Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Self-Isolation) (England) Regulations 2020

Lord Hain Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Finlay of Llandaff and to agree with the thrust of her remarks.

Can the Minister respond to the interview given to last Sunday’s Observer by Graham Medley, a member of SAGE, the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, and chair of its sub-committee on modelling? He argued that a massive expansion of testing will still leave Britain struggling to keep Covid-19 infections under control unless the system can inform people within 24 hours that they are positive. Ministers are fond of quoting rising figures on numbers tested, but surely returning test results within 24 hours is as critical as capacity in a successful test and trace system. Graham Medley said that, if necessary, capacity should be curbed in favour of speed.

The latest figures show significant delays in the test and trace system. In the first week of October, just 33% of tests conducted at regional test sites were returned within 24 hours. The figures were 24% for local walk-in sites and 42% for mobile testing sites. The number of home-testing kits received within 48 hours was a measly16%. Graham Medley told the Observer:

“The length of time it takes to get the test result is critical for the contact-tracing. And so there has to be a potential compromise between the volume of testing done and the ability to return the result, ideally within 24 hours … Suppose you could treble the number of tests you did, but only at the expense of returning them in a longer period of time, then that’s not really going to work. The volume is important, but only if it can be done promptly.”


Surely the system is still a shambles. Almost 250,000 contacts of people who tested positive in England had not been reached by tracers since the end of May. And that has still not improved very much.