Covid-19

Jacob Young Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Young (Redcar) (Con)]

Today’s announcement by the Prime Minister will come as a relief to so many. The outlining of a clear route out of lockdown was highly anticipated in my constituency and understandably so. The past months have been incredibly tough for people across the country, with businesses forced to remain closed, children unable to go to school and exhausted parents doing their best to home school while having to work from home. It has been a long and difficult road so far, yet never has there been so much hope. The roll-out of the vaccine, something we could not even imagine just six months ago, is progressing so rapidly that the UK is leading the world in the number of vaccinations, well ahead of our European neighbours.

On 23 January last year, the first known covid case landed in the UK. Tomorrow we will be 13 months on from that date, yet we have announced that 17.7 million people have received their first vaccine dose. We can often get lost in the frustration of being locked down and easily forget the remarkable achievements that we have made, that science has made, that the NHS has made, that Britain has made. Now that we hold three vaccines in our armour belt, we have the ammunition needed to defeat covid, and soon we will have more.

In Teesside, we will be producing the Novavax vaccine at Fujifilm in Billingham, proving that Teesside will be leading the world in innovation and technology once again. However, what we are missing in Teesside is our own mass vaccination centre. The 660,000 people who live in the Tees valley do not have a mass vaccine centre. For my constituents in Redcar and Cleveland, our nearest centre is 40 driving miles away in Sunderland. We have plenty of available sites. I have written to the vaccines Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), to endorse the Riverside stadium in Middlesbrough or Redcar racecourse in my constituency, which have both previously been testing sites for the Department of Health so will be familiar to the Government. Although I congratulate the Government on what can only be described as an incredible achievement so far, I urge Ministers to create more mass vaccine centres, including one in Teesside, to accelerate the roll-out even further so that we can all be protected much sooner.

It is very welcome news indeed that schools will be allowed to go back to near normal in just under two weeks’ time, and even more welcome news that care home residents will once again be able to see their loved ones. Covid has led to a deterioration of many care home residents due to the lack of human contact, so I am pleased that we are making this allowance. By the end of March, life will slowly start to feel as though we are getting back to normal, with the reintroduction of the rule of six. Between then and the middle of June, we will gradually start to get our freedoms back. I urge the Prime Minister to stick to his pledge of a one-way road to freedom. This road map gives us hope; let’s stick with it.