Local Contact Tracing

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

I welcome the opportunity to take part in this important debate.

Effective contact tracing is going to help us to tackle this virus, and all of us here want the best possible version of that tool in the toolbox. The question is how best we do that. Despite what the Opposition might have people believe, there are no easy answers to this problem. It is easy to stand up in this place or go on TV and say, “Fix it”, but anyone with any real-world experience of organising any kind of project or undertaking that is even a fraction of the scale and size of this one understands the incredible challenges that are inevitably faced. Over recent months, the Government have built a huge testing regime capable of processing 340,000 tests a day that has tested over 7 million people in a matter of months. At the start of this epidemic, the yardstick for all this was Germany. Now that we are testing more people than Germany, France, Italy and Denmark, and many others, that yardstick has quietly disappeared.

Yes, there are challenges. Supply and demand are not uniform across the country and supply needs to be increased, but, whatever Labour Members think about the Government’s approach to testing and tracing, if they describe testing 69% as a complete failure, what does that say about the Welsh Labour Government’s programme? To be brutally honest, I am struggling to understand what exactly Labour Members are trying to say today, beyond of course, “We could have done it differently. It would all have been different and fantastic, and nothing would have gone wrong.” That is basically their position on everything to do with the coronavirus.

Let us talk about some of Labour Members’ common criticisms. They say we should not have the private sector involved, and that there is insufficient capacity. At the same time as criticising the Government for not having enough testing capacity, they are telling them that they should immediately and drastically cut out a chunk of that capacity because it does not suit their ideology. This is all based on their blinkered mentality that if the private sector does something it will automatically be bad and if the public sector does something it will automatically be good.

That brings me to the question of whether doing everything locally would have been the right approach at the outset of the programme. I simply do not accept that asking all 152 directors of public health to go off and set up their own approach at the outset would have been in any way feasible. Were they all supposed to come up with their own laboratories, their own contracts and their own apps? That just is not a credible solution in the short term. It was common sense to begin with a central programme, although even at the outset, when it was clear that something centrally driven was needed to kickstart the process, the Government recognised that local systems had a role to play. Many months before Labour was calling for it, £300 million was provided to help local authorities to develop their own test and trace programmes and, importantly, we have now 93 local authority test and trace regimes up and running.

So what is it that Labour Members are saying? Is it that we should immediately hand over everything that is being run nationally to local authorities?

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

No.

[Dr Mullan]

Well, it is.

Many of us in this place who have had dealings with local authorities—as well as lots of our constituents and probably millions of people across the country—would agree that getting everything done by the local authority is by no means a guarantee of success. Just this morning, in news that I am sure was greeted with groans in the Labour Whips Office, it was revealed that Birmingham City Council’s local programme dropped off 25 used swab kits to homes in Selly Oak. Does that mean that local authorities are incapable of delivering? No, of course not. We have problems in the private sector, and that should not bar them from involvement, and we have problems in the public sector too.

Local authority solutions are not a magic bullet. The quality of leadership, management and organisation varies enormously among local authorities. We all know this, and the Opposition know it. At the election, so many bricks in their red wall fell because residents were fed up not just with Labour at national level but with inept, Labour-led local authorities. After decades in power, they were taking people for granted, with leaders and councillors who were not even up to the job of taking away the bins on time, let alone organising a test and trace programme. The national programme inevitably has challenges, but do Labour Members really think that each and every one of the local authorities will deliver on this flawlessly?

Local leaders are political. Sadly, time and again we see Members on the Opposition Benches putting politics first. In the past 24 hours alone, they have said that they support local lockdowns but then did not vote for local lockdowns; that national lockdowns were a disaster, but now they want a national lockdown—and they cannot even make up their minds whether they want a two-week or a three-week lockdown. And they want the country to believe that if they had been in charge, all this would have been going smoothly. That is not accurate. When it came to getting children back to school, the national Labour party was kowtowing to national union leaders and doing what they said, and we all know that the local Labour parties are just as likely to be influenced by the unions. I absolutely recognise that there is work that needs to be done, but I am afraid the idea that if we just flick a switch and give it all to local authorities everything will be fine is complete and utter nonsense.