Covid-19 Update

Lord Caine Excerpts

Tuesday 6th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I confess that the noble Lord’s question is new to me. I will look into that matter and write to him with an update.

[Lord Caine (Con)]

My Lords, while I very warmly welcome this Statement, my noble friend will be aware that some batches of the AstraZeneca vaccine have yet to be approved by the European Medicines Agency, placing a question mark over the eligibility of some 5 million double-vaccinated Britons for the EU vaccine passport. Can my noble friend assure the House that the Government are working towards a swift resolution of this issue, which ought to be achievable?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I am extremely sympathetic to the situation that my noble friend and a large number of other people find themselves in. I reassure him that we are seeking a solution to this issue with the EMA, and I am hopeful that we will get there some time soon.

Covid-19 Update

Lord Caine Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I completely endorse the sentiments of the noble Baroness and can absolutely reassure her that this is top of the agenda for the G7 leaders’ meeting later this week. The Prime Minister will absolutely be ramming home the message that she put extremely well. Roughly 1 billion vaccinations have been done around the world so far; that leaves another 7 billion or 8 billion to do. We need manufacturing on a scale that the world simply does not have today to see that job through. That is why the UK has contributed so much through the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is a wonderful, portable, cheap and flexible platform for creating vaccines for the world. We are ensuring that that magic source is available to all those who can contribute vaccine manufacturing capacity anywhere in the world. In the meantime, we will ensure that any capacity that we have after we have done the British public is made available, but we have to see the job through here in the UK. It would be utterly counterproductive if the UK, having got so far, tripped over at the last hurdle.

[Lord Caine (Con)]

My Lords, having spent much of the Whitsun Recess trying to do my best to support the beleaguered hospitality sector in west and north Yorkshire, two messages rang out loud and clear: first, the problems that many establishments are facing with staff shortages, in part due to Covid restrictions, which are affecting levels of service; and, secondly, the absolute calamity for many establishments if the lifting of Covid restrictions is delayed beyond 21 June. Can my noble friend therefore assure the House that, in taking what I accept are finely balanced decisions about lifting restrictions, the plight of our hospitality sector and the livelihoods of those who work in it will be properly considered?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I pay tribute to those in the hospitality and related sectors—both those who manage and those who work in it. It has been one of the toughest aspects of this awful pandemic to see these valued and important industries really hammered by the closures that have been necessary to stop the transmission of this awful disease. I hear my noble friend’s message absolutely loud and clear. We are on the final slopes of this journey. We want to ensure that, when we open, we stay open and there is no yo-yoing. That is why we are committed to looking at the data in the run-up to 21 June. His point is extremely well made, and we will definitely take it on board.

Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Lord Caine Excerpts

Monday 8th February 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Naseby (Con) [V]]

I just pushed on the button that said unmute—

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Caine) (Con)]

I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi. Could the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, please mute himself?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I want to ask about the route out of lockdown. I fear the Government are relying far too much on the vaccine programme to get us out of trouble and may be planning to ignore the need to reduce the prevalence of the virus in the community before easing restrictions. I hope that the Minister will reply to my noble friend Lady Barker’s question about a lot of test and trace being laid off. Surely this is the time to continue the effort to find out where the virus is and stop it in its tracks by supported isolation strategies? Can the Minister justify this reduction in testing staff? If he tells me that resources are being switched from the eye-wateringly expensive centralised system to locally based—and more cost-effective—test, trace and isolate services, I will be very pleased to hear it. However, the Government were so slow to make use of local expertise in favour of their expensive national system that I somehow doubt it.

Unless we bear down on incidence in the community, mutations will continue to occur and variants will result, with a possible consequence for the effectiveness of current vaccines. What lessons have been learned from what happened last autumn, when cases rose again after the summer easing of restrictions and we had a second wave worse than the first? What lessons have been learned from abroad, specifically Portugal, where there is now an even worse crisis for which it is having to get help from Germany and other EU countries because they had a free-for-all over Christmas?

Are the Government watching what is happening in Israel, where the level of vaccination is higher than here but levels of illness are not reducing as fast as expected? As Israeli epidemiologist Dr Ran Balicer has commented:

“Vaccines work, but the picture is more complex than that. Other steps are needed as well.”


Experts there believe that the lower level of adherence to lockdown in Israel is part of the problem, which should be a clear lesson for us here in the UK.

Can other noble Lords mute, please?

All this indicates the need for timely parliamentary scrutiny of any proposals for loosening restrictions, so that Members of both Houses will have at least as much notice as schools. Members need the opportunity to counter the pressure that the Government are clearly feeling from the so-called Covid Recovery Group, which does not agree with restrictions and seems to believe, mistakenly, that herd immunity can come from widespread natural infections. It does not seem to care about the deaths and long-term illness that would ensue from such a strategy.

Looking to the future, can the Minister say, first, what studies are being set up to monitor the ongoing level of immunity of those who have been vaccinated, testing against not only current variants but others that may arise? This will be essential if scientists are to advise on the nature and frequency of future booster vaccines. Secondly, do we have sufficient capacity in genome sequencing adequately to track new variants, which will inevitably come into the country until the whole world is vaccinated? We are world leaders in genome sequencing but capacity is different from expertise. Do we not need to scale up this work and perhaps do what they are doing in Denmark: sequence the relevant part of the genome of every positive case in order to detect new variants early? I am afraid that when I heard a little while ago that we have two cases of the South African variant I cynically suspected that we actually had many more but did not know about it. We can know this only if we increase our genome sequencing capacity.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Caine) (Con)]

Before calling the next speaker, I remind noble Lords to remain on mute when not speaking. I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Caine) (Con)]

The Grand Committee stands adjourned until 5.40 pm. I remind Members to sanitise their desks and chairs before leaving the Room.

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.

Covid-19 Update

Lord Caine Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Caine (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend will be aware of the great uncertainties facing those who work in the hospitality sector, particularly in those parts of the country that are in tier 3, such as my native West Riding of Yorkshire. What realistic prospect is there of areas moving from tiers 3 to 2 when the next review takes place on 16 December, so that bars and restaurants can at least open their doors for the crucial Christmas period? Rather than grouping together entire regions into tiers, is there not a strong case for more bespoke local arrangements?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My noble friend is entirely right about the hospitality sector. It is a sector that we care about greatly and we recognise how hard hit it has been. None the less, we have to be considerate of the fact that the best epidemiological studies suggest that this is an environment where infection hits hard, so we are trying to hit the right balance between the two. As for local areas and trying to be more precise and focused in our tiering, that sounds like a sensible suggestion. However, we experimented with it quite thoroughly during the summer, and I remember standing here at this Dispatch Box week after week running through tweaks to various local tiers, only to find that the virus very quickly leaped from one area to another. It is a frustrating fact that the virus spreads from city to surrounding rural area and from one town to the next with alarming speed. It is also true, as discussed in response to the earlier question, that for communications it is important to keep things simple. For those reasons, we are not envisaging a change to the tiering structure at the moment.