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

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, this weekend I thought I would try to do a bit of research to help my noble friend on the Front Bench.

In 1960, I joined the Reckitt Group in Hull, which is in the north-east, as a management trainee. I looked up my notes and found that I was shadowing a test market just south of Newcastle for a brand of Jane Seymour cosmetics. I noted that my tutor made it quite clear that you have to analyse the fabric of the society in which you are doing the test market. The north-east is nowhere near the same as Bedfordshire, where I lived. It is very different. Therefore, any campaign or programme must reflect that difference.

There is a huge community spirit in places such as Hull which does not exist to anywhere near the same extent in the south. There is also far more terraced housing, far more ethnic mixing and a wholly different attitude to life. In that part of the world, local government is very strong. I had the privilege of being the only ever—so far as I can find out—Conservative leader of the London Borough of Islington. I soon learned that the friends in the north in local government are really strong.

I thought, “What is the nearest analogy we have for this?” I am in a medical household. We had a look at what happened with Asian flu in 1957-58; no less than 9 million people suffered from it, the commercial world was hit and 14,000 died. The key element in the report I read was that it started out being controlled nationally, but they soon found that that did not work and had to use local medical officers and GPs for help. That is the evidence there.

After that, I had a look at the statistics in the latest report I could find from the Office for National Statistics: death rates in the first wave of this situation, which began in March, rose steeply from one per day on 2 March to 975 per day at the peak on 7 April. If we look at the second phase—now—there were two deaths from Covid in England on 1 September; five weeks later, on 6 October, this had risen only to 11. That is a huge difference.

As I said on Friday, I looked at what the death certificates show as the primary cause. Between 10 August and 7 October, there were 43 deaths—not hundreds. There were no deaths in the groups 0 to 19 and 20 to 39, four in the group 40 to 59, 14 in the group 60 to 79 and 24 in the group 80-plus. If the objective is to save real lives, we have to look at the elderly and the very elderly. Frankly, the young are not dying. That surprises nobody. Any of us who knows anything about medicine knows that very few young people die from any sort of disease.

I cut a lot of papers, that is a terrible trait of mine. In the Telegraph of 11 October, I read a report from Professor David Livermore of the University of East Anglia. He says, quite rightly:

“In March, we knew little … Now … we know that much infection is very mild and inconsequential”.


He then gives us some figures from Northumbria University and goes on to say that lockdowns might be good if the vaccine were just around the corner. But it is not, is it? At best, it will be here in the spring. We are taking quite a punt following the present policy.

It seems to me—and to Professor Livermore—that life should return to normal, as far as possible, for those at low risk and anyone older who accepts the hazards, which includes him and me. The virus will circulate among us, generating herd immunity. As we recover, it will run out of hosts and lose traction, rather as it did in Sweden.