Covid-Secure Borders

Jo Gideon Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jo Gideon (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in the debate and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer). It is remarkable to hear how extrapolations are presented as facts in this debate. The Opposition, the party of the crystal ball, would have us believe that in their hands the pandemic would have been brought under control more quickly and more lives would have been saved. However, there is no evidence that even the Labour party could stop mutations of the virus reaching these shores, nor that it could ever overcome its ideological contempt for private sector involvement in the health service, whether in delivering world-class research and development or in supporting NHS testing, track and trace, and the vaccination roll-out.

Without the Government bringing together all sectors, we would not have had the incredible progress in vaccinating our nation that we have had. It is difficult to disprove hypotheticals, and if we look to other countries that have tried different approaches, we must recognise that their geography, population density and underlying health issues make effective comparisons impossible. No country found an easy answer to beating the pandemic. The strategy of reducing the spread until a mass vaccination can beat the virus has been adopted globally.

The Government’s investment in the research that delivered the AstraZeneca vaccine, the early purchase of more than 100 million doses while they were still under development, the speedy licensing of vaccines and the phenomenally successful roll-out have saved many, many thousands of lives. That is a fact, yet the Opposition fail to credit the Government for it, preferring to focus on the negatives. If we had imposed earlier lockdowns, they claim, we would have saved thousands of lives; if we had banned travel to and from India earlier, they claim, we could have stopped the delta variant reaching our shores.

We know that the challenge is far more complicated when it comes to closing UK borders. Should we have prevented British nationals who were returning from India from entering the country before the delta variant had been identified as a variant of concern? They were already required to quarantine at home for 10 days. As the Health Secretary told the Select Committee on Science and Technology last week:

“It is harder in a democracy to take some of the steps that some of the authoritarian countries took. Geography matters. Britain is an island…but we are a highly interconnected island…and a huge amount of our freight comes accompanied.”

This Government have always sought to keep the public informed about any decisions relating to the pandemic. In our democracy, we strive to impose any restrictions on people’s freedoms by consent rather than force, which is how we have seen such a high level of compliance, with exceptionally high levels of vaccine uptake among many age groups. Our decisions have been informed throughout by the advice of our scientific and medical experts, and as the advice has changed in line with the epidemiology, so have the guidelines.

We have a tough approach to our borders. The Opposition criticise the Government for moving Portugal’s categorisation from green to amber, and now seek to turn travel into a binary decision by removing the amber category, but life is not binary. Decisions about the road map as we emerge from the worst of the pandemic need to be more nuanced. We have moved on from the phase when choice was a simple one of lives versus livelihoods, to a plan to build back people’s confidence—a plan to re-engage cautiously with normal activities while the vaccination programme powers on to provide the ultimate protection against the virus.

As a global trading nation with an amazing, diverse population, we have to consider travel not just as a holiday activity, but as one that is hugely important to our economy and our mental health. Many people, including me, have family abroad and are desperate to reconnect in person after 16 months of Zoom calls. Many have urgent family business, including, sadly, attending funerals. With the removal of the amber category, the cost of hotel quarantine might preclude many from such urgent travel and would also mean that families travelling to green destinations this summer could find themselves facing bills of thousands of pounds if the status of the country they visit changes before their return. That will hit those who can least afford it, because they will either have to decide not to risk travel or face a debt crisis as a result. I do not believe we should be penalising those who can least afford it.

The Opposition are consistent in their inconsistencies on the issue, guided, I imagine, by focus groups rather than the science: demanding certainty where there can be none as we tackle a completely novel virus; calling for more financial support for businesses while demanding greater lockdown measures, which would hit the economy hard; calling for extensions to furlough schemes and measures to keep workers at home rather than backing our plan for jobs and the gradual reopening of the country; and calling for the Government to introduce quarantine and then criticising its introduction and then calling for it to be expanded. We are looking to a cautious and irreversible route out of the pandemic, building back the confidence of the nation as we emerge from the restrictions; they are looking to scaremonger.

The Government’s approach is the right one, and I urge the Opposition to back it.