Coronavirus

John Spellar Excerpts

Thursday 25th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

If there is a vote tonight, I shall vote no because of concerns that the Government are still focusing on risk avoidance rather than risk management when the public want to get back to normality and thought they were going to be getting that with the vaccine roll-out. In fact, as I see it, this is a move away from earlier on in the pandemic when there seemed to be a balance of debate inside Government between the economic tendency—the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Business Department—and the Health Department. That is a healthy tension because there are real decisions that have to be made. But it now seems almost as though the Chancellor of the Exchequer has become invisible and vanished from that debate, and there is only one group inside Government who are now driving it.

I would have preferred these measures to have monthly renewals by Parliament so that they could be considered much more regularly, because the cost to the economy and to the physical and mental health of our nation has been enormous and is frankly unsustainable. Many parts of the economy, especially in the leisure, hospitality and entertainment industries, are teetering on the brink. Every week more of them go under. Hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens are being put on the dole and many more are fearful that they face the same fate. This is particularly impacting on young people who are not able to get into the labour market. Many small family businesses, with their hopes, fears and aspirations, are being ruined. Millions of self-employed, as we have heard regularly in this House, have been left high and dry.

As we have also heard today, long supply chains of industries are being hit. Many of these industries are part of our attraction to the wider world and they all need Britain to get back to work—the pubs and clubs, restaurants and cafés, theatres and cinemas, TV and film production companies, sporting venues, sports clubs, betting shops, bingo halls and casinos. They are part of what makes our society, what makes Britain an attractive place to live and work, and why people come here, and many of them are being hit incredibly badly.

The public want to be back to normal. As the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) rightly said, they got the vaccines thinking that that would be a pathway back to normality. That is why, unlike some, I believe that vaccine passports or certificates may be inevitable, not only for foreign travel but here as well. I heard Jonathan Neame on the radio this morning. He is a man who knows the beer business extremely well, but he was not necessarily facing up to the real alternative, which is that if the Government drag their feet on reopening, vaccine passports that enable businesses to open earlier, stay open and keep the whole supply chain going may be something that we have to seriously consider.

There has been quite a bit of discussion about variants, as mentioned by both the Health Secretary and the shadow Health Secretary. I think it is now generally accepted that coronavirus will be a bit like flu with regular recurrences, probably towards autumn and winter. I worry that we are going down the path of the EU precautionary principle rather than managing that risk and accepting that unless we are going to keep shutting down society, we will have to work out how to deal with it. As I have said during the course of this pandemic, we need a policy that enables us to co-exist with the virus rather than vainly hoping we can eliminate it. That is the real challenge, and the question is: can the Government rise to it?

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I think in our constituencies there is a real fear that the road map and the extension of the Coronavirus Act are one and the same, that extending the latter means effectively delaying the former, and that if we support the motion this evening, lockdown restrictions will be extended and freedoms not returned. I therefore echo the concerns of some of my right hon. and hon. Friends, such as my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) and my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), about today’s motions. They are not all ideal, because many of us would prefer the return of full freedoms to coincide with the end of the Coronavirus Act, and the Health Secretary made the case as to why that could not be so, while ending some 12 schedules of the restrictions within the Act. He made the case for the need for the Act continue.

If we could amend the Act, I would agree with several colleagues that, for example, schedule 14, for health assessments, and schedule 1, which gives powers to the police to detain those potentially infectious persons for up to 24 hours, would be prime candidates. In fact, as my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), pointed out, schedule 22 has never been used at all, and that would be another candidate for amendment. But we have allowed legislation that is not amendable, and therefore the choice this evening is really whether to support the motions, because there are parts of the Act that have been widely useful, such as temporary courts, the different treatment of leases, and statutory sick pay, and those do, I believe, require support from us all.

[John Spellar]

The reality is that if the Government were defeated tonight, they would recall Parliament and put through the legislation to pass the necessary measures, and therefore they are erecting a false alternative, are they not?

[Richard Graham]

If the right hon. Gentleman will allow me, I want to focus this evening on the key messages that I think it is important for us to hear from the Government this evening; when the Minister sums up, perhaps he can allude to them. The first is that we are still trading on a slogan of “Protect the NHS”. Although none of us underestimates the importance of a fully functioning NHS or the incredible efforts made by all our local NHS trusts, the time has come to recognise that actually in many of our hospitals there are now fewer people with coronavirus than would normally be there with flu; that the huge efforts made by our NHS have broadly succeeded in taking out of hospital —certainly in my hospital, the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital—those patients who had been in intensive treatment; and that the time has come to look at the huge backlog of other physical operations that are needed, at the people who have been too shy to come forward because they were frightened of catching the virus just by going into hospital, and at the incredible backlog of mental health issues that is only just beginning to surface.

Last weekend, the father of a young woman currently working for me dived into the River Severn fully clad in order to save a young woman from drowning. She did not want to be saved; she wanted to commit suicide. We are, in each of our constituencies, seeing more cases of that type, and each one has a whole ricochet of tragedy attached to it, as the Minister knows well.

Therefore, whatever the new message is—I shall not try to draft it for the Government this evening—I think the message has to be that it is now time for us all, but inevitably particularly the NHS, to look after those who have not had coronavirus; to swivel our attention, not completely away from the pandemic, which has not gone away and will never completely go away; and to recognise how much more needs to be done to protect others in society and give them the chances and the attention to flourish—which, of course, is where the road map comes in. I still believe that it is an almost impossible task for our police forces to fully implement the requirements of the restrictions that we have laid on them, and I hope that the Government will be able to do more to allow things to open a little bit earlier and give back those freedoms that everybody values so dearly.