Covid-19 Update

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Monday 5th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I will start by answering a couple of factual questions. As I said in my statement, as of 9 am this morning, 51% of these cases have been contacted by the contact tracing system, and their contacts are contacted immediately after the initial contact—concurrently.

The hon. Gentleman asked about the tiering system. Absolutely, extra support will go to areas where there is an increased number of cases. He asked about the criteria in the proposed approach. Of course, we cannot have fixed and specific criteria, because it depends on the nature of the outbreak. For instance, if there was an outbreak in one individual employer, we would not necessarily put the whole local area into local action. We try to make the intervention as targeted and as localised as possible, but sometimes it needs to be broad, as it is in the north-west and across large parts of the north-east. For example, the intervention in the west midlands covers four of the seven council areas of the west midlands, but not the other three, because that follows the data.

The hon. Gentleman asked about the particular IT system in question. The problem emerged in a PHE legacy system. We had already decided in July to replace this system, and I commissioned a new data system to replace the legacy one. Contracts were awarded in August, and the work on the upgrade is already under way. While, of course, we have to solve the problem immediately, we also need to ensure that we upgrade this system, and we have already put in place the contracts to ensure that that happens. In the meantime, it is critical that we work together to fix these issues, which were identified by PHE staff working hard late on Friday night. I want to thank the PHE staff who did so much work to resolve this issue over the weekend.

In answer to the hon. Gentleman’s final question, we need to ensure that we contact trace all those cases as soon as possible. In two days, we managed to get to 51% of them, and that work is ongoing.

[Jeremy Hunt (South West Surrey) (Con)]

The Health Secretary deserves enormous credit for the expansion of testing capacity that he has personally championed, but is not the underlying problem that the Lighthouse laboratories have been, and will continue to be, overwhelmed by demand? Do we not need to think about the structures and, in particular, whether the responsibility for NHS staff testing and care home staff testing should be moved to hospital laboratories and universities, in the way that was advocated this morning by Sir David Nicholson, the former chief executive of the NHS? Sometimes it is tempting to think that, by dealing with the latest problem, we will solve the whole problem, but ahead of winter and the second wave, we need to think about whether these structures are right for what we have to deal with.

[Matt Hancock]

The expansion of the NHS testing is, of course, critical as well. The system in question, where the problem was over this weekend, brings together the data both from the NHS systems and from the so-called pillar 2 systems. The challenge was in a system that integrates the two, rather than just on one side or the other, but my right hon. Friend makes a broader point, which is that as we expand the NHS’s capacity as part of the overall expansion of testing, we have to ensure that we use that capacity to best effect. In many parts of the NHS, increasingly, it is NHS testing capacity that is used for NHS staff testing. That system works well, because the test is local and convenient, and we are looking to expand in exactly the sort of direction that he outlines. I urge colleagues away from trying to bifurcate between the two systems. Essentially, we have a whole series of different ways to access a test, and we need to make sure that people get the tests that are easiest to access for them as much as possible.