Covid-19 Vaccine Roll-out

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

That is right—we can all look forward to a much brighter 2021. We must stick with it for now, but we can see the way through this.

The hon. Gentleman asked several very reasonable questions. We start today vaccinating in 70 locations across the UK, and we will expand these locations over the coming days. Today we will set out the next tranche of hospital hubs, including Leicester, and vaccinations in Leicester will start in the coming days.

On access to the vaccine, of course we need to make sure that it is available to all, and that includes all with disabilities and all our most vulnerable people, like those who are sleeping rough. This will be best accomplished when we get the primary care community vaccination model rolled out, which will be in the coming weeks. We need to make sure that how we get the vaccine physically out into the primary care networks can be assured as safe, because obviously that is one step more difficult than vaccinating from a hospital, hence we have started in hospitals and then we will get out into primary care and community delivery, and then into the vaccination centres after the new year.

The hon. Gentleman asked about NHS students. The definition of NHS and social care staff set out by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is those who are patient-facing, for obvious reasons. We will set out more details in due course.

Finally, the hon. Gentleman asked about the publication of data on the number of vaccines that have been administered, and according to which priority groups. We will set out those details when the vaccinations have taken place, so that people can see how the programme has been assessed. Overall, may I join him in saying how wonderful it was to see the pictures on the TV this morning—emotional for many of us—and that I am delighted that we have been able to make this progress?

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

Like many, I would like to congratulate our scientists; I would like to congratulate the Health and Social Care Secretary himself, the vaccines taskforce and NHS frontline staff, all of whom have made this extraordinary day for our country possible. It is very, very cold outside, and the question on many people’s minds is: are they now able to book a summer holiday? What is my right hon. Friend’s answer to that question, and is there anywhere in particular that he would recommend if the answer is yes?

[Matt Hancock]

It makes me very proud that we have managed to start this vaccination programme sooner than many people anticipated. People told me that it was not going to be possible and that it was all very difficult. It has been difficult, but we have got there, and we did so because of international science, working with German scientists and American pharmaceutical companies, and people right around the world working on this project. I have high confidence that the summer of 2021 will be a bright one, without the sorts of restrictions that made the summer of 2020 more restricted. I have booked my holiday—I am going to Cornwall.

Coronavirus Vaccine

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The hon. Lady shakes her head, but that is how we have to deal with a pandemic in practice.

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

This is a huge personal triumph for the Health Secretary, who has always backed the science. In choosing and backing on behalf of the country the first vaccine to prove efficacious, he has scored a massive goal for the country; he deserves great credit for that. It will also have global significance. I was in a meeting with the World Health Organisation this morning, which congratulated the UK on being the first country to approve a vaccine, because it will encourage other countries around the world to approve vaccines faster.

I want to ask the Health Secretary about something different, which is the plight of people with learning disabilities. He will know that Public Health England says that they are two to four times more likely to die from covid. The news he has given this morning about people in care homes is tremendously welcome, but people with learning disabilities often feel that they are forgotten, particularly those in supported accommodation. Will he redouble his efforts to ensure that they, too, are able to be reunited with their families ahead of Christmas?

[Matt Hancock]

My right hon. Friend is gracious and kind in what he says, and I welcome the WHO’s comments this morning. It has supported the UK approach and rightly commended the MHRA, our independent regulator. It has followed all the same steps that any high-quality regulator would, should and will, but it has followed them rapidly and sometimes in parallel, instead of one after the other. That is how we have got to the position of being the first country in the world to have a vaccine that is clinically authorised; it is because the MHRA has done a brilliant job, working with Pfizer and BioNTech, to make sure that the same safety considerations are looked at but in a way that made the process as fast as is feasibly and safely possible. The WHO has backed that approach. Regulators around the world could take a look at the MHRA, and we should all congratulate it.

My right hon. Friend rightly asks about making sure we vaccinate those with learning disabilities and offer them vaccination at the right point in the prioritisation. I have discussed that important consideration directly with the JCVI, which takes into account the higher mortality of those with any given condition and has done so in the prioritisation that it set out this morning. Age is the single biggest determinant of mortality from coronavirus, which is why age is the predominant factor in the prioritisation, but it is not the only one. That matter has been considered by the JCVI and it is important that we accept and follow the JCVI advice as much as is practicable in the delivery and deployment of this vaccine.

Covid-19 Update

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The goal of the Government is to bring R to below 1 to suppress the virus until a vaccine can keep us safe. That is the strategy.

I shall take the precise points that the hon. Gentleman raised. He asked for an exit strategy. The statement I outlined is the exit strategy: it is to keep the virus suppressed with the minimum damage possible to the economy and, indeed, to education, while we work as fast and as hard as we can towards a vaccine and with the widespread use of community testing across the piece to help to keep the virus under control.

I would have expected the hon. Gentleman to welcome the massive progress in Liverpool that has shown that a combination of sticking by the rules and community testing at very large scale can help to bring this virus right under control. Instead, he criticised that it does not get into harder to reach communities. That is exactly where we need to get into, and that is why we do it in combination and hand in hand with the local authority.

I praise Joe Anderson, and I also praise other local leaders, such as Ben Houchen in Tees Valley, who is working with us on this, Andy Street and leaders across the west midlands, and the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) in South Yorkshire, who we are working with to get a community testing system up and running in places such as Doncaster. I want to see the community testing that has been successful in Liverpool rolled out right across the tier 3 areas as much as is possible, and I invite all councils to engage.

We invited councils to engage ahead of the decisions today, and we also invited all colleagues in the House to have an input, but it is important that we have clear public health messaging, because unfortunately we did see the number of cases going up and continuing to go up in those areas where local leaders were not working alongside us. It was a sharp contrast to what happened, for instance, in Liverpool, but also in other areas where the local leadership was so constructive and positive.

The hon. Member for Leicester South asked for a scorecard for the exit strategy. We publish the data, and if we can make it into an even more accessible format, I think that is a good idea. He asked about supporting the NHS—absolutely. I am delighted that, yesterday, my right hon Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with the support of the Prime Minister, put another £3 billion into the NHS, on top of the £6.6 billion that is already being invested. That money starts flowing this financial year for this winter and then runs into next year.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the need to support people who have tested positive. We have put in place a £500 support payment. On NHS Test and Trace, I thought from the figures this morning that he would have welcomed the fact that the majority of in-person tests are now turned around within 24 hours. That is significant progress on the speed of turnaround in testing, for which I am very grateful to my team. There will be further support for local councils that find themselves in tiers 3 and 2 to support the action that is needed. But all in all, let us come together and work together to get this virus under control and keep it under control, so that we can get life back to normal as soon as possible.

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

May I welcome the Prime Minister back from his splendid isolation to the place that he has no doubt been itching to get back to more than any other—this House of Commons—and say how wonderful it is to see him here?

[The Prime Minister (Boris Johnson)]

It is great to see you.

[Jeremy Hunt]

From a sedentary position, I think the Prime Minister said that he was delighted to see me here. [Interruption.] Indeed, he is delighted to see me here—on the Back Benches. [Laughter.]

Turning to more serious matters, these are very difficult decisions, and part of the leadership we have to show in a pandemic is telling people unwelcome news. I want to salute the Health Secretary’s cautious approach to Christmas because, much as we all want Christmas to be as normal as possible, nothing would be more crazy than to take our feet off the accelerator at this moment and then see a spike in deaths in February, so I think this is the right approach.

There is one bit of further good news—on top of the news about vaccines and on top of the news about mass testing—that I know the Health Secretary would like to be able to give and that would be enormously welcome: that every single person living in a care home could be sure that they could be visited by a close relative before Christmas. I know he wants to do that, but there are huge logistical challenges in getting that mass testing technology to work in time. May I urge him to do everything he can, because that would make such a big difference to the nearly 400,000 people in care homes?

[Matt Hancock]

I hesitate to interrupt the love-in between the Prime Minister and my predecessor, but I am grateful for his support—for their support. This is a set of difficult measures, but I think the public understand why we have to take them and why they are necessary.

On the point about getting visiting going in care homes, my right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Sometimes we talk about these tests and this new technology in an abstract way or from a scientific point of view, but it really matters and it really improves people’s lives. Where we can use testing to make visiting safe in care homes, that is an example of the way in which these new technologies can help to get life a little bit back towards normal. Of course, it must be done in a safe way and carefully, but we are now developing the protocols for exactly how that can happen and working hard with the goal that everyone should have the opportunity to visit a loved one in a care home before Christmas.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Chair of the Select Committee.

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

This morning, the Select Committee has been hearing about workforce burnout. Witness after witness said that the one thing that would make a big difference to NHS staff is knowing that we are training enough doctors and nurses for the future even if we do not have enough now. Nearly two years on from the NHS 10-year plan, we still do not have the workforce projections published—I know that the Secretary of State is keen to get them published. Can he assure the House that, when they are published, they will be the independent projections and not what the Treasury has negotiated with his Department as part of the spending review?

[Matt Hancock]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that question. I can give him a couple of projections and a couple of facts. Over the past year, we have 13,500 more nurses in the NHS than we did a year ago, and thousands more doctors. Let me give him this projection, which I am sure that he and everybody on the Government Benches will buy into: we are going to have 50,000 more nurses in the NHS by the end of this Parliament.

Covid-19 Update

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I am very grateful to the hon. Member for his questions and for the approach that he is rightly taking. Like him, I am delighted that we are able to roll-out routine testing to NHS staff. That starts today. I am grateful to him for his support and I am grateful for the support and the urging of the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt).

On contact tracing, we continue to work on the constant improvement needed, but, as the hon. Member said, the expansion of testing in a radical way because of the new technology that we have invested in and spent months working on, means that we will now be able to find more of the primary cases and more of the people who have the disease and then will be able to get them and their contacts to isolate. The single most important challenge is finding the people who have the virus in the first place.

The hon. Member mentioned children. The vaccine will not be used for children. It has not been tested on children. The reason is that the likelihood of children having significant detriment if they catch covid-19 is very, very low. This is an adult vaccine for the adult population.

He asked about the JCVI prioritisation. It is really important that we prioritise according to clinical risk. The JCVI has looked into all the risk factors, including ethnicity. It has concluded that age and whether a person works in health and social care are the two prime risk factors, which far outweigh any other, and so they are the primary risk factors that cascade into the draft interim prioritisation that it published on 25 September, which of course will be updated as it gets the final data that comes through from the clinical trials.

He asked about the proportion of the population that needs to be vaccinated. The honest truth to that question is that we do not know what proportion of the population the vaccination needs to reach in order for it to stop the epidemic. The reason we do not know that is that a clinical trial can check for the impact of the vaccine on protecting the individual—43,000 individuals, half of whom have had the vaccine. What cannot be checked is the impact on the transmission of the disease by those people, because a significant proportion of the population have to have had the vaccination to understand that. That is the difference between a so-called disease-modifying vaccine, which tests how much it affects the disease that an individual suffers if they get covid-19, versus an epidemic-modifying vaccine, which is about the impact on the spread and transmission of the disease. We cannot know that until after the vaccine has been rolled out, so we will monitor that very closely.

The hon. Gentleman asked about manufacture, which is important, and for this vaccine that is a matter for Pfizer. It is a difficult process. Distribution is also a huge challenge, and that is being led by the NHS. Because the vaccine must be stored at minus 70° until the final hours, the cold-chain requirements are significant and add to the logistical complications. However, we have known about that cold-chain requirement for many months, and it has been part of our planning for some time. We have a good degree of confidence that that will be in place.

Finally, the hon. Gentleman asked about international collaboration. I am delighted that the UK has been a leader in efforts for international collaboration to find a vaccine. It has put in more money than any other nation, co-ordinating and bringing together scientists and vaccine specialists, and using our aid budget to ensure that people around the world get the vaccine in countries that, in some cases, could not afford to vaccinate their own population. We are a big part of the international work, and I very much look forward to working with colleagues in the United States, and everywhere else around the world, to ensure that we have a global vaccination programme as soon as a safe and effective set of vaccines can be made available.

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

I warmly congratulate the Health Secretary on securing access to the new vaccine. Choosing which vaccine to back must be a bit like playing roulette, and to secure 40 million doses of the first vaccine to prove efficacious is an enormous achievement for the country. He deserves great credit for that. I also thank him for bringing forward the introduction of weekly testing of NHS staff to the end of next week. That will reassure our very hardworking front-line staff that they are not infecting their patients, which is one of their primary worries.

The biggest issue we now face is the fact that only around one-fifth of those who we ask to isolate comply with that, and we do not even know all the people who we would like to isolate. What does the Secretary of State think of Sir John Bell’s suggestion to the Health and Social Care Committee this morning that, instead of asking people to isolate, we should give them 48-hour lateral flow tests, and ask them to isolate only if they are positive?

[Matt Hancock]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. He is generous with his words. I also direct his warm words of gratitude to the vaccine’s taskforce, which has done so much work to ensure that we procure and secure the supplies of these vaccines, should they prove safe as well as efficacious. On Sir John Bell’s comments, that option of testing people regularly—not if they are a primary case and have the virus, but if they are a contact—would not be open to us had we not secured the huge capacity for lateral-flow testing that we now have in this country. I very much look to clinicians for advice. Sir John Bell is a highly respected clinician and expert in this area, and I am sure that everybody will want to look closely at that issue.

Baby Loss: Covid-19

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2020 Westminster Hall

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

It is an honour to follow two such remarkable speeches. Nothing I say will come close to the extraordinary emotions that we have heard. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory), with whom it is a great honour to co-chair the all-party parliamentary group on baby loss. When my hon. Friend talked about seeing Lily’s name in the registry of Truro cathedral, I think what we all thought was that is just the first of many important moments that Lily will be remembered—this is another of those moments. What is so striking about the courage shown by my hon. Friend, and by so many families, is that she chose to relive the agony that she went through over and over again, because she wants to stop other families going through that same pain. That represents extraordinary courage, and I think it is an incredibly good omen for her time in this place that she is prepared to do that.

It is also an honour to follow the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), who has made an extraordinary contribution to the Health and Social Care Committee in the short time that we have been working together. She drew my attention to the issue of women having to cope with extreme emotional stress on their own during the maternity process. I thank her for that, along with all the other work she has done on the Committee on maternity issues. On Tuesday we heard from James Titcombe, one of the best known baby loss campaigners in the country, who, the Minister told me, lost his son Joshua exactly 12 years ago today. James gave an inspirational testimony. It is because of those many families up and down the country that we are having this debate today. I also thank the Minister, who I know will give a compassionate and supportive response. She totally gets patient safety and these issues, and will be doing everything she can to resolve them.

We all understand the importance of infection prevention and control in a pandemic. The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan), as a doctor herself, will understand that. The answer surely has to be an expansion of the testing facilities, which we know are in the process of being expanded. If we are able to test everyone in the city of Liverpool, it must be within our grasp to make it possible to test people who want to be with their partners in those crucial moments of a pregnancy.

I hope that today’s debate will shine a spotlight on the wider issues around baby loss. The uncomfortable truth for all of us is that in this country, according to the latest figures I have seen, we lose about 3.9 babies per 1,000 born in neonatal deaths—deaths within the first 28 days. In Sweden, the rate is about half that. That means that if we had Swedish safety levels in this country, about 1,000 more babies would live every year.

The Select Committee is doing a big inquiry into what lessons need to be learned. I will just talk about one particular lesson that has long been a concern of mine. We make it far too difficult for doctors, midwives and nurses to speak openly about any mistakes they may have made or may have seen, because still, in too many parts of the NHS, we have a blame culture. People are worried that they might lose their job, they might get disbarred or there might be negative consequences for others they work with. We heard on Tuesday that one reason why Sweden has managed to achieve a much lower neonatal death rate is that they have made it much easier for doctors, midwives and nurses to speak openly about things that may have gone wrong. They have managed to change a blame culture into a learning culture.

One thing I hope we will look at is whether it is appropriate under the law that the only way a family can get compensation in this country is if they can prove clinical negligence. That immediately creates antagonism between a family, who perhaps have a child born disabled and desperately need financial support for that child’s life, and the doctors, midwives and nurses responsible for that child’s birth, who also want to help the family with every fibre in their body, but worry that if they speak openly about what happened, they might end up with a successful claim of clinical negligence against them. I hope that is something we can address.

I want to finish by saying this. As we reflect on how to be more compassionate with people going through some of the extreme agonies that we have heard this afternoon, we should always remember that the best possible way to handle baby loss is to ensure that it never happens in the first place. Getting the culture right in our maternity units is the best way that we can save heartache for thousands of families. It is the best tribute to baby girls such as Lily and to baby boys such as Joshua Titcombe, and it is the best way that we can turn the wonderful intentions we are hearing in this debating Chamber into actions that will make a difference for the lives of many.

Covid-19

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2020 Commons Chamber

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

I wholeheartedly support these measures. When we look at the starkness of the data presented to the country at the weekend, we see that the issue is not whether the lockdown is wise, but whether we use the lockdown wisely. I hope that the Health Secretary will forgive me, as his predecessor, if I set out one or two of the things we need to use the next month to sort out if we are to ensure that this is the last coronavirus lockdown and that it is a short one.

First, it will not surprise the Health Secretary that I say this, but we must introduce weekly testing of NHS staff. In the first wave, up to 11% of coronavirus hospital deaths happened to people who picked up their infection in their own hospital. For the basic principles of patient safety and staff safety, we must make sure that that does not happen a second time; otherwise cancer patients will worry whether it is safe to go to their hospital, staff will worry about whether they are infecting their own patients and we will see the NHS again descend into being a covid-only service. We had some hospitals in London where more than 40% of staff were infected in the previous wave. It would be unforgiveable to let that happen again. I know that the Secretary of State is sympathetic and would like to do this. I would just urge him to do it as soon as possible.

[Matt Hancock]

My right hon. Friend knows that I agree with him. Indeed, we are rolling this out now, but we do need to get it everywhere.

[Jeremy Hunt]

I would be very grateful, and I know that staff everywhere would be grateful, if my right hon. Friend could give some indication of when all NHS staff can be confident that they will be tested, but I thank him very much for that answer.

Secondly, I hope the Secretary of State will not mind me saying that this is the moment when we have to fix contact tracing. To be reaching only 60% of people’s known contacts is not good enough. He knows that, and he does not try to defend it—

[Jonathan Ashworth]

He does.

[Jeremy Hunt]

No, no. This is the point: when we have 50,000 people being infected every single day, it is a massive logistical task, but if we are honest, we still had problems when it was a tenth of that number being infected every day. This is the moment to recognise the uncomfortable truth that this would be better done locally, with local authorities taking the ultimate responsibility. While we are making these changes to the contact tracing regime, to have only 20% of people who are infected and told to self-isolate actually complying suggests only one answer, which is that we as the state should pay their wages for the period that they have been asked to isolate. That is expensive, but it is less expensive than the cost of them not complying with the important direction to isolate.

On a more technical matter, I ask the Health Secretary to consider whether there is a way we can speed up the approval of the new therapeutic drugs that are coming online. As he knows, we generally wait until both safety and efficacy are proved before approval is given to a new drug. However, in a pandemic, would it not be right to allow the mass marketing of drugs to go ahead as soon as they are deemed safe, even though we cannot guarantee their efficacy? That could save lives, and any delay might mean that people could not get the benefits of those new drugs.

I want to finish on the issue of population testing. My right hon. Friend and I have had many discussions about this and again I know that he is sympathetic. We are in an immensely stronger position because of the huge improvements in testing capacity that he rightly celebrated in his earlier comments. However grave the situation we are in now, it would be a whole lot graver if we had not increased testing capacity from 10,000 a day to 100,000 a day, and then to 500,000 a day last week and potentially 1 million a day by Christmas. We are not far off the 2 million a day that would be needed to test the whole population every month.

Now is the time for us to tell the public how we are going to chart a course to that destination, because this is the only true light at the end of the tunnel. Charting a course to that destination means charting a course through the incredibly complex logistics and through the technology that will be necessary to record who has or has not had their positive test on time, but if we can show people that there is a date next spring by which the whole population will be tested on a regular basis, we will also be showing people that there is a way through this pandemic. In that way, our national depression would be lifted and we would be able to give the hope to our constituents that is now in such desperately short supply.

Covid-19 Update

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Programme motion
Monday 19th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I absolutely will address the questions that the hon. Gentleman raised. On the first set of questions about testing, I might have missed it, but I think he omitted to support and congratulate the work of everybody involved in getting more than 300,000 tests a day delivered—on track to a capacity of more than half a million tests a day by the end of this month. He rightly asked about batch testing, which is currently being trialled.

The hon. Gentleman asked us to fund local contact tracing everywhere. We have put those funds into each local authority, but of course we put the most support into the areas that need it most. The Government’s approach of targeting the support and measures on the areas where they are needed most is at the core of how we—as he put it—retain the consent of people while we go through these difficult actions.

To be truthful, the hon. Gentleman is far closer to and more supportive of the Government’s position than he feels able to express at the Dispatch Box, not least because he asked for economic support. Let me just leap to the Chancellor’s aid and defence. The Government have put in unprecedented economic support to help people through these difficult times—billions of pounds of aid and further aid forthcoming. The hon. Gentleman asked in particular for economic support when an area goes into tier 3, which is exactly what I announced in respect of Lancashire. That is of course part of the discussions that we have with local authorities when further actions are needed.

So, there absolutely will be more economic support from the Government, yes; more work with local authorities to deliver the local approach that is needed, yes; and more testing capacity, yes. These are all the things that the Government are delivering and it behoves the hon. Gentleman to acknowledge and support them, as clearly we are all trying to deliver the same thing, which is to suppress the virus and save lives.

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

I congratulate the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care on the news about LAMP—loop-mediated isothermal amplification—and lateral flow testing, which is potentially the most significant news about the fight against the virus that the House has heard for many weeks.

Given the dangers of conflicting public health messages when local leaders and national leaders say different things, is it not time to consider aligning incentives by saying that local leaders have the responsibility to bring down the R rate and giving them the powers and resources to do that if necessary, but also saying that if they fail to do that, they will be stripped of those powers to allow the Government to—to coin a phrase—take back control?

[Matt Hancock]

The approach we are taking, which is working effectively in almost every local area, is to work with local leaders. We are doing that across party lines, whether in Liverpool or Lancashire, as I mentioned, or in South Yorkshire, the north-east and Teesside, where the discussions are collaborative and consensual. That is the way we need to deliver the public health messages that are best delivered with everybody speaking with one voice and all working together to tackle the virus. That is not to mention London, where there has been a similar approach.

I would merely point out that over the past week in Greater Manchester the rate of infection among those aged over 60, which is the group most likely to end up in hospital, has risen from 171 per 100,000 to 283, so it is absolutely vital, from a public health perspective, that we act.

Covid-19 Update

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

As I said in my statement, discussions with local leaders in Greater Manchester, Lancashire and elsewhere continue, and I do not want to pre-empt them. Those discussions do, of course, include what financial support is needed, but I remind the House that we have put in place unprecedented financial support for those who are affected.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the test and trace system. The figures this morning in fact show that there has been a record high number of people who have been contacted by NHS Test and Trace, reaching more people and testing more people faster than at any other point. He might have seen yesterday that, internationally, this was commented on as an area where we have done well here in the UK. Of course, we want to make sure that we get things even faster and that we have an even greater testing capacity, but I think he would do better to reflect on the progress that has been made.

Finally, the hon. Gentleman talks about the national circuit break idea that the Labour party put forward, at least on Wednesday this week. I gently say to him that here in this House, Labour calls for a national circuit break, but we take the view that we should do everything we can to control this virus where it is rising fastest and take a more targeted approach. The Labour party cannot even get its Mayors in other parts of the country, where the cases are going up, to come out and support the proposals that are made from the Opposition Dispatch Box. What I would say is that we need to work together. We need to pull together. Everybody should come together, and that is the best way to defeat this virus.

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

I support today’s measures, but is not the biggest issue that we face as a country now uncertainty—uncertainty about our health and uncertainty about the future of the economy? Given my right hon. Friend’s tremendous success in expanding our testing capacity, is not now the time to announce a date—whether it is February, March, April of next year—by when every single person in the population will be tested every week, so that by then, irrespective of progress on a vaccine, irrespective of the success of local lockdowns and irrespective of other uncertainties, we have a date by when we know we will get the virus under control and we know we have some prospect of returning to normality?

[Matt Hancock]

My right hon. Friend and I share a passion for an expansion of testing capacity in this country. He has long tried to persuade me to set yet more goals for the expansion of testing capacity. I am very glad to say that we have hit every single one that we have put in place, such as the 100,000 in the spring, and we are on track to meet the 500,000 by the end of this month. After that, I very much hope that we can continue to expand testing capacity, and I will look at the idea that he proposes very carefully.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jeremy Hunt Excerpts

Tuesday 6th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The hon. Lady has long been a campaigner on this subject. We have made significant progress in terms of expanding access where it is clinically safe to do so. On this, as on so many things, I will make sure that I constantly follow the clinical evidence.

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

My right hon. Friend knows that for every person who tragically dies from coronavirus, at least one other person has long-term symptoms lasting more than three months, meaning that they have breathlessness and chronic fatigue and often cannot go back to work normally. In his letter to me of 14 September, he said that clinics were going to be set up so that they could get mental health support, face-to-face counselling and rehabilitation. Have those clinics been commissioned, and when will those long covid sufferers be able to access them throughout the country?