Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (North East of England) Regulations 2020

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I support and underline everything that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has just said. This is the latest set of local area statutory instruments that we seem to discuss on almost a daily basis. Yet again, they are out of date—it may be a little known fact, but this is actually now called the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (North East and North West of England) Regulations 2020 as a result of an amendment in another obscure statutory instrument that we received. This illustrates the confusion about the whole thing. If the new initiative that may be announced this afternoon provides more consistency and makes these things easier to understand, that, at least, will not be a bad thing. I will not talk about childcare today; I think we will want to talk about that when we discover what is being proposed today.

I do, however, want to talk about test and trace. I believe it is now generally understood that, whatever restrictions are imposed and whatever the legal background to them, an efficient, well-run and successful system of testing, tracing, tracking contacts and isolating as appropriate is key to tackling the coronavirus problem. It is clear that whatever claims are made about the number of people who have been tested and all the rest of it, the system throughout the country is a shambles. This has to be tackled, and I am sure that everybody wants that. The key to it must be to do it a local level and to involve the skills and knowledge of those who do it week by week as part of their normal jobs—not in the case of coronavirus but in the case of food poisoning and other outbreaks of disease. They are trained people and they know what to do.

As an illustration of how shambolic it has been, I want to go through what has happened in my own patch in Pendle, which of course is in the north-west and not in the north-east. Pendle Borough Council was desperate to get involved and to use its expert staff in setting up a proper system. It is about a month now since the Government, the authorities and the county agreed that we could do this. The first thing that we discovered was that where the local system identified contacts from positive cases—all of which had been sent down from national level, being cases which the so-called NHS Test and Trace system had not been able to reach, so they were the difficult ones; they were coming late but nevertheless quite a few of them were contacted—those contacts had to be sent back to national level to be dealt with by Serco or whoever in their call centres, even if they were in the same families or in the same street or working in the same factories, and even if local people using local knowledge could have contacted and traced them much more quickly. I would like an assurance that this nonsense has now been stopped, and that if there are to be a lot of local councils doing this work locally, they will be able to follow up the people they have found, because, otherwise, it is a nonsense.

To have a proper testing and tracing system, it is necessary that there are sufficient testing stations locally. One thing that people in Pendle did was set up four stations. That number is now going down to two because, in the case of the community testing station, the Government are refusing to send out any more testing kits, so it has to close, and of the three that come under the Government, they have closed one. We have gone from four to two despite the fact that our numbers are still going up alarmingly. It needs to be taken seriously; it needs to be done properly. Unless it is, nothing else will succeed.