Covid-19: Update

Lord Sikka Excerpts

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The right reverend Prelate hits the nail on the head. It is extremely sad, frustrating and hard to acknowledge the fact that those who live in deprivation are often those who are hardest hit by this awful disease. We have worked extremely hard to get the vaccine, and testing and tracing, into those communities and to support them with whatever education and community support we can. But the fact remains that this country has an unequal health outcome for too many families, and it is part of our levelling-up agenda that we try to address that. The obesity strategy is one way in which that we can do that, but there are a great many others that we need to look at.

[Lord Sikka (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, 4.7 million people in England are waiting for routine operations and procedures. Some 388,000 have been on waiting lists for more than a year. Even with the extra £7 billion a year, it is estimated that it will take five years to clear the backlog. Can I urge the Government to declare an NHS emergency, equivalent to that of Covid-19, provide additional resources to the NHS, and inform the House of the targets they will set for reducing the waiting list?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Lord is right that the backlog is a grave issue, and we are fighting as hard as we can to address it. The big guns of the NHS are moving from Covid to addressing the backlog, but we should not overstate its threat either. Large parts of the NHS remained open all the way through Covid, and I pay tribute to those in the NHS who worked extremely hard to ensure that many elective procedures and much diagnosis continued. We do them and their reputations no favours if we imply that the NHS was in any way doing less than it should have done to work through Covid. But the noble Lord is right; this is a grave issue, and we take it extremely seriously.