Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Leicester) (No. 2) Regulations 2020

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 24th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the Minister for yet again coming to explain another sheaf of affirmative instruments about faraway places that most noble Lords probably do not know much about. However, some do.

I shall comment on one or two points that have been made. First, the Minister said that in Leicester, local people, local authorities and other agencies had made herculean efforts. That is true of other areas, but people are now being threatened with another six months, and it feels like a threat, though I understand it is not meant as such. Their energies and resilience are being severely tested, and more practical support, including money from the Government, would be very helpful.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, both referred to the fact that the process we are using to deal with the regulations in this House is not satisfactory. It is not. I will have more to say on that later today.

The noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, mentioned black and minority ethnic involvement. I come from an area with a substantial ethnic minority population, and I wonder if the Minister will have more to say about that in this discussion.

Neither Leicester nor Blackburn, nor even Bradford, which shares a border with Pendle on the moors, are part of Pendle. Nevertheless, I should declare an interest as a Pendle councillor; I may refer to it from time to time in this debate and the next.

The other points the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, made—although I suspect we come from a different ideological starting point—are very important and will become more important. We should discuss them.

The Leicester regulations demonstrate the extraordinary complexity of this whole thing. This is the sixth set of regulations, as my noble friend Lady Bowles mentioned. The three amendments to the original regulations were a complete rewrite, and now there are new amendments. One gets the impression that, with the best will in the world, much of the Government’s decision-making on this, which affects local areas, is being done—I will not say on the back of fag packets, because they are out of fashion nowadays—on whatever they use nowadays. Week by week, people who live in areas that have the highest rate of Covid-19, which include east Lancashire, are on tenterhooks to see what is going to happen next. Sometimes, it is what the local people have put forward, as the Minister suggested. In other cases, things seem to come out of the blue. Although the situations have been changing a lot, more stability would be welcomed by all the people who are doing their best to deal with this on a local level. Working out the interrelationship between new national rules and local rules, as they come and change week by week, is extraordinarily difficult, although people do their best to explain it. I wonder whether, sooner or later, some national rules will come which will be more restrictive than local rules and will then apply in a particular area.

Testing is crucial. We all know that testing is crucial. The comments from the Prime Minister two days ago were not helpful, and they have been more or less rowed back on. But it is not just how many tests are done or how many testing kits are sent out, it is the speed of the results and the follow-up of the contacts—at the local level—which is often so important. This still needs a great deal of work. The Minister said yesterday that things were getting a lot better in this respect, but it is not always obvious on the ground.

Finally, yesterday I asked the Minister a couple of questions about the new regulations which provide people with £500, under certain circumstances, if they are isolating, and also about the evidence of enforcement. What the Minister told me was that this would be done by the normal processes by which public benefits are handed out, and that the enforcement would be by local agencies and the local police. What he said was very vague and general, and I wonder if he has some specific ideas on exactly how this is going to be carried out.