Covid-19 Response

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right; this is an incredibly important subject, both, as she says, during the crisis and thereafter. We have a study under way, which Public Health England is conducting, on the impact of all sorts of different conditions on the likelihood that covid-19 will hit someone hard. It is true that there is a link to levels of deprivation, in the same way as one of the strongest factors, other than age, is obesity—that needs to be investigated. We have also seen a bigger impact on people from minority ethnic backgrounds. All these things need to be studied. Levelling up and closing that health inequality gap is an incredibly important part of the Government’s agenda for recovering from this terrible disease.

[Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con) [V]]

As my right hon. Friend has said, due to the hard work of the entire health and social care system we can now look beyond this crisis. As we do that, may I ask him to say more today, and in the coming days, about how we intend to balance the need to address a substantial backlog of more routine and elective work, which, as he says, has been understandably pushed aside by covid-19, with the need to make sure that NHS staff, who have been through an extremely stressful period, have the time to recover?

[Matt Hancock]

That is one of the many balances we will have to strike in the months and years to come as we recover from covid-19. There are, immediately, three things we are doing on that. The first is that we have brought in more staff, especially retired staff, and we want to keep them. They have been absolutely brilliant and a huge help to the NHS during the crisis. The second is providing more support to staff. I mentioned the mental health support, but this involves all sorts of other, wider support to staff right across health and social care. The third thing is making sure that we rebuild the NHS, gaining from the improvements that have been made in the eye of this storm, because there have been improvements to ways of working. Huge strides forward have been taken on the use of technology, and we have found areas where that has made a very big positive impact. Although there are, of course, parts of this crisis response that we want to roll back, there are other parts we want to pick up and take forward.