Covid-19: Response

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

The noble Viscount asks an incredibly broad question, upon which many a treatise could be written. I can best answer by giving my personal experience, which is of being in meetings where the scientists absolutely lead our thinking, where their clinical judgment takes precedence over any lay opinion and where we have been advised by unbelievably impressive and experienced clinicians, epidemiologists and scientists from different groups. My experience is that those voices have been the ones that prevailed in almost every debate. However, not everything can be answered by scientists and there are political decisions to be made. Ultimately, major decisions such as on lockdown, on the strategy for test and trace and on how to run a vaccine strategy are informed by scientists, but politicians have to make big calls. That is the same in every single major national project. I think we have got the balance right. We have tried to put the science, quite rightly, at the heart of the decision-making, and sometimes we have been led into quite politically awkward situations by the good judgment of our scientists. I pay tribute to them and their judgment. My personal experience is that we have listened to and been led by them wherever necessary.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I remind the Minister that holding the Government to account for their decisions in no way undermines front-line workers, whose jobs have sometimes been made harder by their decisions. As the Government say that we are moving to local flare-ups, which body has full responsibility and legal powers—now, today—to implement and control a local lockdown?

[Lord Bethell]

The arrangements for local lockdowns are not fully in place. In fact, the policy around them is in development and a full decision has not been made on what arrangements we will make for lockdowns. The joint biosecurity centre will be absolutely central to those arrangements. It is the hub into which the intelligence on prevalence and infectiousness comes and which pushes that information out into the local area to help advise directors of public health, local authorities and other local services on local arrangements. I believe that it will develop the expertise and the co-ordination role which the noble Lord asks about.