Coronavirus Act 2020 (Review of Temporary Provisions)

Nusrat Ghani Excerpts

Wednesday 30th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

If I may, I will make a bit of progress, because otherwise I will take the whole 90 minutes myself.

The central point is that we need to ensure that we strike a balance so that we get the scrutiny right and also meet the need to act fast. The vote tonight is about whether to renew the Coronavirus Act, and I emphatically urge Members on both sides to vote in favour of that Act because of the broad range of powers without which it would simply be impossible to have an effective response to this virus.

First, the Act has helped us boost the health and social care workforce. One of the achievements in this crisis is that we are able to protect the NHS, and one of the reasons we were able to do that was that we were able to support people on the frontline. This Act allowed the emergency registration of health and social care professionals—nurses, midwives, paramedics, social workers —who wanted to return to the national effort. Skilled and experienced staff were able to return to work and add capacity at a time of emergency.

Secondly, this Act does not just support the NHS frontline: the second part of the Act protects all public servants who keep the UK running safely and securely. Over the past few months we have seen huge changes in the way our public services have operated. This Act allows for remote working and for moving meetings online, and it is about acting quickly to prioritise essential activities. The Act supports vital temporary measures that have allowed public services to keep their work going. This includes courts keeping running in a covid-secure way through the use of virtual hearings; up to 65% of hearings each day now involve somebody joining remotely, so it is integral to maintaining the rule of law that we keep these measures in place. The measures have also kept local democracy going by allowing councils to hold their meetings virtually. These are sensible and pragmatic steps that have helped us keep vital institutions operating in the midst of the pandemic.

The Act gives the Home Secretary powers to close and suspend operations at UK ports and airports if there are insufficient staff to maintain border security. This is one of the powers that has not yet been used, and I hope we will never have to use it, but it remains an important tool at our disposal.

[Ms Nusrat Ghani (Wealden) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s earlier statement. My constituents are incredibly concerned about the powers given in this Act, but I would argue that this debate is not only about scrutiny and allowing the House to debate and vote; it is also about giving the Secretary of State the credibility to continue the work he is doing. It also exposes the difficult decisions and trade-offs he has to make, balancing the spread of the virus against all the restrictions we have to face, so I welcome the opportunity for further debates—much longer, I hope—and votes, too.

[Matt Hancock]

We are absolutely open to further and longer debates—for instance, the debate we had on Monday. Under the Standing Orders of the House, this debate is 90 minutes, and neither the Speaker nor we had the choice over that, but we introduced a full day’s debate on Monday, and there will be many more debates to come.

I turn to a measure that we will not be renewing. I have said that we will keep measures in place only for as long as is necessary, and I can tell the House that in one area we will revoke a power that was part of the original Act. When creating the Act, we included provisions to modify mental health legislation to reduce from two to one the number of doctors’ opinions needed to detain someone under the Mental Health Act 1983 and to extend legal time limits on the detention of mental health patients. These were always powers of last resort, and I was not persuaded, even in the peak, that they were necessary, because our mental health services have shown incredible resilience and ingenuity. I have therefore decided that these powers are no longer required in England and will not remain part of the Act. We will shortly bring forward the necessary secondary legislation to sunset these provisions.

The third part of the Act contains measures to suppress the virus. As a nation, we have succeeded in suppressing the virus once, thanks to so many sacrifices by so many people, but with cases on the rise, we know that more needs to be done, and we need to do it together. Our central strategy of suppressing the virus while protecting the economy, education and the NHS until a vaccine arrives is underpinned by this part of the Act. It gives us stronger powers to restrict or prohibit events and public gatherings, and where necessary to shut down premises. It gives police and immigration officers the power to isolate a person who is or may be infectious, and it allows us to close educational settings or childcare providers. Again, these are not measures that anyone wants to use, but we must keep them in place for the moment, because we need every weapon in our arsenal to fight this virus, and these are a proportionate response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Hunt (South West Surrey) (Con)]

I will support the Government today because, although I fully understand the concerns about parliamentary scrutiny eloquently expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Sir Graham Brady), the biggest threat that we face as a country is not the erosion of liberty but the explosion of the virus. We now know, as we go forward into a second wave, that for every death directly caused by covid there is at least one death indirectly caused by the disruption to cancer services, the interruption of emergency care and people being discharged early from hospital.

I wish to ask the Government about measures that could reduce such indirect deaths, particularly the introduction of the routine weekly testing of NHS staff, which we have discussed many times in the House—I see the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) smiling. In fairness to the Government, they have moved on this issue. In July, Chris Whitty told the Health and Social Care Committee that he supported the routine testing of asymptomatic NHS staff in hotspots. I would like there to be such testing everywhere, including in my constituency, where recently we seem to have seen live cases trebling, but even in the hotspots it is not currently happening with any consistency. That is a worry, because up to a fifth of staff in hospitals got the virus during the first wave and up to 11% of deaths of coronavirus patients were caused by patients having caught the virus in their own hospital. That is the context.

I recognise that some hospitals are trying to do routine testing, but it is very difficult for them to do it on a weekly basis when they cannot access pillar 2 testing, so will the Secretary of State ask all hospitals to make weekly testing happen, under their own steam if they can, or with the support of NHS Test and Trace supplying the reagents, or using pooled testing?

[Ms Ghani]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that when we talk about NHS staff and testing, we need to focus on the most vulnerable—those BAME NHS workers who are dying at a much faster rate? We need data and they need support.

[Jeremy Hunt]

My hon. Friend has done a lot of campaigning to highlight that issue, as have Select Committee members from all parties. The Select Committee will publish a report tomorrow that considers that very issue and will be coming back to it.

The Government’s own figures show that at least a thousand additional cancer patients died because of the interruption caused by the pandemic. As we go into a second wave, it does not have to be the same again. The Government have rightly introduced weekly testing for people in care homes; the arguments are exactly the same for our hospitals. Patients need to know that their NHS hospital is safe and NHS staff need to know that they are not infecting their own patients. As we go into this very difficult period, please, will the Government act and make this happen?