Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) Regulations 2020

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, try to be a loyal Back-Bencher in my party. I am not supposed to agree with dreadful right-wing Tories such as the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, but I agree with a great deal of what he just said—in particular, that there are no costs or benefits in the analysis that the Government have produced. There is absolutely no analysis in it; that is the real problem. However, I told our Whips that I might vote for one of these amendments if I agreed with them, but none of them pass muster so I shall be a loyal Back-Bencher and abstain, which I do not like doing.

It has been amusing in a fairly horrible way to see people in the south of England get all upset about the fact that their areas have been put into tier 2, or even tier 3 in one or two places. Where I live, in east Lancashire, we have effectively been under strict restrictions, save a few weeks in the middle of summer, for more than eight months. It is getting very wearing indeed. The damage it is doing not just to the economy but to people’s mental health and social relationships really is dreadful. We were fairly low in the spring, then it all started up in August to a degree, then we had a huge increase in September and we became leaders in these dreadful national league tables. Now the rate is going down again. Despite what the Government say and the way that they try to match their policies and actions to the way it goes up and down and varies from region to region, I do not think that they have any clear idea of what is happening.

There was a wonderful article about Liverpool in the Manchester Evening News by Jennifer Williams, who knows more about this than most people, which I recommend everybody reads. It is 2,000 or 3,000 words long. The Government say that the restrictions and policies in Liverpool resulted in it all going down, which is why they can go down to tier 2, and it is all to do with the mass testing that has been taking place. However, the same trends have been happening in other boroughs in Merseyside, such as Knowsley and St Helens, as in Liverpool, and they did not have any of this mass testing. They certainly did not have the Army in the same way that Liverpool did. Jennifer Williams points out that the impression is being given to a lot of people that they are going to have a lot of soldiers in to organise this, but she quotes one of the directors of public health in the north-west saying that if that was going to happen across the north-west,

“we’d need an army the size of China’s.”

What will actually happen is more selective testing of people who need to be mass tested but not everybody. So, there is some hope there.

However, testing is no good unless it leads to tracing, isolating and support. Support is still not being given to people at an adequate level. An article in the Guardian today points out that a large number of people who are self-isolating are unable to access the £500 that the Government promised them for technical reasons, because of why they are isolating and, in some cases, because the councils are running out of money. In my own authority —where, as noble Lords will know, I am a councillor—there have been 538 applications for self-isolation grants. Some 217 have been paid but 321 were rejected because they do not fit the Government’s criteria, despite the fact that people are self-isolating, perhaps with their children too. In many cases, it is because they were told by the app to self-isolate but that does not guarantee the money or qualify them for it. My authority has already spent more money on the £500 grants than it is getting from the Government.

I could go on at great length but do not know how much time I have left. My problem is that I can never see the time. I have been told that I have a bit longer so I will say one more thing. If there is to be proper testing and tracing, we must not only forward-trace people’s contacts but back-trace them. In particular, if the numbers are going down, you have to stop new centres of infection or hot spots developing. You do that by finding out where people got infected. If there is a group of people all getting the infection from the same school, factory, supermarket or whatever, you go back to the source of infection and stamp it out. Local environmental health and public health inspectors are experts at that but this is not what they are being told to do by the Government. Unless the Government tell them that, it will all go down again then start to go up again. Where? We do not know because it will all depend on local circumstances.