Health Protection (Coronavirus) (Restrictions) (England) (No. 4) Regulations 2020

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, let me say clearly at the outset that I am reluctantly in favour of the national lockdown. The pandemic is serious and we need to protect the lives of vulnerable people by following the advice to stay at home when we can, and otherwise to follow the advice on safe distancing, clean hands and face masks. However, that is at a huge cost. It will take years to recover economically, and many will bear the social and emotional scars for a similar period.

I cannot let this moment pass without joining those who are saying that government inaction has made those impacts a whole lot worse. For example, SAGE member and UCL professor of epidemiology Andrew Hayward said about SAGE’s recommendation of 40 days ago:

“We can’t turn back the clock, but I think if we had chosen a two-week circuit break at that time we would definitely have saved thousands of lives.”


He went on to say that an earlier short circuit break,

“would clearly have inflicted substantially less damage on our economy than the proposed four-week lockdown will do.”

The Government should be ashamed and apologise to Sir Keir Starmer MP, the leader of the Opposition, for the attacks that they made on him when he made the right call on a national lockdown after the SAGE advice, which would have saved lives and jobs.

I turn to my main point about children. I am pleased that schools remain open. Children need not only to learn but to socialise and play. We should collectively thank the nation’s teachers for putting themselves at risk by continuing to work in difficult circumstances and with limited testing and support services to assist them. Without teachers’ professionalism, the economic and social scarring of this pandemic would be much worse. However, I ask the Minister, please come back with a slight change to these regulations to allow children to continue to play together safely. Play is an essential part of childhood. Pupils can play together in their bubbles when at school but not with those same children after school, at weekends and in holidays. To parents, that makes no sense. Why cannot children play with others from their same school bubble out of school? That would help hugely their mental health and that of their parents, at negligible additional infection risk.

These regulations are too late but necessary. The Government need to do more, where they can, to allow us the freedom to safeguard our mental health in lockdown. Letting children play is one way in which they could help.