Coronavirus Act 2020: Temporary Provisions

Lord Hain Excerpts

Monday 28th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I agree with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Bridges said, and say what a pleasure it is to welcome my noble friend Baroness Clark of Kilwinning, with whom I worked in the Commons, especially on trade union issues, supporting postal workers. I also welcome the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, who has been a beacon of sanity for his pro-Europeanism, and with whom I once raced wheel-to-wheel in an MPs v Lords motor race in the early 1990s at Brands Hatch.

I thank the Minister for his invariable courtesy and hard work, but I ask him these questions. Why does he think my niece living in Dorset, a young working mother of three whose husband is a firefighter, speaks for so many citizens throughout the country in expressing her outrage in these terms at last week’s shambolic announcement by the Prime Minister: “It’s a mess, he didn’t discuss the fact that no one can actually get tests, which is causing people to be off work for ages. We’ve just had an email from the kids’ school, saying it may have to close, as the tests for staff are taking too long”?

Why did the Government not accept the offer from Swiftair, an airbase company, to test everybody landing at Britain’s airports from other countries for £115 and give them the results quickly? Surely that is common sense, and it would take the enormous load off airlines facing bankruptcy and the travel industry as well.

Instead of imposing an expensive, incompetent system of testing and tracing through privatised agencies and outsourced corporates with no experience of this sort of thing, why did Ministers not rely on our excellent system of local care and primary healthcare, using GPs, for example, who often have the friends and the sort of people we would all have made contact with on their books as well as us? Why do they not use care workers and primary healthcare workers and resource them properly, instead of cutting local budgets so remorselessly? Why was the money not spent on them? Why were local councils not properly consulted? The leader of the Leeds City Council was on the radio only a few days ago, asking—pleading—to be properly consulted and properly resourced. There is a real danger that without a proper test, trace and isolation system, like Germany’s, for example—a much more efficient and cheaper one than ours—we could lurch from lockdown to lockdown at terrible cost to our economy and social fabric. I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, said in this respect.

Finally, if I am permitted a rant, I am astonished that anybody agreed to a different regime for bars in the House of Commons from the 10 pm closure for everybody else. Surely this is a Dominic Cummings case of “Do as I say not as I do”. I am thankful that that did not apply in the Lords, as our digital Lord Speaker has just confirmed in his announcement on Twitter.