Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Self-Isolation and Linked Households) (England) Regulations 2020

Lord Caine Excerpts

Thursday 7th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Caine (Con)]

My Lords, given the grim statistics that the Prime Minister outlined in his address on Monday, I fully accept the need for this third lockdown, but I am also clear that it cannot last indefinitely and that we must do everything we can to avoid treading this path again. I share the concerns of many, including my right honourable friend the Prime Minister, over the impact of a third lockdown: on the economy, particularly in retail, hospitality and small businesses; on the education and life chances of our young people; and on the physical and mental well-being of the public, especially those we are asking to shield—something of which I, sadly, have direct personal experience from the first lockdown.

We must therefore find a way out of here, and that must of course be through mass vaccination. I applaud the Government’s efforts in delivering the vaccine so far and in ensuring that more people have been vaccinated here than in the rest of Europe put together, and I strongly support the ambition to have everyone in the top four priority groups vaccinated by mid-February. To achieve that, as other noble Lords have stressed, we need to use every resource at our disposal. That includes the extensive deployment of our Armed Forces, a stripping away of any unnecessary bureaucracy, and ever-more vaccination centres.

In short, we need to act as if we are on a total war footing by running this vaccination programme as a round-the-clock and precise military operation, with the production of the vaccine akin the production of munitions. Ministers and other noble Lords have rightly said that we are in a race against time between the vaccine and the virus. It is not a race that we can afford to lose.