Oral Answers to Questions

Keir Starmer Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd April 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I echo the sentiments about the Prime Minister. We wish him a speedy recovery. I should also tell the House that the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Alexander Stafford) has withdrawn, so I call Sir Keir Starmer and welcome him to his first outing at the Dispatch Box.

[Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank you, the House authorities and the staff for allowing us to meet in this way today; it is important that we have this scrutiny. I also send all our best wishes through the First Secretary of State to the Prime Minister for a full and speedy recovery. I am sure I speak for the whole House in sending our best wishes to all those affected by coronavirus and the condolences of the whole House to those who have lost loved ones. Again on behalf of the whole House, I offer our deepest thanks to those on the frontline, risking their lives to keep us safe and our country going.

I promised that Labour would give constructive opposition, with the courage to support the Government where that was the right thing to do—we all want and need the Government to succeed and defeat coronavirus—but we also need the courage to challenge where we think they are getting it wrong. In that spirit, I want to start with testing. Testing is obviously crucial at every stage of the pandemic, but we have been very slow, and are way behind other European countries. The Health Secretary made a very important commitment to 100,000 tests a day by the end of April, but yesterday the figure for actual tests was 18,000, and that was down from Monday, when it was 19,000 tests. We are way behind the curve and the end of the month is a week tomorrow. What does the First Secretary expect to happen in the next eight days to get us from 18,000 tests a day to 100,000 tests a day?

[Dominic Raab]

I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman and I congratulate him on his success in being elected leader of the Labour party. I will certainly pass on his best wishes to the Prime Minister—I know he would want to be here in person—and I join him in paying tribute to all our NHS and other frontline workers.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman rightly raised the crucial issue of testing, which will be an incredibly important part of our strategy for transitioning from the current social distancing measures. However, I have to correct him: our capacity for tests is now at 40,000 per day. That is an incredibly important milestone. He is right to say that in the final week that will require a big increase, but of course a project like this requires an exponential increase in the final days, the final week, of the programme. I reassure him that we are working with a range of commercial partners to boost the testing to get to that 100,000 tests per day. Two of our super-labs, in Milton Keynes and Alderley Park, are now fully functional, and Glasgow will be open later this week.

[Keir Starmer]

I thank the First Secretary of State for his kind comments. I did not need correcting, because I gave the figure for the actual tests a day. The First Secretary says that there is capacity for 40,000 tests a day and I think it is really important that we fully understand what he just said, because it means that the day before yesterday 40,000 tests could have been carried out, but only 18,000 tests were actually carried out. All week, I have heard from the frontline, from care workers who are frankly desperate for tests for their residents and themselves—desperate. They would expect every test to be used every day for those who need them. There is clearly a problem. Why are the Government not using all the tests available every day?

[Dominic Raab]

It is important to pay tribute, because there are two elements to this: getting the capacity up is half of it, and we are making good progress—I hope that the right hon. and learned Gentleman concedes that point—and the issue of increasing the demand, which is something we have control over. Of course we are making sure that the eligibility is broadened. Our focus, as I think he would agree, should be on frontline NHS staff, broadened out to care workers and other key workers in a way that the system can manage. We are confident that, based on our test capacity, we will be able to deliver that. On the capacity itself reaching the 100,000 target, we have a range of deals with firms such as Randox, or AstraZeneca, GSK and Cambridge University working together to staff a new lab. We will deliver, and those tests will be crucial, not just to control the virus but to allow the country to move the next phase.

[Keir Starmer]

I welcome the fact that capacity has gone up, but it is not now a question of driving up demand; demand is there. Last week, the Health Secretary said that every care worker who needed a test would get one, but the reality on the ground is very different, and there are very few tests indeed.

The position is this: if a care worker has symptoms of coronavirus—or a family member does—he or she has to self-isolate, quite rightly. To get a necessary test, they are then instructed to travel to a testing centre, which is often many miles away. For example, social care workers in Leicester are told to go to the outskirts of Nottingham, a 45-minute drive, in order to get tested. There are lots of examples of this across the country.

There is an obvious problem with that system. Not all care workers have access to a car and, because they or a family member have symptoms, they obviously cannot use public transport, so it is little wonder that we see those pictures of half-empty testing centres. That does not look like a good plan. It is not about driving up demand; it is about tests and where they are needed. What reassurance will the First Secretary give to care workers on the frontline that things will improve for them, and fast?

[Dominic Raab]

It is certainly about capacity. I addressed that issue in my earlier answers and also explained how we will bridge the 100,000. It is also about demand. We need to encourage those who are able to take the test to come forward. The right hon. and learned Gentleman is right to say that it is also about distribution and about some of the logistical and transport challenges that people, particularly some of those that he described, will have in getting to the test. We are working with the local resilience forums to make sure that we can distribute the tests as effectively as possible. We have mobile labs to go to some of those hard-to-reach areas. We will be using the Army, which, along with the other key workers, has made an incredible contribution to support that effort.

I just come back to the key point, which is that it is important to have a target and to drive towards that target. We are making good progress. We are confident that we will meet our target, and the right hon. and learned Gentleman should join me, as we engage in this national effort, in saying to the Welsh Health Minister, Vaughan Gething, who has abandoned the Welsh target in Labour-run Wales of 5,000, that, actually, all four corners of the United Kingdom need to work together in this effort to make sure that we reach that national target. It is about capacity and it is about distribution. We will only be able to hit that target if all of us come together to deliver on it.

[Keir Starmer]

I do recognise how hard people are working to try to drive up the number of tests, but there is a significant gap and there is only eight days left. On Monday, Manjeet Singh Riyat, an A&E consultant at the Royal Derby Hospital, sadly died of coronavirus. He was, I think, the first Sikh A&E consultant, respected widely across the country and instrumental in building up Derbyshire’s emergency services. Sadly, he is just one of the many frontline health and social care workers to have died from coronavirus during this crisis. Will the First Secretary of State tell us how many NHS workers have now died from coronavirus, and how many social care workers have now died from coronavirus?

[Dominic Raab]

May I just say that I entirely agree with the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s broader point, which is that our key workers who are fighting for us and tending to the most vulnerable in our society—whether in the NHS or in social care—need our full support? That is why it is so important that we ramp up the testing and ramp up the PPE deliveries. On the latest figures, my understanding is that 69 people in the NHS have died of coronavirus. I do not have the precise figure for care homes. It is more difficult to establish that number in relation to care home workers as opposed to care home residents. I think that we can all agree in this House that every one of those is a tragedy, and that that can only make us double down on our efforts to tackle this virus and to do everything we can to support those amazing workers in the NHS who are delivering so much in taking the battle to the coronavirus.

[Keir Starmer]

I thank the First Secretary of State for giving us the figure in relation to NHS workers and, of course, each and every one of them is a tragic case. I am disappointed that we do not have a number for social care workers, and I put him on notice that I will ask the same question again next week and, hopefully, we will have a better answer.

Let me turn to protective equipment. Clearly, this is crucial to those at risk on the frontline who are risking their lives to save ours. The least they deserve is the right protective equipment. We have all heard countless examples of frontline workers not getting the equipment that they need. This is from a Unison care worker just last weekend:

“I work in a nursing home. I’m terrified. I don’t know if residents have the virus. We are wearing home-made masks. This is horrible and I am very scared.”

That word “scared” is one that we have all heard many times in the past two or three weeks. A survey by the Royal College of Nursing found that half of nursing staff felt under pressure to work without the levels of protective equipment set out in official guidance. This has been a stress test of our resilience, and the Government plan is clearly not working. I ask the First Secretary of State to tell frontline workers at risk when they will finally get the equipment they need to keep them safe.

[Dominic Raab]

In relation to all those frontline staff who have passed away battling coronavirus and who have worked so hard to protect other people who are suffering, may I first say that our hearts go out to them? The right hon. and learned Gentleman is absolutely right that we must do everything we can to protect those frontline staff. I know that a consultant recently passed away at Kingston Hospital, which is where I have been treated and where both my boys were born and delivered, so I know how important and how personal this is to so many of us. We all absolutely agree on the need to protect those workers. He will know that getting PPE to where it needs to be is a massive international challenge that every country faces, from China to Germany. We have made a huge effort to provide, for example, the ventilators that have bolstered the NHS during this incredibly difficult time. If we had not done that, the NHS would not have been able to cope.

Since the start of the outbreak, we have delivered 1 billion items of personal protective equipment, and tens of millions have been distributed via the devolved Administrations. We recognise, though, that we have to strive even harder in this incredibly difficult and competitive international environment to source the equipment. That is why we brought in my noble friend Lord Deighton, formerly chief executive of the London 2012 Olympics, who has been appointed to lead on our domestic efforts.

We have delivered 34 million items of PPE across 38 local resilience forums. We have established the hotlines, the Royal Mail procedures and a new pilot website to ensure not only that we have the amount of PPE that we need, but that it can get to the most vulnerable and those on the frontline who need it the most.

[Keir Starmer]

I share the sentiments of the First Secretary in relation to all those working on the frontline. I also pay tribute to all those who have ramped up the capacity of the NHS. It has been incredible to see what has happened in the past few weeks, and I know that that has been a huge effort.

I understand the challenge of getting the right equipment to the right place every time, but, as the First Secretary knows, there is a significant gap between promise and delivery. Over the past few days, it has emerged that British manufacturers have got in touch with many Opposition Members, and probably with Members across the House, saying that they offered to help to produce protective equipment but did not get a response from the Government. I understand due diligence, and that not all the offers could be taken up, but some of those who offered to help are now supplying in other countries, so they clearly could have supplied in this country.

Something is going wrong, and there is a pattern emerging here. We were slow into lockdown, slow on testing, slow on protective equipment and now slow to take up those offers from British firms. The Prime Minister has said that this is a national effort, and he is right about that. In that spirit, I ask the First Secretary to commit to working with the Opposition to identify and take up those offers from British manufacturers for protective equipment as soon as possible.

[Dominic Raab]

I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman, although I do not accept his premise that we have been slow. We have been guided by the scientific advice, the chief scientific adviser and the chief medical officer at every step along the way. If he thinks that he knows better than they do, with the benefit of hindsight, then that is his decision, but that is not the way we have proceeded, and it is not the way we will in future.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman mentioned offers from British businesses. It is not quite right to say that they must have been acceptable for UK standards just because they are supplying different needs for different countries abroad, but I reassure him that 8,000 businesses have offered PPE in response to the Government’s call. Every business receives a response, and 3,000 of those 8,000 are followed up where they have either the specification or the volume that makes it a sensible thing for the NHS to do.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman made a sensible point about specifications and health standards. He will know from the reporting that in other countries that have distributed PPE items without those high standards, they have been distributed with faults or flaws, they have had to be recalled, and health workers in those countries have had to go into isolation. I appreciate that he wants to put pressure on and scrutinise the Government, but I think and hope that he will understand the need to take the right decisions and to scrutinise very carefully the precious PPE that we are putting on the frontline to protect our key workers.