Covid-19 Internal Review

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I am enormously grateful for my noble friend’s kind comments. On his point on vaccines, I emphasise the enormous contribution of the whole union behind the vaccine project. It has been a union project to deploy vaccines to every person in the UK at amazing speed and with consistency right across all parts of the union. For that we should be enormously grateful.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, while we all here respect that health is a devolved responsibility, does the Minister not agree with me that one of the problems that arose was the confusion arising from different rules in different parts of the United Kingdom and different messages throughout the United Kingdom? In the inquiry, will the United Kingdom Government talk with the devolved Administrations to make sure that, in future, there is a more co-ordinated response? The virus knows no boundaries.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the Prime Minister will define the terms of reference and the chair will define how the inquiry deports itself. On the noble Lord’s point about the rules and the suggestion of confusion, I agree that there was a lot of heat and smoke around differences but the truth is that 99% of everything that we did between the different parts of the union was exactly the same. There was a lot of focus on very small differences, but what I celebrate is how much common ground there was in our responses.