Living in a COVID World: A Long-term Approach to Resilience and Wellbeing (COVID-19 Committee Report)

Lord Robathan Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, I shall of course be brief because I am speaking in the gap. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, and her committee for producing this report. I congratulate her on it. Unbelievably, it is now two years ago that they finished it, and things have changed since. I might not agree with everything in it, but I will concentrate on what I think is the most important issue. Sadly, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, has yet to reach this in her inquiry—I suspect that she wonders why on earth she ever took on the job.

The most important issue is whether the so-called cure was worse than the disease. Nobody doubts that Covid was an extremely unpleasant disease and that it kills people—but, frankly, not many people under the age of 60 unless they had some underlying health conditions. In the lead-up to March 2020, we heard from Messrs Whitty and Vallance that we needed herd immunity and to shield the elderly, who were vulnerable, and other vulnerable people with underlying health conditions.

As we heard, huge damage has been done to mental health and education—what good did closing all the schools do?—and other health issues were caused, such as undetected cancers. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, about some of those. Of course, we now have higher death rates in other fields than we had from Covid.

We have saddled our children and grandchildren with the most enormous debt around their necks for decades to come. We have crashed the UK economy, as I think everybody knows; the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, referred to the cost of living crisis, which is closely related to the failures of policy during the coronavirus pandemic. I should say on behalf of the Government, although I do not always defend them, that the Opposition, both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, were hounding the Government to go further and further.

Lockdown was an absolute disaster. The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, mentioned cost-benefit analysis. I had a debate on that to try to get the Government to give us one, but answer came there none. The heart of the matter is whether the Government knew best. I have always felt that the gentleman in Whitehall never knows best. I was derided and insulted for asking that question and for challenging lockdown policies. Therefore, before I sit down, I ask the Minister and anybody else who wishes to answer: who now thinks that lockdown policies were a good idea?