Public Health

Marcus Fysh Excerpts

Monday 4th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con) [V]]

The precedent that health trumps liberty must not be the conclusion from this period. I am determined about that, because it is fundamental to our very souls as the British people. We are not a people who take well to surveillance, and it is a little ironic that the country that has probably been surveilling its population more than any other appears to have been the source of this virus. The point is that widespread surveillance really is not acceptable in Britain, so I want to talk a little about the app being proposed as part of the next phase, which may be related to the coming regulations that replace those we are looking at today.

Obviously track and trace and testing are essential parts of getting the population confident again that they can go about their business in a normal fashion. I support those things, and they are an incredibly important part of that. The opportunities that those things present to people must be taken up, but to do that they must be voluntary, decentralised and simple, because they have to be widely taken up to be effective as a process for giving people confidence that they do not have the virus and for spreading that confidence throughout society, so that people can go about their business normally. I am very concerned that it appears that that is not how the intended app has been designed.

The app is centralised, and it is worth understanding that Germany has now abandoned its plan to use an app that would centralise the information that it collected about where people had been and what their health conditions were. I understand that the NHS has itself assessed today that the proposed app may not provide enough security, performance or clinical safety for it to be used here. I would like to hear from the Minister whether those reports, for example on the UK Defence Journal today, are indeed accurate.

The decentralised model is how the app should be implemented by design, so that it is not possible for a security breach to be as serious. It is an essential principle of our democracy and our freedom that we are not tracked by the state, and I think that the centralisation of the data is entirely wrong. I would dump the centralised design and I would dump it now, because I do not think people will take it up in the proportions required for it to be effective if it is a centralised design.

We need to remember what the point is of these big intrusions. I completely agree that the lockdown was necessary, as I have said before, but these intrusions into normal life and our normal economic opportunities are really, really massive. They were done in order that we should not overwhelm the NHS—clearly that was the right thing to do—to give us time to build its capacity and to introduce capacity for testing. The whole idea behind that was so that we could get back to normal. We must never lose sight through this process of what normal means. “Normal” is not being tracked centrally. “Normal” is not being afraid. “Normal” is not being suspicious of every stranger. “Normal” is not dobbing in our neighbours. “Normal” is working when we can, not furloughing.

I genuinely believe that we need to get back to normal when restrictions are eased. We need to communicate that very clearly—much more clearly than has been done on occasion with some of the confusion about the regulations and their implementation. Our economy and our future depend on it.