Covid-19

Matt Western Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Three minutes is barely enough time to do justice to the Government’s mishandling of the pandemic, the vaccination programme excepted, but I will do my best.

From the outset, as the old adage goes, the Government failed to plan; the result they faced, failure. Precisely a year ago, the Prime Minister failed to attend not one, not two, but all of the first five Cobra meetings. Then there was the revelation that the previous Conservative Government had undertaken Exercise Cygnus, modelling and predicting the consequences of a pandemic, back in 2016. It was ignored, as were the calls by the scientists to lock down hard and early. Sadly, this Government do not do due diligence; otherwise, they would have followed the leadership and example of Sheffield City Council and its excellent locally delivered test and trace system. Instead, the Government blew £21 billion.

The farce that has been the Government’s handling of PPE underlines that failure to do due diligence. UK companies such as Tecman and Contechs in my constituency—brilliant, agile small and medium-sized enterprises—can supply PPE. They are supplying it to Europe and elsewhere, shipping all they are manufacturing, while the UK Government source from China and Turkey at higher cost. Meanwhile, frontline NHS and care workers are denied FFP3-grade masks. This from a Government who claimed that staff were overusing PPE in the first few months of this crisis, and denied for the first eight months that the public needed to wear masks. Is it any wonder the public do not trust this Government?

Thankfully, the Government took options on vaccines. Credit to them for that, but the success of the roll-out is down to the universal healthcare provided by our fabulous NHS, and the use of our primary care networks and people such as Sukhi, Nick and Ollie driving local delivery. I now hear that, having finally realised that the NHS, and not Deloitte, Serco or others, was critical and central to meeting that challenge, the Government have appointed a private company to run their mega-lab in Leamington. I ask the Minister why.

While there is hope of arresting the health crisis, the Government need to do more to help businesses through the coming months, with more certainty. We do need dates, whether for extending the furlough scheme, for maintaining and simplifying grants, as called for by the Federation of Small Businesses, or for the extension of the business rates holiday or the cut to VAT on hospitality. There must be support for the 3 million self-employed excluded from Government programmes.

It is not enough to claim that there is light appearing. The Government need to provide protections for public health and the economy to secure and make certain our recovery, and they need to prioritise vaccinations for our teachers if they are really serious about schools returning.