Covid Contracts: Judicial Review

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Bethell

Monday 1st March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord puts it extremely well, and he takes me right back to those days. I remember making a public call for help with diagnostics, and an NHSBSA call centre was overwhelmed by 5,500 calls in a week—triaging them took nearly a month. The noble Lord is entirely right: getting through all of those who sought to help was an enormously difficult task, and those who proved to be effective assistants were not always the obvious ones. I could share anecdotes of surprising people who came forward and gave tremendous help, while those who you would think could help simply did not have what we needed. Those were extremely complicated times, and I pay enormous tribute to the officials who saw us through them.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the Minister has been explaining how the centre was overwhelmed by the number of offers. In the early stages, why was it not dealt with by a greater degree of local decision-making and autonomy? Local authorities and hospital trusts were bypassed in this, as in a number of other areas, such as test and trace. Would it not have been much better to have allowed small companies and local authorities to bargain with each other about these offers in the first place?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

That is a reasonable question, and, in fact, that was our starting point: the noble Lord will remember that, at the beginning of all of this, we supplied PPE to 252 NHS trusts and no one else—everyone else sorted out their own PPE. The reason we had to change was that this was a global crisis: borders were shut, factories closed down and every country in the world was desperate for PPE. There was no facility for a procurement manager at an NHS trust, let alone a small social care home in the West Country; those avenues were all shut. That is why it took a massive national effort to secure PPE. We now have a portal that supplies more than 50,000 different NHS and social care units; as I explained earlier, we have an enormous stockpile to secure that. This has been one of the big learnings of the pandemic: in order to have resilient supply chains, there needs to be some national muscle to make sure that it works properly.

Covid-19: Contact-tracing App

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Bethell

Wednesday 6th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

The noble Baroness is entirely right to be concerned about the vulnerable and our approach. I completely share those concerns. It is a massive challenge, but that does not stop us embracing the advantages of technology where millions of transactions can be done in a day which could never be done by more manual processes. An enormous amount will be invested in trying to reach out to those who are isolated, vulnerable or digitally excluded to ensure that they have details of our track-and-trace arrangements. Hiring an enormous army of track-and-trace experts has already begun, and details can be seen on my Twitter feed of how volunteers who have the right qualifications can join those efforts.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, if we are moving to a centralised app, what assurances do we have about how long the data will be stored? I see references to use for research purposes in various documents. Will there be careful safeguards about the deletion of the data after a certain period?

[Lord Bethell]

I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, that sunset arrangements will form part of the conditions of the app and that they will be published shortly.

NHS: Data

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Bethell

Tuesday 28th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

The noble Lord asks an excellent question but I am afraid that those statistics are not available in my wonderful briefing. I will try to track down the numbers and write to him with whatever information is available.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Conservative manifesto promised a good expansion of data sharing across government. We all know that there are many advantages of doing that, as well as the need for a number of safeguards. If, for example, the health and medical records of Windrush people had been available to the Home Office, it might have been easy to establish how long many of those people had been in the country. Does the Department of Health have clear rules about the sharing of public data with other departments?

[Lord Bethell]

The arrangements for sharing between departments are overseen by the Information Commissioner. The rules are set by a combination of the digital health technology standards set by NHSX and guidance given to practitioners through the data security and protection toolkit. These provide the rules for inter-departmental sharing; I would be glad to provide copies to the noble Lord if that would be helpful.