Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2020

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 30th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, there is a pressing need for credible testing and data if the tiers being proposed today are going to work. As long ago as March, the director-general of the World Health Organization said:

“We must test every suspected case … Test, test, test”


and paragraph 7.3 of the Explanatory Memorandum includes case detection rates as part of the criteria on which the tiers are allocated.

The Government have a long history of failure on this. The system collapsed in September, there was a huge IT failure in October and, as my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey said, the last nine months have been a long history of chaos, despite costing £22 billion. Meanwhile it seems that most of the contracts that were awarded went to friends and relations of MPs rather than to local delivery, which was the obvious answer.

There was a bad but wonderful example of a massive failure of testing that we saw a week or two ago in Kent. It was quite reasonable for the French Government to require the testing of incoming drivers, and about 5,000 drivers needed urgent testing. As well as the lack of toilets on the M20, there was chaos with that testing. In the end, the French fire brigade sent across 20 firemen with testing kits to help to clear the backlog, as did the Polish army. It took nine days over Christmas to clear a backlog of just 5,000 testing needs. I am afraid that demonstrates the total incompetence of the Government on testing. No amount of lockdown will work without a credible and efficient testing programme.