Covid-19 Update

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Monday 19th April 2021 Commons Chamber

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

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. Let me start by saying that I have no doubt that Downing Street was reluctant to cancel the Prime Minister’s trip to India. As a Member of Parliament for Leicester, I am immensely proud of our deep ties and bonds with India, but it was the correct thing to do in the circumstances, because we must always be vigilant and driven by the data, and variants are the biggest threat to our progress.

Tackling the variants demands that vaccination continues to be rolled out successfully; I again pay tribute to all involved. Uptake levels are improving, as the Secretary of State said, but they are still too low in some minority ethnic communities. Will he provide extra resources to the local communities that need them to drive up vaccination rates?

We will look carefully at the details for vaccinating social care staff, but the Secretary of State will know that every attempt throughout history to force mandatory vaccination has proved counterproductive. Why does he think this attempt will be any different?

Even with high levels of vaccination across the population, there will be significant groups who are unvaccinated—children, for example. The virus will be endemic, as the chief medical officer has recently confirmed. Papers from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies model a third wave this summer. How do we avoid that? May I suggest to the Secretary of State that one way that we could do that would be to pay higher sick pay and expand its scope? Some of the poorest and the lowest paid will continue to suffer and be left exposed to the virus unless we fix that. We should not just glibly accept these health inequities; it could mean that urban areas are left behind, remaining under restrictions with higher infection rates. For the millionth time of asking, will he please fix sick pay?

Let me turn to India, which has the most cases in the world at the moment—more than 250,000 confirmed cases a day, I think, and going up. That is one of the world’s steepest surges, right now. Uploads of Indian sequencing to the global open access database show that the new double mutant B1617 variant has become dominant in India in the past few weeks, out-competing our home-grown Kent strain. As of today, COVID-19 Genomics UK reports 135 cases of B1617 in the UK and 115 in the last 28 days. It has been the fastest growing variant in the UK in the last three weeks. Most of those variants are imported, so we welcome the Secretary of State’s announcement about adding India to the red list, although I hope that there will be support and help in place for constituents such as mine who are legally in India and want to return.

We also now have cases in the community that are not linked to international travel. I understand that the Secretary of State is carrying out analysis of those samples, but surely we now need to start surge testing and designate B1617 as a variant of concern. How long will it take before we have more definitive evidence that it is more infectious or immune-escape? We already know that this variant carries mutations of concern in other variants. If we have learnt anything in the past 12 months, it is that this virus ruthlessly exploits ambiguity and that we must act fast when the situation is controllable, because in a few weeks’ time, it might not be.

The Secretary of State did not mention vaccine passports in his statement. Does he anticipate that vaccine passports will soon be needed for football games or concerts? As he said, Leicester City have made it to the FA cup final, and they are a team challenging for Europe on merit who always put fans first. Many who are anticipating going to a football match later this year will be wondering this: if they need a vaccine passport, will it be based on one dose or two? He may have seen data from Israel or the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the US which suggests that people are still infectious after one vaccine dose, so can he update us on that front?

Finally, I turn to the latest Sunday Times revelations about the lobbying by Greensill and Cameron of the Secretary of State and the very highest NHS officials about the payday financing scheme. This was not an act of altruism to staff in a pandemic but an investment plan to package up loans to sell to investors, with the former Prime Minister, not nurses, in line for a payday windfall. Cameron wrote in one of his emails:

“As you can imagine, Matt Hancock”

is

“extremely positive about this innovative offer.”

They sought a partnership with NHS Shared Business Services, which is jointly owned by the Department. They sought access to the personal and financial data of thousands of NHS staff. They wanted their electronic records for their own commercial gain. Their plan was to expand into the social care sector, where staff are on low pay or zero-hours contracts, and because the market is fragmented and made up of private providers, the supposed non-profit offer would presumably not apply.

There were meetings and communications with a parade of the most senior NHS officials, including former Health Minister Lord Prior and Baroness Harding. At least 30 trusts may have spent valuable time considering the adoption of this untested payday lending scheme, and it is all because the Secretary of State succumbed to the lobbying of his old boss Cameron. So again I ask him, will he publish all the text messages, all the emails and all the correspondence with David Cameron? Can he tell us how many NHS leaders and officials Cameron and Greensill lobbied and met? How many NHS trusts in total were approached about this expensive, unneeded scheme?

While we are on the issue of NHS Shared Business Services, can the Secretary of State also tell us why he never declared his own links to Topwood, the confidential document shredding firm which was still on Friday night, until it was curiously taken down, using the NHS logo on its website to promote itself? With so many accusations and allegations of sleaze and cronyism, these are basic questions that deserve clear answers. NHS staff deserve a pay rise and support, not these payday loan apps forced on the NHS by speculators trying to make money out of the pandemic. How can he possibly defend it?

[Matt Hancock]

Let me address the final point first. As I said to the House last week, my approach was and is that local NHS employers are best placed to decide whether to take up offers of pay flexibilities, and Ministers are not involved in decision taking in NHS Shared Business Services. When it comes to the other matter that the right hon. Gentleman raised in terms of my declarations—which are known to him and to everybody else only because I have followed the rules in letter and spirit and made that declaration—I agree with the Leader of the Opposition, rather than him, who said that he was not suggesting that any rules were broken.

I turn to the covid-related matters. I welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s support of the decision to put India on the red list, which is not one that we take lightly. He is right to ask about surge testing, to make sure that we limit the spread as much as possible of the variant first found in India, and I can confirm that we will be doing that.

I welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s support for vaccinations, which he has demonstrated at all turns. It is partly because of the unanimity across the House among all parties on the importance of vaccination that we have this absolutely spectacular level of uptake. He says that every attempt at mandatory vaccination is counterproductive. I gently point him to the fact that surgeons needs to have a vaccine against hepatitis B. Vaccination that is tied to work in fact has a longstanding precedent in this country.

The right hon. Gentleman asks many questions about certification, but he knows that a review of it is under way at the moment, being led by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who I am sure will have heard his representations and questions, and will be able to address them in the review.

Finally, the right hon. Gentleman says that we must avoid a third wave by sticking to the rules, and he is right. We should avoid a third wave if we can, and the way that we can do it is by sticking to the rules and getting the jab. That is why the vaccination programme is so important. It is why the road map is cautious and, we hope, irreversible. That is the plan, and with the 10 million second vaccines and the progress in the vaccination programme that we have seen in the last few days, weeks and months, I am very pleased to say that we are on track.