Health and Social Care Update

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Monday 22nd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Lord is entirely right to emphasise this incredibly important aspect of our toolkit to manage infection rates down. The workplace is an area of infection threat and asymptomatic testing is a way to keep workplaces safe. We have put in place until the summer the free provision of lateral flow tests for those who wish to do workplace testing, and we are looking at ways in which we could potentially extend that, particularly in circumstances where the infection rate crept up again. We are working very closely with BEIS colleagues to look at the kind of regime that would be necessary. I pay tribute to DfT colleagues who have trail-blazed this area with the test to release programme, which uses private testing capacity for that important transport corridor, and to colleagues at UKAS who have put in place the accreditation necessary to create an independent, private ecology of the kind that the noble Lord refers to.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I come back to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack: the SPI-M-O consensus statement of 24 February showed that while 95% of care home residents had had the vaccine, only 70% of staff had. We really must do better on this; does the Minister agree?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I could not agree more heartedly; the vaccination of staff is a massive priority. Those figures give us cause for some reflection on how we can increase them. The adoption rate of vaccines by all healthcare workers has been much more impressive than on previous vaccine rollouts, so we are encouraged overall, but we are determined to hammer out all the last rock pools where people have not been persuaded. As I alluded to my noble friend Lord Cormack, we are looking at all methods to make sure that we get there in the end.