Public Health

Maria Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Adam Holloway (Gravesham) (Con)]

First, I pay tribute to the continued amazing performance of NHS staff and, indeed, to the Government and Kate Bingham’s team for the incredible developments in respect of the vaccines.

I do not underplay the difficult and complex decisions being made by people in the Government and, of course, the terrible toll on families affected, but it seems to me that with every difficulty and milestone reached the Government are acting on largely uncontested information. It feels like there has been a serious lack of diversity of opinion, analysis and evidence when it comes to many of these restrictions. The Covid Recovery Group does not want to “let it rip”; they just ask for proper economic impact assessments.

Let us take, for example, the hospitality industry. We are talking about using an enormous amount of taxpayers’ money to pay the industry not to open or to pay people not to go to work, but the payments will go nowhere near the losses that the businesses will make, and many of them will still go to the wall, despite that money. Why are we looking at not keeping them open, given the very limited evidence for closing them?

Prior to this latest lockdown, I joked with the proprietor of the Compass Alehouse in Gravesend that going into his place was like being put under his control: “Stand there, scan here, anti-bac your hands, walk along that path, sit down there” and so on—Members get the picture. The point is that the hospitality industry has spent an absolute fortune and thought long and hard about how to run establishments safely. We should be reopening well-run pubs and restaurants such as the Reliance fish bar and Bartellas in Meopham, and the authorities should be merciless in closing and fining pubs that risk NHS capacity.

I would much rather my constituents socialise in well-run venues than squeeze on to the sofa back at home with their friends. I would have thought that mixing in venues was much better than mixing at home in tiers 2 and 3. I would have thought that encouraging personal responsibility was rather better than the nuances of how much people have to eat with their beer. As others have said, we must make sure that restrictions make sense, or we will drive down compliance.

We have to have a bit more diversity in the advice—perhaps there should be a few people with private sector experience, and perhaps even some more diverse scientific voices. I do not understand why we are using infection rates and not intensive care unit occupancy to guide policy. Why can we not move people around the country? I do not understand why we are preventing millions of people from working when we have not even made a dent in the surge capacity of the Nightingale hospitals—

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

There are no staff!

[Adam Holloway]

Intervene if you like.

[Maria Eagle]

I will. The hon. Gentleman talks about Nightingale hospitals, but there are not enough staff to staff the Nightingale hospitals. We would have to take them out of the hospitals that they are trying to give some relief to. That is why they are not being used.

[Adam Holloway]

I thank the hon. Lady for intervening and giving me a bit more time, and that is where I would like to see money spent. I would like to see money spent on surge capacity in the NHS, rather than on paying people not to work.

You know what, like it or not, my constituents are going to be thrown into more weeks of extraordinary lockdown, and there is no possibility of this not now happening given the Opposition’s decision to abstain. Well, I am going to support the Government’s decision and message to comply and, indeed, our remarkable Prime Minister in particular, but I will be hard pushed to support the Government in future if there is a realistic possibility of the Government being forced to seek a different path. Churchill himself had a wide mix of generals and advisers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

It seems to me, listening to the debate and to my constituents, that the Government have a problem with being trusted in this field at the moment. Much of that—I am trying to be supportive—comes from the feeling that there is not total transparency. Trust of the kind needed to impose these sorts of measures must come from utter openness and transparency. If the Government were to learn anything from the nature of these debates over the months, that is the lesson they should learn. They must be more open and more transparent.

The Government are repeatedly changing the rules in a confusing way. They seem often to be more interested in managing difficulties from their own Back Benchers than in communicating properly with the public and promoting understanding about why the measures sometimes are necessary.

I will say a little bit about the experience in Liverpool, because we were the first area into tier 3—the old tier 3; we have already got a new one starting tomorrow—where the reality is that infection rates have fallen enormously since then. Local leaders were asking for a full lockdown ahead of the tier 3 arrangements, and they embraced tier 3 happily because of what was happening. We had over 700 infections per 100,000 and our hospitals were precious close to being totally overwhelmed, and the staff in those hospitals have had to work like absolute Trojans. They are still dealing with very high levels of illness.

The reality is that the work done there and the mass testing have helped. We have seen the numbers fall from more than 700 per 100,000 to under 100 per 100,000 in Liverpool, and that is an enormous fall for which we are very grateful. It has relied on solidarity: on people in Liverpool helping each other, doing things they would not necessarily want to do for each other. It is that solidarity around the country between people and communities that has to be promoted, not “We’re all right at the moment, so why should we have to have these issues?” That is what the Government need to focus on. Ensuring routine testing for all high-risk workplaces is important. More testing of the kind we have seen in Liverpool spread out across the country is tremendously important.

More also needs to be done to help to support self-isolation, because that is the real problem. One of the lessons in Liverpool is that people have not downloaded the app and they have not gone to get tested, because they feel that if they get a positive response they cannot comply. That is where we need to focus—on helping people to comply. If someone lives week by week on a wage that is only just enough to keep their head above water and food on their family’s table, they will not want to see whether they are positive unless they have symptoms and absolutely have to do so. People will not go for a test on a routine basis if they are worried sick about what they would be able to do if the answer is yes and they are positive.

We have to focus more effort on the £500 test and trace self-isolation payment. Far too few people are getting it. It is not an entitlement and it should be. People should not have to jump through hoops at a worrying time to get it. Only one in eight are qualifying for it. Many more people are being turned down and local authorities in my area are being told that when the money they have to pay for it runs out, which it nearly has, it will not necessarily be replenished. That is not a way forward if we expect people to comply. People have to be helped to comply when they are worried sick about whether they can put food on the table for their children.