Covid-19 Update

David Johnston Excerpts

Tuesday 5th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The hon. Lady is right that making sure that our whole social care system gets access to PPE is important. There is often a focus on PPE in hospitals and care homes, but on home visits, as she rightly raises, access to PPE is also vital.

There has been a global increase in the prices of PPE. The prices that the Government pay for PPE have increased a number of times over the course of this crisis. That is a feature of the global shortage of supply as the demand for PPE across the world has shot up. We are seeing that the world over. What I hope to do is bring on stream more and more domestic manufacturers of PPE, both to ensure that we get the quantity and to see whether we can stop the price rises happening.

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con) [V]]

Elderly constituents of mine in Wantage and Didcot have been concerned by media reports suggesting that they will be forced to stay in their homes for an extended period. Can my right hon. Friend confirm that that is in fact not the case and that, through all his work on testing and the tracking and tracing app, he is working to make sure that we can all return to a normal life as soon as possible?

[Matt Hancock]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question. I would like to take this opportunity to set out the exact policy, which a few media outlets have got wrong in the past few days. We set out from the start, and clearly on the nhs.uk website, that broadly there are three groups of people when it comes to the strictures of the social distancing guidelines. There are people of working age who do not have underlying health conditions, who must follow the social distancing rules. There are those in groups that are, according to the science, more susceptible to this disease, including the over-70s and some with underlying health conditions, who we say are clinically vulnerable and must pay particular attention to the social distancing rules.

Then there is the group who are shielded. These are people with specific underlying health conditions who will have received a letter from the NHS. It is only to this last group that we have said, right from the start of social distancing, that they will need to stay away from people as much as is practically possible for 12 weeks. We know that that is a very significant impact and burden, hence we have written individually to those people; in many cases, they will have specific requirements because of their condition.

It is really important that people understand those three separate groups. I hope that that clears up for the House some of the confusion seen on the front pages of some of the newspapers.