Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions on Gatherings) (North of England) Regulations 2020

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Friday 25th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, in these regulations it is young people, who are least affected by the virus, who are taking the lion’s share of the burden in the north and throughout the UK. Young people, who are instinctively gregarious, are living with their school lives damaged. They are often the first to be quarantined and yet are expected to attend schools which have had to sacrifice school sport and activities on the altar of academia, necessarily prioritised under Covid. As my noble friend Lord Forsyth said, they have had to trade in a university experience for a remote online degree course, often in a closed single room, while having to pay the same costs charged by universities, which have closed the opportunities for sport, an active lifestyle and social and cultural engagement, which have been at the centre of the university experience for generations.

For those who started work coming out of school, college or university last autumn, it was the young who were victims of a furlough scheme, which was constructed on a year’s employment contract, without which the employee had to pay everything to keep them. It was no surprise that young people were the casualties of a “last-in-first-out” policy, making them three times more likely than employees in general to lose their jobs. It was young people who woke to see apprenticeships and internships go up in smoke. It is young people who have no chance of a first step on the ladder when companies are making existing employees redundant—a generation of young people more obese and more prone to suicide, mental health issues, boredom and loneliness than any other in living memory.

When the Government come forward with their promised and overdue sports recovery programme, will the Minister recognise that a physically and mentally fit and active cohort of young people is critical and, in health terms, beneficial in the fight against Covid? Will he ensure that it is about not only the survival of clubs hammered by Covid, but also about the people served by the clubs, the young who have no team sport opportunities now or on the horizon? If not, we will have let down a generation of young people, not only those in the north or Glasgow, but a whole generation who should not have borne the brunt of a disease which least affects them.