Covid-19 Update

Lord Rogan Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Bethell) (Con)]

My Lords, I am enormously grateful for the thoughtful and informed questions from the Front Bench, and I echo the comments about teachers made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. The return to school is a fundamental priority of the Government. It is a massive challenge for those involved, for governors, teachers, parents and school kids. I endorse the thanks the noble Baroness gave to teachers, who are performing incredibly well. The high return rates—percentages in the mid to high 90s—is remarkable and shows enormous confidence in the system among schoolchildren and their parents.

I also echo the noble Baroness’s thanks to NHS and social care staff who are preparing for winter. Enormous amounts of preparation are going into that. In response to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, I reassure the Chamber that engagement with social care, local charities and local councils is incredibly intense and we are working extremely hard with local partners in all areas.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, asked when the new regulations will be delivered. I am afraid that I cannot confirm the precise date, but I can reassure her that this Government are committed to being accountable to Parliament for those regulations and I look forward to that debate.

The noble Baroness also asked about the sequence of announcements. I reassure her that the Prime Minister brought his Statement to Parliament in good faith to update Parliament first. We cannot prevent leaks from happening, and leaks that get on to social media and then into the papers are something that we did not design or deliberately create. They are something that we regret. It would have been massively our preference for the Prime Minister to put Parliament first in his announcement.

The noble Baroness also asked about the testing system. The capacity of the testing system has never been higher: it has increased by 10,000 per day for the last two weeks and continues to increase dramatically. But demand has never been higher either, and there are good, laudable reasons why that demand is going up. The number of tests for supporting the vaccine programme has gone up. The number of tests to support our therapeutics programme has gone up. The surveillance of local prevalence has gone up, and the marketing around the use of tests by those who show symptoms has proved to be much more effective and the take-up among those who have Covid-19 symptoms has gone up. For those reasons we are extremely pleased by that effect.

However, there has also been a significant rise in the use of tests by asymptomatic individuals, largely tied to children returning to school. That is why we have been clarifying the guidance on the use of tests—that they should be used by those who have symptoms and not by those who are asymptomatic. One day, when the capacity is there and the system can bear it, I hope that we will move towards a system where anyone can have a test whenever they like, however they feel, but right now we must live within the system that we have. We are doing hundreds of thousands of tests per day and clarifying with teachers and parents that tests should be used by those who show symptoms and not by those who are seeking some other form of guidance.

Regarding the questions asked by the noble Baroness about the moonshot, I am a little confused. “If we cannot do millions of tests today, how can we expect to be able to do millions of tests tomorrow?” seems to be the question. I will answer it very clearly. The innovation around testing has moved much quicker than anyone could have expected in terms of scale, cost, accuracy and speed. The industry and the professionals in the NHS, academia and private business have come together in a triple helix to collaborate in a massive revolution in testing, which has changed considerably in this country from the days when we were struggling to do 2,000 or 3,000 tests per day to when we had the capacity to do 200,000 or 300,000 tests per day.

We have a clear view of how we can dramatically increase the tests. That clear view has two components: those tests that use existing technology that is purchasable in today’s world, and a clear idea of where innovation will take us in the very near future. This Government are committed to grabbing the opportunity of that innovation in order to dramatically increase the number of tests. There will be nay-sayers who will question whether that innovation will deliver, and undoubtedly there will be set-backs. Not everything will deliver as promised. However, I am extremely optimistic that we will be able to harness the power of science and innovation to invest in the backbone of our data and our delivery mechanisms, and to engage with the British public to deliver a testing system that enables us to return to the life that we love.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, questioned whether the testing system could be relied on to deliver results. Let me explain: the people of Luton and Leicester have used testing and contact tracing, and infection rates are dramatically lower—less than half what they were in late July. Those are two excellent case studies of how our system of testing and contact tracing has turned around difficult situations and pushed back the spread of Covid by breaking the chain of infection. The noble Baroness also asked what we will do to improve the system as it stands. There are three areas of improvement: first, technology; secondly, infrastructure, by which I mean the data and the presence on the ground; and thirdly, engagement with the public so that they understand how to engage and we understand better how to interact with the public.

The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, asked about the contact system and gave some statistics. I reassure her that since 28 May we have rung 272,000 people who have been reached by the test and trace system. Where communication details have been provided, the service has reached 88.6% of close contacts, and 78.4% of people who have tested positive have been reached. Within the bounds of epidemiological effectiveness, these are extremely impressive statistics. Compared with those from other countries, they range among some of the highest. It is an incredibly impressive set of results for a system that was stood up in relatively recent history. Local public systems are complementing the central contact tracing hub, and I pay thanks to all those local authorities that either work with their full-time employees, or, as is often the case, have employed local businesses, to support it.

We have hit our target on care homes—the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, might like to take a moment to celebrate that. We are also trying to work with a degree of transparency in our operations. I do not regret for a moment the fact that the operational senior leadership in the track and trace team has been on the level about the present supply constraints, with social care and the general public. I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, that care homes absolutely remain top of our priorities. Many of the frustrations the public face, such as longer distances to travel, are exactly because we have put care homes first and have therefore had to dial down some of the availability of tests to the public. We sit down with care homes to discuss winter preparations. An indication of that is the 31 billion items of PPE that we have contracted to buy for this winter—an astonishing figure. That pays great tribute to the work of the noble Lord, Lord Deighton, and the PPE team, who have built up a fantastic stock.

Finally, I would like to express a small amount of confusion about the remarks from the noble Baroness, Lady Barker. On the one hand, she attacked the involvement of major private companies and central control of our track and trace system, but on the other hand, she attacked civic engagement, the volunteering of members of the public to support our track and trace system, and local initiatives whereby NHS trusts have brought back retired staff. The combination of these two themes is the heart of our success, and I celebrate both.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Rogan) (UUP)]

We now come to the 30 minutes allocated for Back-Bench questions. I ask that questions and answers be brief, so that I can maximise the number of speakers.