Public Health

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Commons Chamber

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

As we are debating this global pandemic, I want at the start to mention another global epidemic on World AIDS Day. I recommit Labour to ending HIV transmissions within this decade—I am sure the Secretary of State shares that commitment. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) and the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), who spoke earlier, for the launch of their commission today.

Members from across the House have spoken with insight, eloquence and sincerity. A number—the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) made this point—said that we should avoid caricaturing each other’s position, and I entirely agree with that. I entirely accept that hon. Members who feel they cannot support restrictions in any form do not want to see this virus rip; they have alternative proposals. 

This has been a good debate—it has been a full day’s debate—but there has been frustration on both sides of the House about the nature of the debate. I think part of that frustration is born of the way the Government brought their proposals to the House in a statutory instrument. It is a straight up-or-down vote—a binary choice. The Government could have chosen to bring forward legislation, and I am sure that the House would have worked together to improve that legislation.

There have been issues in the detail of the instrument that have caused problems. We have had the ministerial muddle of the last 24 hours around scotch eggs. If we look at the details of the instrument, I am told that a wake is allowed today, but from tomorrow wakes will not be allowed in tier 3 areas, so the provisions around wakes will be more restrictive than what is allowed today. I am sure that these anomalies and issues could have been ironed out had the Government chosen to bring forward some legislation where we could have worked together across the House and tabled amendments.

At root, this has been a debate about freedoms—I commend the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Sir Graham Brady) for his speech about freedoms early in the debate—but also about how we balance risk; I think that is what the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison) was alluding to a moment ago. All of us want to see these freedoms returned for our constituents. The question is, at what point is it safe to start restoring freedoms to our constituents and our communities? The second question is, if we accept that freedoms have to be restricted in order to bring the prevalence of this virus down, what is the economic support in place? This House wants to save lives, but in saving lives, we are asking many of our constituents to potentially sacrifice their livelihoods. In those circumstances, our constituents—families and small businesses in our constituencies—deserve some recompense for that as well.

One theme that has come out throughout the debate is how an area will move between tiers and whether the Government are using the correct geographical footprint for tiers, but throughout this we have had different approaches. The Prime Minister’s approach has ricocheted throughout. I remember when we were told that we would have a “whack-a-mole” approach. On Saturday, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, in his essay in The Times, said that we need to cast the widest net possible for these measures to be effective. Now, in response to questions from Back Benchers on both sides of the House, the Prime Minister says we are going to use granular detail to make very specific, localised decisions. Are we back to whack-a-mole or not?

I say to hon. Members that I have some experience of these matters. Leicester never effectively came out of the national lockdown. We went from national lockdown to local lockdown. We have bounced between versions of what today would be known as tiers 2 and 3. Our pubs were shut; our restaurants were closed. My constituents were banned from going on holiday for part of July. Using polymerase chain reaction tests, we did mass testing. We went door to door with PCR tests, and we brought our infection rate down to 25 per 100,000. We were kept in restrictions.

I have heard hon. Members stand up and argue, with sincerity, that their area should not be in tier 3 or tier 2 because its infection rate is 40 per 100,000 and that is lower than it is down the road, where it is 50 per 100,000. These are entirely legitimate points to make. Leicester remained in restrictions with its infection rate at 25 per 100,000. My question to the Secretary of State, when he comes to respond to the debate, is this. I know that he has published five criteria by which judgments will be made about the future of tiers, but will he publish specific scorecards for each area, and can he tell us at what level we should now be alarmed? Is it 40 per 100,000? Is it 35 per 100,000? That was the nationwide level when the Prime Minister introduced the rule of six on 15 September; it is 160-odd per 100,000 today.



The Secretary of State will also tell us that the answer is mass testing, and I of course pay tribute to Joe Anderson and Liverpool City Council for what they have done with the mass testing pilot. Indeed, for months we have called for targeted mass testing, but, as my hon. Friends the Members for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) and for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) have pointed out, if a community testing programme is to succeed, it needs a community isolation programme alongside it. People in low-paid jobs who are not ill and who do not think they have the virus are unlikely to take a test if they are not going to get adequate sick pay and support for their isolation. We say again to the Government: bring forward a sick pay package and ensure wider access to the £500 payment. I have also heard concerns, relating to mass testing, that the testers are not allowed to go door to door. Can the Secretary of State tell us whether that is correct?

Fundamentally, we support public health restrictions, but we cannot impose public health restrictions without giving our businesses the support to survive, and that is our difference here tonight. Give our pubs, our restaurants and our hospitality sector the grants that they need. Yes, we need to save lives, but we also need to save livelihoods.