Public Health

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

My hon. Friend makes such an important point. Going back to the staff surveys, particularly given that the overwhelming majority of staff are vaccinated, it is not that they do not want their colleagues to be vaccinated, but that they have concerns about the way in which the Government are going about this. We accepted from the Government and from NHS England a very clear view that omicron has raised the stakes in this regard, which has had a big bearing on our position. It is very difficult for me and my colleagues on the Labour Benches to put ourselves in a position that is on the other side of the argument from the NHS and from the public, but the point about engagement is really important. The Government must work with and take the workforce with them. It is not good enough for us to just clap for the NHS, or clap for carers; we must work in partnership with them and respect that these are people who have given their lives to public service and caring for others. They do care. They will instinctively be on the right side, but they just need some persuasion, some patience and genuine engagement and that is where the Government have gone slightly wrong.

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

My hon. Friend started off his speech in an excellent way and has got better as he has gone through it. I say that, but I will almost certainly not be in the same Lobby as him on some of the votes this evening. There is a general point to the specific point that he is making on vaccines, which is that the Government should be clear, explicit and transparent on every issue that they raise if they want to take with them people who are not just worried about vaccines but worried about this whole affair. Repeatedly, the Government have refused to do a cost-benefit analysis on the impact of their policies. We have before us now a number of statutory instruments without impact assessments. Does he agree that that information should be available?

[Wes Streeting]

Let me say to my hon. Friend that, in his intervention, he started off well, dipped in the middle and then got better at the end. He made some absolutely fair points about impact assessments and transparency. In fact, I can see the Vaccines Minister waving impact assessments at me, so I am sure that she will make them available to my hon. Friend.

It comes back, as we have discussed at various points today and previously in relation to these sorts of restrictions and measures—it is how I began, and will begin to close, my contribution—to how we really cannot be complacent when it comes to public support, public compliance and public consent for the measures that we are considering. We know that we have asked so much of the British people and they have played their part. We also know that recent events have dented their trust and confidence and their willingness to comply, because they have seen No.10 saying one thing and doing another. That makes it even more important that, when we discuss measures that impact on people’s lives, livelihoods and liberties, we have these sorts of exchanges, look over the evidence rigorously, test each other’s assumptions and come to a conclusion.

With some of the exchanges that we have heard today, people across the country on both sides of these arguments can at least take some reassurance from the fact that, when these matters are under consideration, we do take them seriously. The Government could do a little better sometimes on bringing measures forward in advance of their implementation and on setting out the rationale and argument, and not just assuming that, because measures have been supported by the public previously, they will be supported today. I think we have public support for the measures under consideration this afternoon, but we should not be complacent about it. That is why it is right that we spend so much time exploring these issues.

--- Later in debate ---

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

As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I was trying to help you with the intervention by withdrawing from the list, but I am grateful to be on top of the list for the Labour Benches.

I agree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) the Leader of the Opposition when he says that the Prime Minister is a threat to public health. I think that that is absolutely right. I draw a different conclusion from my hon. Friends on the Labour Front Bench on how we should respond: not by being irresponsible but by taking a look at the way the Government have dealt with the whole of the covid crisis from the very beginning to what they continue to do.

I am a member of the Science and Technology Committee. Together with the Health and Social Care Committee we produced a 150-page report. I hope that right hon. and hon. Members have had the time to read it. They may not agree with its conclusions, but it contains very valuable information. The key point, which a lot of the press missed, was not that the Government followed the science on the issue but that they got into a groupthink with the scientific advisers and did not challenge them. They assumed that science was something handed down on tablets of stone, whereas it is not. It is a process and it needs challenging by those of us who have responsibility in this House for making laws and policies, and by other scientists. We seem to be repeating that process.

My Committee had as a witness this morning Susan Hopkins. Let me say that at best—if I can use a word somebody else used—the advice we were getting from her as an adviser was opaque. The information we were getting was opaque when it should be transparent. This time last week, the Deputy Prime Minister stood up and said there was no plan to go to plan B. Some 36 hours later, we were starting plan B. Why was that? What was the scientific advice given?

We were told fairly definitively that no such advice was given to change the view. What changed the view was that the Prime Minister was in a state of crisis and under pressure from his own Back Benchers and everybody else. That is not a sensible way to make decisions. It is not a sensible way to make decisions to put forward statutory instruments that say—the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup) was waving a sheet about, which may or may not have been the impact assessment—that no impact assessment has been done.

[Mr Steve Baker]

I have in my hand the impact assessment for vaccination as a condition of deployment in health and care providers—I was not able to get in earlier. I feel confident that the Front Benchers will know that the estimate is that 88,000 people will leave the health sector, 73,000 will leave the NHS, 15,000 will leave the independent health sector, and 35,000 workers will leave domiciliary care. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that is reason enough to vote against imposing this on the nation?

[Graham Stringer]

That is very interesting. It is also interesting that papers circulated by the Vote Office said there was no impact assessment. That does not impress me.

The point I was just about to make—I do not know if other hon. and right hon. Members have noticed this—is that the 355-page Act passed at the start of the epidemic, the Coronavirus Act 2020, is barely being used. The Government could have used the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 to bring in some of the restrictions that they have placed—maybe necessarily, maybe unnecessarily—on people’s freedoms. The difference between the 2004 Act and the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 is quite simply that much less scrutiny is available under the latter. Once regulations are passed, if there is not a sunset clause, they last. The Government should not be rewarded for unnecessarily using tough authoritarian legislation when other legislation was available that would have allowed more scrutiny.

The Government have refused to give information. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) began his speech by saying that different people have different views and weigh the factors of civil liberties and health in different ways. That is absolutely right, but the Government will not tell us the costs and benefits of their policies. We now know that three quarters of a million people have failed to be tested for cancer. This is not a win-win situation. Cancer patients who are yet to be tested will eventually die because of the decisions being taken, because services are not available; some people will die of covid.

To come to the right decisions, this House needs all the information available, but it is not coming from the NHS and it is not coming from Government Ministers. That is why I will not give the Prime Minister the benefit of my support for the way he has arranged to respond to this covid crisis.