Covid-19

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab) [V]]

There are two or three points that I want to make very quickly tonight, after first thanking the extraordinary national health service team and the public health team in Birmingham, of Justin Varney, David Rosser and Paul Jennings, who meet with Birmingham MPs each week. The clarity of the information that they give and the quality of their leadership in our city are absolutely extraordinary.

The three quick points I want to add to this debate are these. First, it is now crucial that Ministers make available detailed ward-level data about vaccinations. As some people know, we have been fighting for this data in Birmingham for some time, and I thank the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) for working with me. The Secretary of State promised us the data back in about January. It was then made available to public health directors through the dashboards that they can see, but it was marked as restricted, which means they cannot share it. We have been able to get it into the public domain by putting it on the agenda in some preparatory work for the covid-o committee that we have to set up, but it is really not good enough that we have to go this roundabout way to get crucial data published.

The reason this is so serious is that the data in Birmingham reveals a story of two cities, if not two nations: rich and poor. In the richest wards in Birmingham, we have vaccination rates that are over 90%; in the poorest wards, we have vaccination rates that are under 60%. We have a dramatically different vaccination uptake in the richest wards compared with the poorest wards. Underlining, underpinning and exacerbating this problem is the fact that our testing uptake has a similar pattern. In fact, the amount of testing in the richer wards is 60% greater than the testing in the poorer wards. Anecdotally, we have people who cannot afford to find out they have covid but happen to live in wards where the vaccination uptake is lowest. Cases are now concentrated in the poorest places, and the risk is that these poor places will languish in a kind of long covid for many more months than richer places. That opens the risk of a pandemic of disease now triggering a pandemic of poverty.

I call on Ministers today to please make sure that this data is more widely available, and for heaven’s sake start using our community pharmacies to start rolling out the vaccination programme in our poorest places. On big hubs and GPs, we do not have access to those kinds of services in the same way that the richer wards do. Viruses that evade a vaccine are viruses that continue to evolve, and no one is safe until everybody is safe. We need a different approach to vaccination roll-out, and we need it now.