Public Health

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Maggie Throup]

In September, the Government set out their autumn and winter plan for fighting the virus, which could be implemented to ensure that the NHS is not overwhelmed. Although we are not implementing the entirety of the plan now, we are taking steps to respond to a potentially potent mutation of the virus. We have taken great steps in our fight against the virus, having delivered nearly 115 million vaccine doses so far, and more every day, with almost 18 million people having also received their booster jab, including me.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

Will the Minister deprecate those public appointees who, notwithstanding the clear proportionate advice of the chief scientific adviser, have been on the airwaves telling people that they should not socialise, to the huge detriment of people’s wellbeing and of an industry struggling to recover from earlier lockdowns?

[Maggie Throup]

I am sure the people my right hon. Friend is referring to will have heard him loud and clear. We all enjoy socialising but, as he will appreciate, we are in a difficult situation. However, we also have personal responsibility.

We are confronted with an emerging threat, which is familiar but not yet well known. The measures that we are putting in place are proportionate, precautionary and balanced, and are being made in response to the specific threat.

Late last week, the challenge arising from the latest covid-19 threat from the variant of concern known as omicron emerged. Public health officials in South Africa shared information on the omicron variant and it was identified as a coronavirus variant of concern. Thanks to our world-leading genomic sequencing experts at the UK Health Security Agency, we were able to identify that some cases of the new variant are present in this country. So far, we have identified 14 cases in the UK and, unfortunately, we expect to find more in the coming days.

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[Sir Graham Brady]

I am grateful to my medically qualified right hon. Friend for that intervention. He is of course right that that is unlikely. There would have to be some evidence of a very different kind of variant of covid for it to pose any kind of threat of that sort. He is also right to point out that when we first went into a lockdown, it was intended to protect the NHS for long enough for us to increase capacity in the service for a three-week period. The first lockdown then spread into three months. That is the most important thing the House should be guarding against: the mission creep that allows Governments simply to introduce restrictions and further restrictions, and then extend them, getting into the habit of regulating what we do. That is my most important concern of all.

In the summer of 2020, the Prime Minister said that it was time to move on and time to start to trust people to make decisions for themselves. I rejoiced at that and thought what a wonderful thing it was that we were moving to a point where we would advise people, inform people and make sure they had the best evidence to make decisions in their own lives. Now, however, we see the first instinct of the Government when we do not even have any evidence that the omicron variant is worse in its effects. There is some suggestion from South Africa that it might be less severe, but the Government’s first instinct is to introduce further compulsory measures and regulations relating to self-isolation and to face coverings in some settings but only until 20 December, plus measures that affect the travel industry, particularly the move back to PCR tests on day two.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

We are about to have another pingdemic as we approach Christmas, to the huge disadvantage of enterprises across the country. It fundamentally undermines the other main effort of the Government, which is to increase vaccinations. One of the advantages of being vaccinated is not having to self-isolate if in the company of someone who is infected. If that is taken away, one of the incentives—the principal incentive—to get vaccinated is removed.

[Sir Graham Brady]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is a very serious concern that we might be entering a world where we lurch from one set of restrictions to another, where no business and no individual can get used to the idea of the freedoms they are able to exercise or what restrictions might be in force at the time.

What really concerns me—I think we all know and recognise this—is that we are dealing no longer with a pandemic, but with an endemic virus that will be with us for many, many years and probably forever in some form. Further variants will emerge. They might do so every couple of months or every year. We tend to have a new flu strain on an annual basis and some are much worse than others. But surely, we need to get back to an assumption that people will make decisions for themselves and have control over their own lives. We cannot move, as we appear to have done, to an environment in which the Government simply assume they can instruct us whenever there is the first small evidence from anywhere in the world of a new strain that might behave in a different way, and new and potentially swingeing public health measures are put in place. I ask Ministers to consider the implications of that and for looking at other diseases. Will we start to treat other diseases and viruses in the same way, assuming the best thing to do is to compel people and instruct them on what actions they need to take?