Lord Scriven
Main Page: Lord Scriven (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Scriven's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(4 years ago)
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Lord Bethell
The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, is not entirely right. We have fantastic manufacturing in the UK—I reinforce the view of my noble friend Lady Buscombe that the sector provides jobs for the economy—but we do not have low-margin, high-volume manufacturing. The image of a Burberry gown always sticks in my mind on this point. Burberry makes £500 shooting jackets, but it does not make £5 surgical gowns. That is something that we need to address, and it will be the priority of my noble friend Lord Deighton.
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, the South Korean prevalence rate is so low because they have tested, traced and isolated since day one. The Government initially did this and then stopped it. Ten days ago, they said that there would be 1,000 tracers; now, the figure has gone up to 18,000. Why have the Government not kept this system going consistently, which South Korea has proved reduces the prevalence rate of the virus?
Lord Bethell
The noble Lord, Lord Scriven, is not correct to say that the Government decided to stop track and trace; there are still PHE track and traces, but when the disease reaches a certain level of prevalence, it simply is not arithmetically possible to track down every new incidence of the disease. Nor is it true that anyone in the Government said that we would have only 1,000 tracers in our call centres. Plans which I have seen are being drafted at the moment which are wildly more ambitious than that. It is our plan to put together a system that is proportionate to the challenge.