater Manchester. We are told, although we clearly were not present, that when the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was making his proposals to lock down London, the Prime Minister, the ex-Mayor of London, said, “No, you can’t do that. It will cost half a million jobs.” That means that the Government value jobs in London over those in Manchester and elsewhere in the country.