Coronavirus Bill

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 24th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I too pay tribute to those on the front line: those in intensive care and social care, but also those serving in food shops and those in local government keeping services going. I also pay tribute to those in the Civil Service and in this House who are ensuring that our democracy can continue. Our democracy, as has just been said, is vital in being able to challenge, ask questions and perhaps sometimes put a different point of view—not merely via a question online or a telephone call, but in debate, which is what democratic parliaments are all about.

I have tried to approach this issue from a lifetime of experience, having been Home Secretary at the time of the attack on the World Trade Center and much afterwards. I realise, as the Minister has said, that this is on a different scale. We are talking about the experience and challenge of the Great War. In my view, the Minister has handled his brief incredibly well since taking it over and I pay tribute to him for doing so.

Over the last few weeks I have asked myself what I would do if I were in Cabinet today. Would I try to maintain that proportionality and balance which we debated at great length nearly 20 years ago? Yes, I would. Would I be absolutely clear that democracy demanded that Parliament continue to work? Yes, I would. Would I take incremental steps that took people with us? Yes, I would, because the balance between the philosophy of John Stuart Mill and Rousseau’s social contract has underpinned everything we have done in this country and should do in future. The nature of the state will be debated now and in the future; though perhaps in a different way, it will still be about the balance between the actions we need to take as a Government and a state and the responsibility we carry as individuals.

I am here today because I have lifelong experience, some areas of which are more relevant to this debate than others. I do not mind saying that, while others will rightly take a decision to isolate and protect themselves, as demanded of all of us, some have to be there on the line, saying things and debating matters from the perspective of their age and experience. I make an appeal for social responsibility and care to print, broadcast and responsible social media, because it is vital at this time that people continue to be there to ensure that the papers are printed and that broadcasters can still broadcast—it is not all down to social media. The most dangerous things we face, other than the virus itself, are anxiety and fear—people’s confidence in their own mental and physical well-being being undermined. I make a plea to the media: inform, interrogate, sometimes entertain, but never fear, because that anxiety can be incredibly dangerous at this moment in time. That is why enforcing the measures in this Act must be done with great care.

I say to my colleagues, including my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer, and the noble Lord, Lord Newby: be very careful about the demanding of yet more power and enforcement, the media demanding every day that more people be more fearful. Yes, there will be particular areas of our country where intensive care services and all around them will be under pressure, as they are at the moment in London and the south-east, but listening to interviews from Queen’s in north-east London on Sunday’s edition of “The World This Weekend”, I realised that what we needed was the calming voice of those who had been through experiences of this kind.

My wife Margaret has been a doctor for 35 years and has just retired. I do not speak for her, but I learn from her about the dangerous and difficult decisions that she has taken over a lifetime: of whether people should die at home or be transferred into hospital. That is why we should listen to the noble Lord, Lord Robathan. Proportionality requires us to take a deep breath. Yes, we respect the scientists, but we need more of them, from a wider sphere, to come forward and to be heard. I respect those who came forward quickly with their modelling, but we need wider modelling to ensure that we get this right. We need more testing more quickly. If we had more testing, we would know much more quickly who had had the virus and who was reasonably immune, and we would be able to distinguish those who had not had the virus but thought they had. We could then continue in a more reasonable fashion—yes, of course, working from home, but without that anxiety and fear.

I have talked a lot about anxiety because my daughter-in-law, who is a teacher, spent the whole of last Friday talking to the students in her secondary school not about exams but about their anxiety about their parents and grandparents and what was going to happen to them. Recovery plans as Theresa May has described will therefore be really important. Behind the scenes, I hope that that work is taking place.

It is important to use the letter that has been sent out by the Communities and Local Government Secretary to reassure people in local government that they will be supported. Local government has lost more in the austerity measures than any other part of our public services. The capacity does not exist. What the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, said needs to be underlined and understood.

I shall finish, as did the right reverend Prelate, by quoting from my favourite hymn. “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” ends with:

“O still, small voice of calm.”

That still, small voice of calm is needed now as it has never been needed before.

Coronavirus Bill

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 25th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendment 1, which was moved by my noble friend Lady Thornton, and I hope that the Government will accept it. It is essential to have such a monitoring body covering local authority care and support. If we were in any doubt, surely the searing speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, yesterday should have convinced us. Is the Minister aware that organisations caring for the vulnerable and disabled are being hit by the triple whammy of increased operational costs, loss of income from increased vacancies and staff shortages exacerbated by the crisis and a lack of personal protection equipment?

In addition, for those in the third sector, fundraising has collapsed. Will the Minister ensure that all care organisations involved are contacted urgently and directly to offer practical government help? In care homes in lockdown across the country, staff are worried stiff. We certainly do not want to see scenes such as the one in Spain where a care home was discovered abandoned with all the residents dead. I should add that my wife is a trustee of the Leonard Cheshire Disability charity, which has many care homes across the country.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, yesterday I had the privilege of being able to speak, so I will be brief. I support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lady Thornton and the words of the noble Lord, Lord Scriven. Normally, he and I would be knocking bells out of each other but, on this occasion, we happen to be in total agreement.

I want to reinforce the point that in times of trauma, as we are at the moment, civil society is always critical to survival. That is true in war zones and it will be true in the weeks ahead. I have registered interests in a number of voluntary and charitable organisations, including the RNIB and the Alzheimer’s Society. I want to stress the importance of monitoring. That is not in the sense of a suspicion that the Government will somehow abuse these powers deliberately but because the prioritisation that underpins this power of suspension of normal rights understandably presumes that it will not be possible to carry out the norms of support available.

We learned today that a staggering 250,000 people have already indicated that they are prepared to volunteer. I recently stood down as a board member of the National Citizen Service, among other voluntary commitments. Picking up on the point made by my noble friend Lord Hain, it would be useful if we were able to reinforce very quickly the fact that those organisations in civil society—this is true at the local level as well—are picking up this cudgel and are able, not necessarily to fill the vacuum but to reach out, particularly to the 1.5 million people who have been asked to isolate themselves completely for 12 weeks. I hope we will be able to revisit that when things are clearer in three or four weeks’ time.

I very rarely speak about this, but I want to put on record what it must be like for someone without sight in a high-rise flat. They cannot even look out of the window to see the sun and the birds or make any contact. That is prison. Being able to reach out, even with local government’s lack of capacity, through the voluntary sector and volunteers to make contact, provide support and ensure that, where someone has a crisis, their rights are being upheld, will be vital. I believe that the Minister gets all this. From everything I have seen and understood in a metaphorical sense, he and the team around him are tremendously hard-working and appreciate these issues, working as they are in incredibly difficult circumstances. Given that, I hope that there can be a positive response because, frankly, if we cannot mobilise in this way as well as monitor the rights of those who yesterday the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, spelled out in a way that I could never manage, we will have let down those who need us most at this critical time.

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords, I hope noble Lords have noticed that my noble friend Lord Low has tried to speak twice, so when I finish, I am sure he will be given an opportunity to do so. When we are so short of people to oversee our proceedings, it is difficult.

I want to make two points. The first is that I am very supportive of the first amendment for two reasons. When I originally read the Bill, I assumed that the issue of local authorities having to decide who needs care in terms of the available resources was about the staff resources available, but it is clear that some among the population with severe disabilities are worried that it is about the allocation of financial resources. That is a very important reason for us to monitor regularly whether it is about money or staff because, as a nurse myself, I know that if we are very short of staff, we will have to prioritise in some form in both the NHS and social care.

The other issue about which many of us have been written to was spoken to yesterday by my noble friend Lady Grey-Thompson. If people with dementia are rapidly discharged from NHS care into care homes, which clearly they should be if that is appropriate, we need to ensure that there is no retrospective charging for them and their families. That is another important reason for Amendment 1.

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[Lord O’Shaughnessy (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, asked for a cross-party view so I will make a brief intervention. The economic and moral case for doing something for this group of people is unarguable. No one in this House or in the other place disagrees with that. Their needs are just as great as of those who have the good fortune to have employed jobs, and it is on all of us to make sure that we have a solution.

If it was possible to do what is in the amendment, it could have been done already. There are technical and potentially moral hazard issues why this specific amendment might not be right. I do not stand in judgment; I just know that there are technical issues, and I know that there is a great deal of sympathy for this kind of solution. However, I know that the Treasury has been looking at this and other solutions and that it has its concerns. However, the most important thing is not to agree today on the specific line-by-line items of a package. Exactly as noble Lords have said, this is about getting a sense from my noble friend about when this package of equal weight and power will happen.

There are economic and moral reasons for doing this but health reasons too. If you are young, financially insecure or both of those things, you are highly likely to be at the very wrong end of the economic consequences, but you are also likely to look at it and think, “I might not get this disease and I’m almost certainly not going to die of it, so I’ll take my chances. I need to pay the rent”—or whatever it is. We simply cannot all be in this together if we have created a system which creates perverse incentives for certain groups. My noble friend knows that I am saying this with support for him and for the Government, but it is incumbent on us all to solve this so that we can act in unison to make sure that we deal with this health crisis together.

[Lord Blunkett]

I add my support by saying that those words from the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, were very wise. On the people that we have addressed so far and who have been talked about publicly, I reinforce that it is quite right that we should seek, in whatever way we can, to provide the support that has just been described. However, there is a group that falls between those who have already been assisted in support to companies and the purely self-employed: the worker working for themselves in our economy.

There is a group of entrepreneurs, many of them with start-ups and some with continuing businesses, who cannot access what is on offer to those in slightly different circumstances because of this. If they are using serviced premises—I will give an example in this House in a second—and therefore do not pay business rates, they are not entitled to the help that is already been granted on business rates or the grants that have been put in place, all of which are extremely welcome. In addition to what we describe as the self-employed there is therefore a group of people with very small microbusinesses.

The hairdresser’s in the Palace of Westminster—I make no declaration other than that I use it—is not unique but is a good example of someone running a small business which employs people but which cannot draw down on the help currently available for the reasons I have just described. It does not pay business rates in this building, and those with serviced premises that they rent do not pay them either. I hope that the noble Earl will be able to take back to his colleagues that there is this little additional gap that we should not have to come back to and say, “We forgot about those.” I am sure that is not the case but I just want to reinforce it.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I support the amendment and I stress, as others have, the extreme urgency in this. The noble Viscount, Lord Colville, told us a very moving story about a situation involving an older worker, but I invite the Committee to think about the situation of many young people, who are disproportionately represented in the gig economy in these sorts of roles.

In London and many other cities, young people live in shared households. There may be four, five or six people, each with one bedroom, probably not even with a living room, because what was once a living room is now a bedroom. What happens in that household when most people cannot pay the rent? What strains will there be in that household as people struggle to get by, with the most basic cooking facilities and the smallest amount of space? One can imagine the difficulties such people will be in. They need to be rescued, to know that they have security now, and that will give stability and certainty.

As many other noble Lords have stressed, this would ensure that that person would not have to continue to operate as a courier for food travelling around the country—I am trying not to mention a brand name—or as a care worker or in any other of the roles they might be fulfilling. This is in the interests of everybody’s health, but also in the interests of people who do not have, as some in this situation will, the bank of mum and dad to rely on. It is those young people who do not have the bank of mum and dad that we really have to help.

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[Earl Howe]

The noble Baroness makes a very important point. She may be aware of instances where the system has broken down, and of course that is very regrettable. I hope that those affected will be able to bring that to the attention of the Department for Work and Pensions. We can only do what we can do. I say again that the willingness to ensure that the system works is most definitely there.

[Lord Blunkett]

I am in danger of being a pain here, but could the noble Earl acknowledge that he understood the point I was trying to make about micro-businesses? If they employ somebody, they may be able to draw down on the £2,500 per month assistance, which is very welcome. But if the business itself goes bust because it cannot draw down on the generous help that is available to larger businesses with rateable value, then those employees will not have a job to come back to.

[Earl Howe]

I fully acknowledge the noble Lord’s point. I refer him to the various measures that my right honourable friend announced for businesses generally, but in particular for small and medium-sized businesses. They are more vulnerable generally than larger businesses. The job retention scheme was specifically designed to address this situation, as he rightly said, as were mortgage holidays. The business interruption loan scheme is available to small businesses, particularly on finance facilities up to £5 million. That will enable more businesses to access the finance they need to assist cash flow. If it proves necessary for my right honourable friend to look at further measures, I have no doubt that he will do so.