Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 8th February 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Naseby (Con) [V]]

My Lords, my wife and I tested positive at the beginning of January. We isolated. Half way through the isolation, my wife was taken seriously ill and taken into Bedford Hospital. Thankfully, she is now at home. I pay a major tribute to the efficiency of the testing at Bedford town car park, and particularly to the care and attention in Bedford Hospital.

On Saturday, I had my coronavirus jab. The whole thing took 10 minutes. It was brilliantly organised. I spent some time talking to the volunteers, and we owe a huge tribute to them. In that context, I hope that some plans are being made for the Prime Minister to write a letter to all the volunteers who have come forward and taken part.

I have three pleas to my noble friend on the Front Bench. One comes from me as a marketing man. The tiers have worked, but one thing you learn about marketing is that you need to refine down areas, particularly if you are test-marketing new products. We are not test-marketing new products; we are test-marketing something which we cannot totally get a grip on. I wonder whether it would not be more sensible, instead of thinking about district council areas, to hone down to major towns and have a close look at them. That way, we would begin to really get a grip on it.

Secondly, on timing, any organisation—whether it be a business, a school, or whatever—needs time to plan ahead. I hope that when the Statement is made on 22 February, the Government will be planning for approximately three weeks’ notice of any substantial change.

Thirdly, I again make a plea for sport. I declare an interest as president of Northamptonshire County Cricket Club. There was virtually no cricket at all last year. The new season starts, if my noble friend would like to note it, on 8 April with county games across the country. All the 18 major counties have Covid-secure grounds. A huge amount of energy, money and resources have been put into those 18 grounds. The staff are well briefed and organised; the players are the same. Can we please try really hard to start off this season—perhaps confining it to one member and one guest at the grounds? I hope that when the Twenty20 comes round, which will not be until the beginning of June, we will be in a position to open up to the public.

Finally, I make a plea for Wimbledon and declare an interest as a member. Wimbledon’s championship is the leading tennis championship in the world. A great deal of work has gone into ensuring that we can, if at all possible, hold a championship this year in the first two weeks of July. There would be no finer advertisement for UK Ltd, and for the great British public, than to see Wimbledon happening with spectators in those weeks. I wish my noble friend all success in the way he is handling these things, and to the teams working for him, I say: thank you—you have done a superb job.

[Lord Clark of Windermere (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for all the work he has done in fighting this terrible pandemic. I wish him well with all his efforts in future, but perhaps I can be a little critical of details today, because underpinning this SI are the basic nuts and bolts which make the system work—and they are creaking in places.

We sometimes do not realise that there is a difference between guidelines, which are what Ministers would like us to do but do not have the force of law, and regulations, which do have that force. As we have gone through the tiers created by the Government over the past year, some of the issues have been about guidelines and some about regulations. Let me give a couple of simple examples.

Colleagues will recollect that at the beginning of the year, two women were handed fixed penalty notices by Derbyshire police for reportedly travelling five miles for exercise. The police force subsequently stated that it was reviewing the action based on new national guidelines, but the issuance of the notice was still supported by the Health Secretary, although it did not have the force of law. Then of course we had a similar case—I am not making this as a political point—when the Prime Minister was cycling 18 kilometres to ride around a park in London. I have no trouble at all with that, but the issue is that it causes problems on a wider scale, and with tragic results.

I live in a national park. As I look out of the window, the snow is falling—the hills are covered in snow. Although people have guidelines that the Government’s wish is that they should not drive to the Lake District, but they do. Every weekend, they are still driving regularly from Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool, Kent and London. That is not illegal, but they are not allowed to spend the night. How do you trap people who are sometimes spending the night?

We had a tragic incident this last weekend involving the mountain rescue, which has been called out several times, when two young men went camping on the mountains above Kirkstone Pass. One of them got chest pains and called the mountain rescue in the middle of the night—it was two in the morning. One member of the mountain rescue slipped and fell; he has very serious injuries.

However, the police cannot stop people driving in to camp. Once they have camped, they can be issued with penalty notices because that is in a regulation: you cannot stay overnight in an area such as this. I am arguing that there needs to be some consistency in the regulations and guidelines so that we know where we stand, and that the police also know what they can and cannot do.

[Lord Naseby (Con) [V]]

I just pushed on the button that said unmute—

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Caine) (Con)]

I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi. Could the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, please mute himself?