Kevin Brennan
Main Page: Kevin Brennan (Labour - Cardiff West)Department Debates - View all Kevin Brennan's debates with the Cabinet Office
(3 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberThe reality is that the disease is rising across the country. We have seen in other European countries and around the world that it sometimes rises fastest in one place rather than another. The sensible thing is to tackle it in a local way, which is what we are doing.
Between 27 September and 3 October, 89% of positive cases were reached by local authority public health tracing in Wales, but for the equivalent period just 74% were reached by the outsourced, centralised system in England. That is not ideology; that is just better virus-control policy to save lives. Test and trace needs trust to be effective. Does the Prime Minister now acknowledge that outsourcing the system was an error?
No—no more than getting a vaccine or test device from the private sector is an error. We need a mixture of public and private and of national and local, and that is what we are doing.