Covid-19: Local Restrictions

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Friday 9th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I cannot help but observe the palpable irony of being told, on the one hand, to engage, form alliances and double up on stakeholder engagement and, on the other, being told to hurry up and get a move on. An effective response means a combination of both national and local systems. A huge amount of work needs to be done to build the consensus, support and technical arrangements for that response. We are putting a huge amount of work into that process and look forward to making announcements on it. Until then, I reassure the noble Baroness that officials and politicians are working night and day to make that response as effective as possible.

[Lord Bilimoria (CB) [V]]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that, with almost 30% of the country under lockdown and more lockdowns to come, the key solution is mass testing? Does he also agree that we could have the equivalent of the ventilator challenge to manufacture the portable LAMP machines, which could greatly enhance testing capability, and have the Abbott Laboratories Binax-type, $5, 15-minute test available widely? Why are we not hearing more about this being implemented urgently?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I reassure the noble Lord that we are making progress. He is entirely right: the ventilator challenge is an inspiration, and I note that we have hit our target of 30,000 ventilators. I note that we have 300,000 tests a day at the current run rate; we have re-registered 50,000 new clinicians to return to support the NHS; we have had 16 million downloads of the NHS app; we have recruited 14,200 nurses as part of our recent recruitment; we have processed over 24 million tests in laboratories as of 8 October 2020; and the Vaccine Taskforce has secured access to six different vaccine candidates across four different vaccine prototypes. These are enormous achievements and we will continue to pursue our response with energy and vigour.