Covid-19 Update

Lord Patel Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

I thank my noble friend. Certainly, the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the Communities Minister have all had regular dialogues with the leaders of the Liverpool City Region over the last few days. She is absolutely right that within the very high tier there are certain baseline restrictions and then others that can be decided at a local level. She is right that in Liverpool, decisions have been made to close casinos, betting shops, indoor gyms, fitness and dance studios and sports facilities, although there are going to be exemptions for organised indoor team sports for disabled people and activities for under-18s, understanding some of the issues she raised. Obviously, she is absolutely right about mental health, which is why we have provided £9.2 million of additional funding for mental health charities.

[Lord Patel (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is generally accepted that the test, track and isolation policy is important for suppression of the virus. Despite the large volume of tests that we carry out, as the noble Baroness stated, plus the increase in capacity, we have not seen any significant effect in suppression of the virus through this policy, so what more needs to be done to make our test, track and isolation policy more effective? Furthermore, does the Minister agree that any policy, suggested by some, of abandoning suppression of the virus and adopting a policy of herd immunity is morally, ethically and scientifically flawed?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

On test and trace, I hope I outlined in my earlier answers the work that is going on to further improve national and local link-up. As I said, across the country there are now 95 local authority contact tracing teams—21 local teams in the east of England, for instance, 23 in the east Midlands and 21 in the north-west. Combined with the national system, they are helping to ensure that we have good data on the ground so that we are able more effectively to track what is happening and then, with the tiered approach, make sure that the interventions work on a regional or even more local level.

Covid-19

Lord Patel Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

The police will have the option to draw on military support if they require it. This would follow tried and tested mechanisms and so, for instance, could involve the military back-filling certain duties, such as office roles or guarding protected sites. What this is absolutely not about is giving additional powers to the military or having them replace the police in enforcement roles. They would not be handing out fines.

[Lord Patel (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I was pleased to hear the Leader of the House mention an increase in testing to 500,000; I hope that that includes a rapid turnaround time. My question is about the ambition, mentioned by the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister, to use testing as a mass screening tool. The current test and track system has lots of problems but mass screening has even bigger problems, so I hope that before it is introduced, the Government will publish the plans and consult beforehand.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

I am sure that the department will take soundings and work with as many experts as possible as we look to develop this. It is a future aim to start testing people to identify those who do not have coronavirus and are not infectious with a quick, simple, scalable test but we are not near that yet, so we will certainly work with experts and companies to develop it. We will draw as much expertise as we can because, along with the development of vaccines, this will be critical hopefully to moving back to some kind of normal life.