Covid-19 Update

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I will go through the answers to the questions the hon. Gentleman reasonably asked. He asked about the most vulnerable. A programme of work is under way to ensure that those who need support because they are staying at home—especially those who are victims of domestic violence—get that support. It is incredibly important and difficult work, but we are doing what we can in that space. He also asked about prescription charges. Only around a fifth of people pay prescription charges, so those who are the least able to pay already get free prescriptions.

The hon. Gentleman asked about Sports Direct. Sports shops are not essential retail, and therefore they will be closed. I have seen a bit of the noise that has been going on around today about Sports Direct in particular. I want to be absolutely clear that sports kit is not essential over the next three weeks, so we will be closing Sports Direct, along with other non-essential retail. He also asked about fines for corporates as well as individuals—absolutely, those fines are available if that is necessary.

The hon. Gentleman asked about protective equipment, and he is quite right to do so, because as we discussed yesterday, having protective equipment for staff on the frontline—especially those in the NHS and social care, but also in other frontline services—is very important. We are moving heaven and earth, and the military involvement is ramping up the delivery of that equipment. He asked specifically about social care. I am glad to say that the current plan is to get protective equipment to all social care settings by the end of this week, and then we will have to keep going. We have put in place a hotline. If someone needs PPE and they are not getting it, they should call the hotline so that we know where the difficulties are in getting PPE to the frontline, and we can respond to those calls and get it to them. I feel that very strongly.

The hon. Gentleman asked about testing. As we have discussed many times, we are ramping up testing as fast as we can, including buying millions of tests. My team are currently buying these tests, which we will make available as quickly as possible. He asked about there being no machines ready to buy. I do not recognise that at all. I have not seen any leak, and I would not want to comment on a leaked email—certainly not one that I have not seen. It is true that we are bringing testing machines together to provide a more efficient testing system, and I am grateful to the universities that have put these testing machines into the system. This is a national effort, and they are playing their part. We are also buying machines where we can.

The hon. Gentleman asked about staff ratios, which have been publicised this morning. It is true that we are having to change the standard staff ratios for delivery of certain types of procedure, including ventilation. The reason is that we cannot easily train somebody to intubate a patient and put them on a ventilator. We are training those who we can train to the standards necessary, but this is an incredibly difficult task, and it is therefore safer to have the doctors who are trained to do it and experienced in doing it doing it to more people, with more support staff than in normal circumstances. That is absolutely necessary to respond to the quantity of need, because this is a very specialist part of the NHS and of medicine that suddenly has much bigger demand than could ever have been envisaged outside a pandemic scenario.

I pay tribute to the staff who will be working much more intensively and who are putting their vital skills at the service of the nation in order to save lives. I am grateful to all those who have worked with the royal colleges to ensure that we get these ratios right and stretch the capabilities we have as far as we safely can in the circumstances. Finally, the hon. Gentleman mentioned abortion. We have no proposals to change any abortion rules as part of the covid-19 response.

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

I thank the Health Secretary for the superhuman efforts he has taken to resolve the issues around PPE in the last week. The evidence is that we are in a much better situation now than we were a week ago. He will not mind if I follow up what the shadow Health Secretary said about testing. The concern is that we appear to be testing on a daily basis virtually no more people than we were over a week ago, when the commitment was to increase the daily number of tests from 5,000 to 25,000. Given that this is a vital part of the success of the suppression strategies in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, can he give us an estimated date when we will get back to routine covid-19 testing in the community of all suspected cases? Even if that is three or four weeks away, a date means that there is a plan, and without a date, people will not be confident that this really is the plan.

[Matt Hancock]

Although I was not in the Chamber, I heard the comments that my right hon. Friend the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee made about this yesterday, and he is right to push on this issue. I am not going to give him a date today, because we are in the middle of buying the tests that are needed, especially the new tests that have just come on stream. I have been able to give him the update that we have now purchased millions of these tests, which will arrive in the next days and weeks. I will be in a position to give him a more concrete timetable, and I will make sure he gets that as soon as we can make it public.