Public Health

Maria Miller Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

Yet again, we are here debating measures that restrict the freedoms of the people we represent, which I do not think any of us would have dreamt of just 12 months ago when we stood at the general election. Now this decision falls to us, so we have to balance the evidence of the threat to health and life with the threat to people’s livelihoods, mental health and education. In making that choice, we must take people with us based on the evidence. It is clear to me that we understand this virus better now than we ever did before, and there is more evidence now, in this debate, than ever before.

I have been contacted by many people in my constituency who do not want to throw away the gains that we have made so far in advance of the roll-out of mass testing and vaccines. NHS staff, and school and shop workers do not want to see an increase in infection in their community, making it more difficult for them to be effective in their roles.

My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has been clear today that the tiers we are debating will be reviewed every two weeks. He gets my full support for that approach, rather than a continued lockdown, if—if— in return Ministers can carefully consider two things, and I know that the Minister will be listening carefully, that I believe will help us continue to take the country with us through to the end of this dreadful pandemic. I speak representing a constituency where infection rates have fallen by 40% since the beginning of this lockdown, and our hospital trusts have fewer than 10% of their beds being used to care for patients with coronavirus, yet we are moving from tier 1 to tier 2.

The first issue the Government have to help us with is data. Data is our most powerful weapon, but we need to understand better what it is telling us. A data mountain has been amassed. I welcome the five-pillar approach taken by the Government, but we need a clear and agreed process to analyse it, regular analysis at a local level by our public health directors, and clear and transparent input to the decision making of Ministers. We need clearly set out roles for our directors of public health in that decision-making process, setting out local infection control actions that are being taken and the capacity of our hospitals to deal with coronavirus without impacting on other elective procedures and non-coronavirus illnesses. As Members of Parliament, we need to see that local professional leadership inputting directly into the decision-making process, getting rid of the confusion and conjecture that surround so much of the information at the moment.

Secondly, we need to follow the human geography of the epidemic, not the blunt tool of upper-tier authority boundaries, which bear little relation to the everyday lives of the people we represent. My constituency is in Hampshire, which is 47 miles long and is the largest county in the south-east of England, with 1.3 million people, yet it is being treated the same. Can we please look at breaking down the ways in which the country is split—perhaps in Hampshire, we can look at a north-south split—which better reflects the infection rates?

In conclusion, the last thing I want is to vote for the restrictions today, but we cannot throw away the gains that we have made so far. In the next two weeks, can we see from the Government a clear process to build the confidence of our constituents in the data available, and tiers that follow the human geography of the pandemic, not administrative regions? In that way, we are better able to explain, better able to evidence decisions and better able to take people with us.