Covid-19 Pandemic: Commemoration

Lord Robathan Excerpts

Thursday 13th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

I will write to the noble Lord on his important point.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, this appalling pandemic killed thousands of people. I am sure everybody in the Chamber knows people who were killed and these were often nasty and unpleasant deaths. Since then, the Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson, has said—this is my understanding; I am willing to be corrected—that lockdowns did not achieve very much. Can the Minister tell us whether the Government are looking at what the lockdowns achieved? After all, thousands of people died during lockdowns; what did they achieve and what are the Government looking at for the future?

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

It is important to recognise that a whole inquiry and its machinery are looking at the effectiveness of particular measures. The next module publication will be within a couple of weeks. The work we are announcing our response to today is around commemoration. From a personal perspective, however, I remind noble Lords that the NHS was in a very perilous state at the point that we went into lockdown. For somebody working on the response, the question was not whether we should do that but when.