Covid-19

Mike Wood Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I appreciate that there are Members who applied for the previous debate and could not get in, so if Members will forgive me, I will take very few interventions. It would be a shame if Members could not get into this debate, as happened last time.

On 21 September, SAGE advised the Prime Minister to adopt a time-limited circuit breaker, and warned that

“not acting now to reduce cases will result in a very large epidemic with catastrophic consequences”.

On 13 October, when we debated the tiered approach, I warned that

“the embers are burning brightly”

nationwide, and that

“further action is going to be needed.”—[Official Report, 13 October 2020; Vol. 682, c. 205.]

Later that day, the Leader of the Opposition proposed to work with the Prime Minister in the national interest and help to introduce a time-limited, two-week circuit break across the school half term.

What was Downing Street’s response to our offer to work together? Downing Street branded us opportunistic. The Chancellor criticised us, describing the proposal as

“a damaging, blunt, national lockdown”

that would cause

“unnecessary pain and suffering”.—[Official Report, 22 October 2020; Vol. 682, c. 1252.].

Even though this morning he defended the decision to go into lockdown, there are now briefings—I am sure the whole House will be shocked by this—that the Chancellor does not really support this lockdown after all. I have been around for a long time, and I know that when a Chancellor tells a Prime Minister that he supports him, while simultaneously letting Tory Back Benchers think that he backs them, that is definitely a man on manoeuvres.

Then we have the Foreign Secretary, who said that

“the idea of a short, sharp circuit breaker is, frankly, something of an enigma. No one can say, if you go into a national lockdown at what point you get out of it.”

Well, quite.

That brings me to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office—a man renowned for his long-standing loyalty to the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson)—who, in recent days, performed a pirouette with great panache. Two weeks ago on “Sophie Ridge on Sunday”, when asked whether a circuit break could be introduced, he gave an emphatic “No!” But yesterday, when asked on “Sophie Ridge on Sunday” whether the Prime Minister’s lockdown could extend beyond four weeks, he said yes. No wonder the Foreign Secretary is confused with that level of consistency from his Cabinet colleagues.

Then, of course, we have the Prime Minister. Two weeks ago, he said a lockdown would be the “height of absurdity” and he said that a lockdown would “turn the lights out”, yet here we are on the eve of a longer, deeper and more restrictive lockdown than we proposed. Fundamentally, this is about the Prime Minister’s judgment. Since SAGE advised a lockdown in September, over 4,000 lives have been lost. Infections have increased from 4,000 a day to over 20,000 a day. The numbers in critical care on ventilation have increased from 154 to 815. Deaths have been doubling roughly every two weeks since the beginning of September.

Thousands more, sadly, are likely to die over the next fortnight. Tragically, this lockdown is too late for them. Andrew Hayward from SAGE said earlier today on the radio that

“if we had chosen a two-week circuit break…we would definitely have saved thousands of lives and we would clearly have inflicted substantially less damage on our economy than the proposed four-week lockdown will do.”

On Wednesday, Labour Members will, in the national interest, vote in support of the necessary measures, but the House should be clear that this lockdown will be longer and more damaging because the warnings from SAGE in September and then from the Opposition in October were dismissed by the Prime Minister. There is a sorry pattern to this Prime Minister’s handling of the crisis.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

The shadow Health Secretary risks inadvertently misleading the House in suggesting that SAGE was recommending a two-week circuit-breaking lockdown. As he knows, it has strongly suggested that what it was talking about was a series of lockdowns. Is that still Labour’s position?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I am sure the hon. Gentleman is familiar with the minutes from SAGE, which read:

“The shortlist of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that should be considered for immediate introduction includes:...A circuit-breaker (short period of lockdown) to return incidence to low levels.”

That is the proposal that we endorsed, and it is the proposal that was rejected on 21 September by the Prime Minister. Now the Prime Minister is putting the country into a four-week lockdown, which the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster conceded yesterday could last beyond four weeks. This is fundamentally about the judgment of the Prime Minister, and indeed the Chancellor, who, we know from briefings, blocked the Government from making the choice to go for lockdown earlier.

Throughout this crisis, we have seen mistake after mistake. The preparations for this pandemic were poor and insufficient. The lessons of Exercise Cygnus were not taken on board. The country’s stockpile of PPE was allowed to dwindle, leaving frontline health and care workers unprotected and placed in harm’s way. I hope we can get a cast-iron guarantee that the same will not happen again this winter. Instead of putting the public health teams in charge of tracing, Ministers turned to outsourcing companies, with management consultants paid more in one day than care workers would be paid over four months. Week by week, the numbers followed up by the test and trace system fall. Directors of public health, who want to get on with contact tracing, complain that it takes days for them to receive the information on cases.

The app was months too late, and yesterday we learned that it has an not even been alerting people properly. The Secretary of State is supposed to be the digital whizz kid, and he could not deliver the app on time, and it has not been working sufficiently. Far too many test results are still not turned around in 24 hours, even though we know that we need speed when dealing with a virus that spreads with such severity. There have been 1,300 outbreaks in care homes since the end of August, and care staff still wait more than two days for results.

As we have heard, there is still inadequate financial support for people who need to isolate. It should be no surprise that there were reports of less than 20% of people isolating, given that they are expected to make a choice between feeding their families and their health. Rather than giving people proper, decent sick pay, the Chancellor spent hundreds of millions subsidising meals in restaurants through the summer. There is now evidence from academics to suggest that that led to the spread of the virus and seeded the virus in the early stages of this second wave. We welcome the announcement of the 80% furlough, but furloughed workers in the midlands and the north will conclude that their jobs were worth 13% less than those elsewhere.

The experiences of other countries were needlessly ignored, warnings were downplayed, and the precious advantage of time was squandered. Tragically, that has been as true in September and October as it was in February and March. The Government did not learn. It does not require a crystal ball to listen to scientists and make timely decisions in the national interest, so lessons must be learned, and this lockdown must be used wisely.

I welcome what the Secretary of State said about expanding testing capacity, but we also need to turn around the PCR—polymerase chain reaction—tests quickly for those with symptoms. They are still not turned around in 24 hours. If we are going to have extra capacity in the system, I hope there will be a commitment to turn those tests around in 24 hours for those who need them. We need to expand access to testing to more people, to rebuild confidence across society. UK universities are leading the way in piloting regular saliva testing for students, and some have extended that to the wider community. Rolling out these saliva tests across communities paves the way for weekly testing of key workers such as transport staff, care staff and, especially, NHS staff.

We have been calling for months for the Government to roll out a programme of regular, routine testing of frontline NHS staff. Surely, as we move into winter, that should be a priority. The saliva testing innovation should be brought on stream quickly to do that routine testing of all frontline NHS staff. If we could roll that out—I know that the Secretary of State agrees with me on this, and I do not disagree with him on the objective; I am urging him to use these four weeks to get a move on with it—it would allow us to identify asymptomatic carriers and protect the most vulnerable in society. Will he come forward with a plan to work with our universities on saliva testing, which he knows is very exciting and could make a huge difference?

Contact tracing has to be fixed. It has not been working properly through the call centre approach. The local directors of public health would do a more effective job, but they need to get the contacts within 24 hours, not within days. If they get those contacts within 24 hours, they can introduce as a matter of routine retrospective contact tracing, which finds where people got the virus from and identifies super-spreading cluster events. That approach has been taken in countries such as Japan, and we know that it is more effective. I know that it is happening in some hotspots, but it should be routine across the country.

As I said, we need reassurance that people will get support for isolation. In this lockdown, we will have a spending review, and the test of that spending review is how it will support our national health service and social care sector for the rest of this covid period. We entered this crisis after years of underfunding in the national health service, with capital budgets repeatedly raided—[Interruption.] There were years of underfunding in the national health service—of course there were. The national health service used to get a funding increase of around 4% to 5%. It got something like 6% to 7% a year under Labour Governments. Under this Government, for 10 years, it has got around 1%. Everybody knows that the NHS went into this crisis after years of underfunding. Everybody knows that the NHS went into this crisis with capital budgets having been repeatedly raided, which has left hospitals with a £6 billion repair bill. The NHS entered this crisis with around 15,000 beds having been cut since 2010.