Coronavirus Act 2020 (Review of Temporary Provisions) (No. 3)

John Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

First, may I wish my hon. Friend a very happy birthday? He makes an important point in his valuable intervention. What I can say, which I certainly hope will reassure him, is that the Act will be regularly reviewed, that parliamentary scrutiny from all quarters is very welcome and that any powers retained in the Act need to be properly justified—they must be necessary and proportionate. That is the case that I am setting out on behalf of the Government today.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

A lot of us feel that this legislation should now just lapse, because there has been a material improvement in the situation. There are other powers should things go wrong, and this House could grant powers in the space of a few hours if there were a new and unpleasant crisis. Why do we have to have these powers hanging over our head when there does not seem to be a need to use them?

[Sajid Javid]

What I can tell my right hon. Friend is that there are provisions that we hope to keep in the Act, subject to the House’s will today, which are still necessary. For example, there are provisions that protect NHS capacity with respect to temporary registration of nurses and other healthcare professionals. There are similar provisions for the care sector; there are also provisions that provide support packages for those whose jobs may have been hit or who have to take time off work to meet the self-isolation requirements. There are provisions in the Act that I think are still necessary; I will speak about some of them in just a moment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

That is exactly right. It is for that reason that if there were a Division I would not be voting for this legislation, because I do not think it comes with enough parliamentary scrutiny—the sort of scrutiny that there is if we use the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

[John Redwood]

Would it not also help the Government’s case if they gave us more detail on which of these measures actually worked and did some good? We need more post-result audits so that we can have more confidence in some of these measures.

[Mr Harper]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point, which would be worth following up.

Conscious of your strictures, Madam Deputy Speaker, let me make a couple of final points. On the issue raised by the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) on vaccine passports, the Secretary of State gave half of the right answer, which was that the Government would have to persuade the House to introduce vaccine passports, and he confirmed that the House would have to vote on it. The final piece to come in his wind-up remarks is that that vote will come ahead of any decision to introduce vaccine passports, rather than there being only a retrospective vote after their introduction. If he confirmed that, he would do the House a powerful service.

The final point is to reinforce what the shadow Secretary of State was saying, and what I said in my intervention, about speeding up second doses and third doses for those who are immunosuppressed and, to release the pressure on the NHS, focusing on improvements in social care this winter. My local NHS trust—I have raised this issue with the Secretary of State privately—has made the point that some of the pressures are because it cannot get the people who have received all the hospital treatment they need out into the community, because of a lack of either residential social care or domiciliary social care. For it to deliver on clearing the backlogs of healthcare and to stop accident and emergency backing up, it must be able to get people out of the “back door” of the hospital into social care or back home. It is social care that will put the NHS under critical pressure this winter, in the next few weeks, so I urge my right hon. Friend to focus on the social care aspect of NHS pressure, not just on NHS pressure. With that, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will broadly obey your strictures and sit down.