Health Protection (Coronavirus, Wearing of Face Coverings in a Relevant Place) (England) Regulations 2020

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Friday 18th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I support the amendment and thank the Minister for his thorough explanation of the new regulations and how they will work, which is very helpful. I particularly support the part of the amendment that

“regrets the delay in bringing forward the Regulations”

back in the spring. Indeed, I regret the fact that the Government were not advising people to wear face masks even earlier—in particular in the early days of the virus, when there was a lot of concern about the lack of PPE generally and face masks were a substitute for people in care homes and so on who could not get hold of proper PPE. Nevertheless, face masks were better than nothing.

I congratulate people all over the country who set about making them on their sewing machines at home and distributing them—particularly a group in Colne who call themselves the Maskateers and ended up producing thousands of face masks initially for free distribution to local care homes and so on when they simply had nothing else. It was appalling that this was necessary but highly commendable that they did it. When the care homes began to get proper equipment, they continued making them and made them available to the general public for a donation, which has been to the great benefit of the local hospice—so not everything is bad in what has happened as far as Covid is concerned.

When I was cut off by time in the previous debate, I was talking about the fact that in our borough we had got to the top of the league table of the incidence of positive tests and were working very hard indeed to bring it down. In his reply, the Minister talked about the need for dedicated local outbreak plans. The point I was making was that that was exactly what we had. A lot of people were working very hard, based on the accepted mantra of “test, test, test”, then “track, track, track” the contacts and follow up to make sure that they were are isolating. That is what we were doing.

That effective local work was destroyed in one day when the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State went on television and appeared to be blaming people who were not symptomatic for wanting tests. In our part of the world, with the full agreement of people at national level, we had been encouraging everybody to go and get tests so that we knew what was happening and where the problems were, and then—in the streets and areas where the main problems were—going and knocking on doors and getting people to do it. That is what I meant when I said that the Government had pulled the rug from under the work that was being done locally—and unfortunately our numbers are now going up again.