Covid-19 Update

Lord Sikka Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the vice-chancellors and to the universities and colleges of Britain for the way in which they have embraced campus testing. It has been a salutary lesson in what can be done, and it has helped to keep infection rates down on campuses where there has been a small number of returning students to date. That is done mainly through LFD testing. Positive tests then have a complementary PCR test, and the PCR test is automatically sequenced if it is positive. The combination of LFD, PCR and sequencing is the right one for keeping infection rates down, but we tweak the formula as and when best advice comes in.

[Lord Sikka (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the pandemic has hit the low-paid and the poor the hardest. The Government need to commit to a road map to a better post-Covid society so I invite them to make two pledges. First, at the very least, they need to reduce the NHS waiting lists in England from the present 4.95 million to 2.5 million, which was the case in 2010. Will the Minister pledge to do exactly that by the end of this Parliament or even sooner? If not, why not? Secondly, the poorest 10% of households pay 47.6% of their income in direct and indirect taxes, compared with 33.5% for the richest 10% of households. This condemns millions of people to poor food, housing and health, which is a key reason for deaths during this pandemic. Will the Government pledge to eliminate that injustice by the end of this Parliament?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I recognise some of the noble Lord’s insights. It is undoubtedly true that the low-paid and the poor have been hardest hit by Covid, both by the infection rates themselves and by the lockdown. That is a frustrating truth that is completely recognised and acknowledged by the Government. It is also true that the low-paid and the poor have health inequalities that have themselves made people more vulnerable to sickness, both from Covid and from the non-Covid diseases that have been exacerbated by limited access to some parts of the NHS. We are absolutely committed to reducing NHS waiting lists—that is an incredibly important part of the “build back better” mantra—but we need to do more to bring a degree of levelling up to all parts of society in order to address the symptoms that the noble Lord rightly describes.