Covid-19

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab/Co-op)]

Given the numbers who are interested in the debate and given that I have enjoyed the indulgence of the House now for four days in a row—I am not sure what I will do next week; I might just come here and make a speech for the sake of it—I will try to be brief. I also apologise to the House, because I have a long-standing commitment and so I will not be here for the wind-ups. I apologise to the House for that discourtesy on this occasion. I have spoken to Mr Speaker about it, and he understands the particular circumstances.

I noticed that the Secretary of State has updated the House on Slough, Stoke-on-Trent and Coventry, but he did not mention anything about Nottinghamshire and West Yorkshire, and he will know that they are candidates that are widely speculated as the next to go into the tier 3 lockdown restrictions. For example, in parts of Nottinghamshire, localised infection rates are 370 per 100,000 in Gedling and 362 per 100,000 in Rushcliffe. In West Yorkshire, the rate is 307 per 100,000 in Wakefield and in Calderdale. Given that, he must be considering the future of West Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.

I am just aware that we are going into the parliamentary recess. I do not know whether I can invite the Secretary of State to say anything now, because Members from those areas will be concerned that with Parliament not sitting next week, they might not have an opportunity to put their points to him or get their points on the record. If he does not want to say anything now, it would be important if the Minister of State could offer some reassurance to people in those parts of the world as to what might be happening.

[Matt Hancock]

As previously announced, discussions are under way. We want to proceed in consultation with and working with the local areas. With the parliamentary recess next week, we will find a way to ensure that colleagues are appraised of the situation, preferably in advance of any announcement.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I am truly grateful for that reassurance, because the Secretary of State will understand that many people in those areas will be concerned and Members will want to get their points of view on the record on that front.

The virus has caused a pandemic because it exploits ambivalence and takes advantage of our human vulnerabilities. It undermines our biological defences and spreads through human social behaviour and clustering. We know that people with long-term chronic conditions in particular are vulnerable, and we know that there is a greater burden of illness in our more disadvantaged areas, which covid cruelly exaggerates. We know that as we entered this crisis, we had less resilience as a society. We entered with life expectancy falling for some of the poorest and stalling nationwide, and life expectancy is a summary of our overall health.

In the past 10 years, the amount of life in good health has decreased for men and women. Our child mortality rates are some of the worst in Europe, and poor health and chronic illness leave communities acutely vulnerable to disease, so it should come as no surprise to any of us that some of the boroughs currently fighting the most virulent fires are some of the very poorest in our country, with the very worst life expectancy.

I welcome the progress being made on diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccinations, which the Secretary of State has updated us on today. We welcome the expanding of mass testing, including the saliva testing and the lateral flow testing. I hope, by the way, that the Secretary of State will invest in our great universities, which are developing some of this saliva-based testing, because they will need the equipment and the labs to process it. He will probably need to invest in robotics and artificial intelligence to do some of that, because there are not enough staff to do it at the moment, and I hope that is part of his agenda. As well as all that, because the virus is now endemic, we will need a health inequalities strategy to get on top of this virus for the long term.

In the immediate term, we also need to adjust our behaviours to bring infection rates down, which is why I have supported the difficult restrictions that the Secretary of State has had to impose, and it is why we are saying we need clarity all the time from Government. But people also want to know that there is light at the end of the tunnel, because it is still not clear to families in Bury, Heywood and Penistone and all those other places that have been put under lockdown in recent days how they will escape it.

We still do not know whether the restrictions across the north will be lifted when the national R falls below 1 or when local regionalised R values fall below 1. We still do not know whether restrictions will be lifted across the north when hospital admissions stabilise. Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that decisions are

“based on a number of things including the R—also, of course, rates of infection, rates of admission to hospital and other data.”—[Official Report, 21 October 2020; Vol. 682, c. 1053.]

He did not tell us what that other data is. Perhaps the Minister responding to the debate can outline how an area in the north in tier 3 gets out of those restrictions. I know that the areas will be reviewed every four weeks, but what are the criteria to inform those reviews?

I represent Leicester, where we are in tier 2, but we have been in a version of restrictions for 114 days. We went directly from national lockdown to local lockdown. In fact, we endured tougher restrictions than those currently designated for tier 3. Our hospitality closed, our non-essential retail closed and—I did not agree with this—our schools closed as well. All those measures together did help to bring infections down in Leicester to about 55 per 100,000—to be frank, many Members would bite your hand off for 55 per 100,000 now—and even at 55 per 100,000 we remained in a version of lockdown.

Now, months later, after all the sacrifice we took in Leicester—after months with our businesses closed, with the mental health impact of people not being able to see their loved ones and families denied the opportunity to visit a care home to see their grandmother or mother—our infection rates in Leicester are 219 per 100,000. The Secretary of State will therefore have to forgive me when I express some scepticism that his approach will work and suppress the virus to the levels sufficient to bring the R value down, because although the early restrictions in Leicester did have an impact, after months we are still under restrictions with infection rates over 200 per 100,000.

The Secretary of State updated us on the situation we are in. He has been good at updating the House repeatedly; I have no criticism of him at all on that front. The growth rate in the virus is slower than in March—it is more muted, thanks to the great sacrifices of the British people, with hand hygiene, social distancing and everything we are doing—but it is not plateauing. We are dealing with an autumn resurgence, and for all the heat and fallout we have had across the House this week, the truth is that the virus is at worrying levels everywhere. The national R is between 1.3 and 1.5. The R across the south-east is between 1.3 and 1.5, across the south-west between 1.3 and 1.6, and across the east of England between 1.3 and 1.5.

Of course, admissions to critical care are currently concentrated in the north and the midlands, but while at this stage in the first wave those admissions to critical care were beginning to come down, they are continuing to go up. It is right that improvements in care mean that people are less likely to die. That is a good thing, and we all celebrate that, but general and acute beds are filling up with covid patients across the north and across the midlands.

We know that the Prime Minister has rejected a circuit break for now—he does not rule it out indefinitely. We think he should have taken advantage of next week’s half term. He decided not to do that. But we should remind ourselves that SAGE advised the circuit break on 21 September. A month later, on 21 October, we had these grim statistics: 191 deaths; 996 hospital admissions; 6,431 in hospital; 629 on ventilation; 26,688 tested positive; and 249,978 cases in the past 14 days. Many will ask how much of that could have been avoided, had the Prime Minister gone along with SAGE’s advice a month ago.

Today, the Chancellor said in his statement that we have to find a balance between saving lives and protecting livelihoods, but I do not believe that the two are in conflict. It is not a trade-off. Actually, I do not believe the Secretary of State thinks it is a trade off—the tone of his remarks was very different from that of the Chancellor earlier. Saving lives and protecting livelihoods go hand in hand. I worry that the approach the Government are currently taking—while understandable, because nobody wants to be in a lockdown, and none of these decisions are easy or do not have negative consequences; I think we are all mature enough across the House to appreciate and understand that—means that there will, by necessity, have to be tougher, deeper action in the weeks to come, not only in autumn. Winter has not hit us yet.

Professor John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene said yesterday in one of the Select Committees that

“there’s no way we come out of this wave now without counting our deaths in the tens of thousands…I think we are looking at quite a bleak situation unless we take action…I don’t think we should be taking action just specifically in the highest risk areas, but I think we need to take action everywhere”.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Sir Jeremy Farrar, who is also on SAGE. For balance, Professor Van-Tam said at the press conference this week that he disagreed, but also that

“we may have to push on the pedal a little harder”

to get it under control.

I know the Secretary of State is a decent man. He has been very good throughout this crisis in talking to me privately; one would expect a Secretary of State and a shadow Secretary of State to have those discussions. Whenever I have asked for briefings, all the way back to January, he has ensured that the chief medical officer would give me confidential briefings, as I am sure that every Member across the House would understand and appreciate. So I know he is a decent man. I know he is not playing games or anything like that. I know that these are difficult judgment calls of extraordinary gravity. I know there is no easy solution. Everything has trade-offs; everything has negative consequences. But we also know that unless we take decisive action, the consequences could be even worse. No one should pretend to the House that that is not the case. There is a worry that by not taking action now, we will, in the words of Professor David Hunter, an epidemiologist at Oxford,

“all wind up in tier 3 eventually.”

According to Times Radio yesterday, Government sources were telling it that the Government are now planning a three-week circuit break next month across all tier 2 and tier 3 areas. If that is the case, then the Government should probably level with us so that we can all start preparing for it.

This is not just about minimising harm and deaths from covid. As the Secretary of State said in responding to questions from my hon. Friends, we have a huge responsibility and duty to minimise harm and deaths from non-covid conditions as well. We have to avoid the situation that we were in in the spring, when the immense lockdown, which was actually a number of different interventions all at once, meant that to build surge capacity in the national health service, we had to cancel elective operations to free up general and acute beds, and much important diagnostics work and treatment got delayed. That has left us with a situation today where 110,000 people are waiting beyond 12 months for treatment, compared with just 1,600 in January; 3 million people are waiting for breast, bowel or cervical screening, and more people are waiting for treatment.

My worry is that we will end up building a greater backlog in treatment if we do not act. General and acute beds are filling up. We have a number of hospitals cancelling electives already. Bradford has just suspended non-urgent surgery. Birmingham is talking about suspending non-urgent surgery. It is happening in Nottingham. We know that Merseyside is under considerable pressure; the Secretary of State outlined it. It has just been revealed in the Health Service Journal that we are heading into this winter with 2,000 fewer beds than we had last winter. Today the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has warned that over half of A&Es across the country are caring for patients in corridors due to the lack of beds—and we are not even in winter yet. Our overcrowded A&Es are not ideal at the best of times, but during a covid pandemic it is obviously highly dangerous to be treating patients in corridors of A&Es. The president of the royal college, Katherine Henderson, has pointed out that this situation

“will put more lives at risk than it ever did before.”

If the Government really want to drive down infections, suppress the virus and ensure that general and acute beds are not overwhelmed and more operations are not cancelled, then they have to seriously consider what steps they need to take to go further. Unless the Secretary of State or the Minister is going to get up at the end of this debate and say, “Actually, we’re going to do a circuit breaker over half-term next week”, I accept that the Government have probably missed that window of opportunity now, but at some point they will have to take further action.

We could have avoided much of this if test and trace had been more effective. The Secretary of State is spending £12 billion on this programme. Twelve billion pounds is a colossal amount of money. Some of it is going on consultants who earn £7,000 a day, but where on earth is the rest going? We are throwing around figures in this covid debate, and we are becoming quite complacent and relaxed about them, but £12 billion is an extraordinary amount of money; we could probably run the NHS for a month or so on that. We learn today that the system is contacting only 59.6% of contacts, which is the equivalent of failing to contact 101,000 people. That is not world beating; it is a world-beating shambles. I really hope that the Government look at stripping all the failing private outsourcing firms, such as Serco, of these contracts and putting local public health teams in charge. That would be much more effective.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I want to pick up a point about the app. It is telling people to self-isolate, but it does not give them the code that they need for the process, so they cannot claim their £500. That is creating chaos across local authorities. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government need to get on top of this quickly?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

Absolutely. There have been problems with the app. When I am in Leicester, it tells me that I am in an area that is both medium and high alert. Leicester has been under lockdown for 100 days, so how can the app say that in the part of Leicester where I live?

[Matt Hancock]

I thought that the hon. Gentleman’s comments were very thoughtful until we got to the unnecessary political knockabout. I want to make a couple of factual points about the app. It only takes the first two segments of someone’s postcode, some of which spread over two different alert levels, so that is why it describes the situation in Leicester as it does. When it comes to making sure that people press the button on the app to access the £500 self-isolation payment for the low-paid, that button is there on the app.

I want to leap to the defence of Test and Trace, because in the past fortnight the number of contacts and cases that have been reached has doubled. In slightly more than the last month, the distance travelled to get a test has halved, and the turnaround time for tests that are sent to care homes—those tests are critical for saving lives—has come down. More than 50 statistics on Test and Trace are published every Thursday, and of course the hon. Gentleman can look through them, find a couple that are going in the wrong direction and complain about them, but I think it is better to have a balanced opinion.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

That was a spirited defence, but the statistics have been bad every week. The Secretary of State knows that, because I have raised it with him every week.

[Matt Hancock]

What happens is that every week, the hon. Gentleman looks through the 50 statistics and finds the ones that are not going in the right direction. I am merely pointing out that the system is doing much more than it ever has. One place where the huge amounts of money that we are putting into Test and Trace go is into the record amount of testing capacity, which is now more than 370,000. I think he should stand up and thank all the people who are delivering on this colossal effort.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I am very happy to thank the people who are working in Test and Trace.

[Matt Hancock]

U-turn.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

That is not a U-turn. Thanking the staff is not a U-turn. The Opposition are on the side of the workers; the Secretary of State is on the side of the bosses. Of course we are happy to thank the staff who are working on Test and Trace, but he cannot seriously look at the statistics and tell us that the system is effective. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster did not defend it. When he was asked about the statistics on “The Andrew Marr Show” on Sunday, he said that

“any test and trace system of whatever kind has less utility”

when the virus is accelerating. If the Secretary of State thinks that there is a good set of statistics, perhaps he should send it to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who took a different line on Sunday.

Let me come to a conclusion, because I know that many people want to speak in this debate. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State tells me to leave out the knockabout, but he is the one who started it off. The problem is that we went into this pandemic with an underfunded NHS, public health cut back and less resilience as a society. This will not be the only pandemic that we have to deal with. Climate change, urbanisation and deforestation mean that we are likely to see more viruses jump from animals to humans. The big challenge for us as a society when we come through this pandemic, as we will, is that we have to start building the health security to protect us for the future, because unfortunately, all of us across the House will be dealing with more of these pandemics in the years to come.