Covid-19 Response: Defence Support

John Healey Excerpts

Tuesday 12th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for giving me advance sight of his statement and I welcome this direct update to the House. This is a chance for us all to thank and pay tribute to the 5,000 forces personnel, both regulars and reservists, who are currently providing covid assistance, and to the leadership from Standing Joint Command under Lieutenant General Urch. The Labour leader and I saw at first hand in November the professionalism and commitment that the team at Aldershot bring to this task. The public also welcome the important contribution our armed forces are making to help the country through the continuing covid crisis, from troops on the frontline building Nightingale hospitals, community testing or driving ambulances and tankers, to the planners, analysts and scientists behind the scenes. The military is an essential element of our British national resilience, and people can see this more clearly now than perhaps at any time since the end of national service. I trust that this will reinforce public support for our armed forces and help to redefine a closer relationship between the military and civilian society.

However, I detect a sense of frustration from the Secretary of State in his statement. The Government have been too slow to act at every stage of the pandemic, and too slow to make the fullest use of the armed forces, as I and others on both sides of the House have argued since the summer. During the first lockdown, the covid support force was 20,000 strong, yet fewer than 4,000 were deployed. The winter support force numbers 14,000, yet now, even with what the Secretary of State calls

“the most significant domestic operation in peacetime”,

just 5,000 are being used, with only 56 military aid requests currently in place. How many of the 14,000 troops does the Secretary of State expect to be deployed by the end of the month, as we confront the gravest period of this pandemic to date?

On vaccinations, it is very welcome that from this week the armed forces are finally being used to help deliver the nation’s No. 1 priority, the national vaccination programme. The Secretary of State has said that 250 teams of medical personnel are on stand-by, and yet only one in 10 is set to be posted this week to the seven NHS regions in England. When will they all be deployed and working to get vaccines into people’s arms? We in Labour are proud that Britain was the first country in the world to get the vaccine, and we want Britain to be the first to complete the vaccinations. We want the Government to succeed. Does the Secretary of State accept that military medical teams can do much more to help?

On testing, we also welcome the work being done across the UK to reinforce community testing, from Kirklees to Kent and in the devolved Administrations. Fifteen hundred personnel had also been provided to support schools with covid testing. Now that schools have moved to online teaching, what changes are being made to those plans? When infection rates come down, testing will again be vital to control the virus. Yet the £22 billion NHS track and trace service is still failing to do the necessary job. There is no military aid agreement in place for Test and Trace, so may I suggest that the Secretary of State offers military help to get the outfit sorted out?

Finally, I turn to service personnel themselves. MOD figures confirm that the average number of tests for defence personnel since April has been just 1,900 a week. With 5,000 troops now deployed on covid tasks in the UK and more on essential operations or training overseas, what system is in place to ensure that those personnel are tested regularly, and what plans does the Secretary of State have to ensure that they are also properly vaccinated?

The challenge of covid to this country is unprecedented. Yesterday, the chief medical officer said that we are

“facing the most dangerous situation anyone can remember”,

so, if the Secretary of State seeks to expand the role of the military in defeating this virus, he should know that he will have our full support.

[Mr Wallace]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his questions. First, on the issue of military willingness to engage, he knows we are of course incredibly keen and eager to offer whatever assistance we can. I will address his questions on the range of those subjects one by one.

One of the reasons why we invest in people as planners in the heart of Departments and local government is to ensure that we shape that ask as it develops and to ensure that we are dealing in the art of the possible, as well as with realistic deployment requests. Sometimes we get initial requests for thousands of people, but once we scale it down and work through what is required, it ends up being a couple of hundred.

That has been partly because some of the Departments or local authorities are not used to MACA. Funnily enough, Departments used to using MACAs, as indeed local government or the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government would be—local authorities that have had significant flooding in their time—will be used to that relationship, but for others this is a new experience.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about the scale between the designated force and the force actually used. He is right to say that 20,000 were earmarked for the covid response at the beginning and that 4,000 to 5,000 were deployed. That was at any one time. As he knows, our forces work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so we rotate many of those personnel through. Right now, 5,000 might be deployed at any one time, but people will be earmarked to become much more ready—in a higher state of readiness.

To be at 24-hour readiness, or ready within a few hours, places a huge demand on anyone—in effect, to be sitting in your house or barracks waiting to be deployed—so we rotate the forces through the different readiness stages. One stage might be to be ready to move in 24 hours, one might be with three days’ notice or one might be with one week’s notice. Those different readiness stages mean that they can either get on and do their day job, or basically just stand and wait. Therefore, of a force of about 14,000 who are currently earmarked, yes, we have 5,000 today, but I suspect that by the time we have got through this phase—if all demands remain the same—somewhere between 10,000 to 12,000 of those 14,000 personnel will have been used at some stage on the covid response. The 5,000 who are on today will come off, get a period of rest and build-up time with their families, and then come back again. The force has a fixed amount in terms of where we draw the different readinesses, but the deployments are drawn through that process. Of course, all armed forces personnel are able—“available” would probably the wrong word—to help the Government in their resilience and defence; that is obviously the purpose of their job.

We have over 100 people in the planning process for the vaccination roll-out across the whole United Kingdom: in Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland. We also currently have 21 quick reaction vaccination teams, who are usually staffed by a doctor, some combat medics and nurses. Their job, in a team of six, is to deploy as required. We are holding 229 teams in reserve, should we wish to deploy all 250. The limiting factors at the moment will be the delivery schedule and timetable of the vaccines themselves; of course I could deploy 100,000 soldiers tomorrow, ready to vaccinate, but if the stock is not there, we would be better off deploying them in other ways.

The Government are very keen, and the Prime Minister is determined, to ensure that we match the pace of stock delivery with the pace of delivery into people’s arms—the jabbing. We are very clear that we can do more to assist. The Prime Minister knows that and has indicated that we will be called on as the NHS requires, but we should not forget that the NHS is also recruiting tens of thousands of volunteers, former clinicians and former nurses who are able to do the vaccinations; it is not a purely military response.

In answer to the right hon. Gentleman’s question on testing and tracing, we have had a one-star within the organisation of test and trace from very early on. We originally earmarked 1,500 personnel for schools testing. We have reduced that down to about 800, who stand by to help not only where needed in the schools that are currently taking key workers’ children, but also with talking to people, through webinars and other remote methods, about how to administer lateral flow tests. We stand ready to do more if required. We have scaled the number of personnel down slightly simply because of the school closures, but we stand ready to increase that number if required.

Let me turn to the personnel themselves. When they deploy on a MACA task, such as the 800 personnel deployed to Manchester, they will be tested before they go and throughout the process. They will abide by whatever the current NHS guidelines are: if they feel ill, they should get a test; and if we feel that they are going in front of people who are vulnerable, we will also take steps to test them. If people test positive, they are very quickly isolated. I can get the latest figures for the House, if that helps. The lateral flow tests have opened up a huge amount of much more easily accessible testing to do that.

I am grateful for the right hon. Member’s support of our Defence. I assure him that both the Prime Minister and I are determined to lean into this problem, and to maximise our efforts wherever we can. Wherever we see an opportunity, instead of waiting for an argument about who does what, we offer to do it. That is why only recently the House will have seen us fly out those vaccines to Gibraltar. We put them on a plane, get them out there and get it done. We can have all the arguments we want after the fact; let us get on with it. We are all—I know this includes the loyal Opposition—united in working to help deliver this. Defence is doing its bit, but we should not forget that it is doing its bit alongside the amazing people of the NHS, who are on the frontline in their tens of thousands, day in, day out.