Peter Bone
Main Page: Peter Bone (Independent - Wellingborough)Department Debates - View all Peter Bone's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
I am happy to look at other life events, although not for the regulations that are before the House today, which are not open to amendment. I am happy to discuss other life events with my hon. Friend.
Let me turn to two other points before I close. First, let us look at the motion tabled by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House. The House has been determined to ensure that, even in the worst clutches of the pandemic, we have found a way that democracy can function and this House can perform its vital functions. Like everyone here, I miss the bustle and clamour of the Chamber when it is full. I cannot wait for the moment when we can all cram once more into our cockpit of democracy.
Just as we have extended other regulations, we propose extending the hybrid arrangements for the House until the House rises for summer recess on 22 July.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
Will the Secretary of State give way on that point?
Matt Hancock
Yes, in a moment.
This will allow for proxy voting to continue along with virtual participation. Crucially, the regulations on the hybrid arrangements fall this summer recess, so when we return in September, we are confident that we can return in full, cheek by jowl once more. I do not know about you, Mr Deputy Speaker—nor, indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone)—but I cannot wait.
Matt Hancock
I would dearly love that, and I will talk to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, who, as I well know, is an enthusiast. I would love it if we could make that so—let us see.
Finally, I want to tell the House about the results of our consultation on vaccination as a condition of deployment in care homes. After careful consultation, we have decided to take this proposal forward, to protect residents. The vast majority of staff in care homes are already vaccinated, but not all of them are. We know that the vaccine protects not only you, but those around you. Therefore we will be taking forward the measures to ensure the “mandation” as a condition of deployment for staff in care homes, and we will consult on the same approach in the NHS, in order to save lives and protect patients from disease.
Simon Fell
My hon. Friend makes a good point. I am making the judgment based on my local knowledge and that of my director of public health, but we all have to make that decision in this place today.
We cannot afford for schools to close again, for young people to miss any more of their lives, or for any of our businesses to close as a result of further impositions, so it has to be one more heave, to protect more people, and then we have to accept that, in the face of a virus that we are not going to get rid of, and which will continue to mutate and challenge us while we are on this Earth, we must vaccinate as many people as possible and then give people back their freedom.
There is a more fundamental issue at play here—public acceptance. We made a delicate compact with people over the last year. We restricted their liberties to keep them safe, and already we are seeing compliance with that law beginning to fray. We must accept that people expected their liberty to return as vaccinations were rolled out, but as we vaccinate more, acceptance of that compromise falls. If we cannot maintain that compact, our response to it has to change.
So I hope and expect that after this final surge of vaccinations, we will return on 19 July to a society where people are able to make their own choices. It is easy to sloganise about freedom. I, for one, am deeply uncomfortable about living in a country where we dictate to newly married couples whether they can cut their wedding cake or not.
I believe that this Government have acted honourably and with good intentions throughout this horrible pandemic, so I am giving them my support tonight for one last heave to finish the job, and then we must return all of our freedoms on 19 July.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I wonder whether you could help me in regard to social distancing. There is not a single Labour Member on the Opposition Benches. There are no SNP; there are no Liberal Democrats; there are no Plaid Cymru. Of course there are the DUP. Would it be appropriate, because the Conservative Benches are packed, for half of us to move over to the other side of the House to improve social distancing?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I think, Peter Bone, if you look around, even on the Conservative Benches there are a few green ticks, so please stay where you are. I call Jim Shannon.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman). Like him, I have followed a journey of sometimes voting with the Government on these restrictions and sometimes voting against. It is unusual to be able to say that I agree with the previous speaker, because the previous speaker is nearly always from the Opposition, but, of the 51 speakers in this debate, only five are Labour Back Benchers. This is one of our most important debates. It is about the freedom and liberty of the British people.
Sammy Wilson
Does the hon. Gentleman find rather odd not only the absence of Opposition Members, but the fact that the Government are comfortable about getting the restrictions through only because they have the support of the Labour party, and yet most Labour Members who have spoken today have condemned the Government for their actions?
Mr Bone
I could not agree more with the right hon. Gentleman—may I call him my right hon. Friend from across the aisle? He has, of course, been here for the whole debate.
This debate is about the liberty of the British people. We are taking away something that is our right. For instance, I am due to go to a wedding, but I cannot have a group of friends round to my house beforehand because there would be too many of us. When I get to church, I cannot sing. I cannot sing anyway, but I am not allowed to sing. Then I cannot dance at the wedding—[Interruption.] I cannot dance, either. More importantly, as the evening drags out, I cannot then go to a nightclub to boogie the night away in celebration. The following day, I cannot go for a park run to run all these problems off, so I might need to call a doctor, but I cannot go and see a doctor because they will not do face-to-face appointments. This is withdrawing our very liberty.
I am a great fan of the Prime Minister, and I think most Conservative Members are. He came to lead the Conservative party at the end of the Bercow Parliament, when Parliament was in chaos. He took us through a general election, he won a mandate, he delivered Brexit, he dealt with the awful covid pandemic and he has led the world with the vaccine programme, yet tonight, unfortunately, I cannot support him. I think every Member has to put their country first, their constituency second and their party third. On very many—indeed, most—occasions, all those three are in line, but this time I do not think the Government have made the case for putting off unlocking.
With apologies to Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies and covid statistics, and the Government have been using an extraordinary propaganda machine to take certain statistics to try to prove their case, but if we look at other statistics, we can see that the total number of deaths at the moment is running below the five-year average. My hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle said that he had very few cases in his area. In Northamptonshire, thankfully, our two hospitals have zero covid patients and we have not had a death due to covid for five weeks. The Government made their own original forecasts for what would happen on 17 May when we did the major unlocking, but we have done better than their best prediction of the situation, so why have we now gone into this doom and gloom?
I have no doubt that if we were in opposition, our Benches would now be packed and there would be this blond guy, fairly chubby and a bit scruffy—well, as scruffy as me—jumping up and down and making the case for getting rid of these restrictions. I know it is a balance and I know people have to make a choice, but we, as Conservatives, believe in personal responsibility and common sense. Going back to my original example, of course I would not go into a busy nightclub, and of course I would not have 100 friends round, but that would be my decision, not the decision of the state. So unfortunately, as much as I like the Prime Minister, I think he has got this wrong, and I will vote against the regulations tonight.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
Happy Sussex day, Madam Deputy Speaker. Like every good, horny-handed son and daughter of Sussex, I am afraid I “wunt be druv” into the Government Lobby this evening.
The hashtag #i’mdone was the overwhelming message on social media on Monday when independence day, so tantalisingly close, was again cruelly whipped away from my constituents. Madam Deputy Speaker, I’m done with making excuses to my constituents about when their lives might get back to some degree of normality.
We are constantly told that these decisions are about data, not dates—quite right—but we have the imminent dates by which the vaccination programme will have achieved effective herd immunity, which is well ahead of what was imagined when the lockdown road map was designed. Now, 80% of adults have had their first dose. We have data showing that the Pfizer vaccine is 96% effective against the delta variant after two doses, and that the AstraZeneca vaccine is 92% effective. We have data showing an average of nine deaths a day at the moment, and 136 hospitalisations—a world away from where we were at the start of the road map. We have data from Public Health England that only 3% of the delta variant cases have received two vaccinations.
We also have dodgy data from three modelling studies by the University of Warwick, Imperial College, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. They show widely different scenarios, with the most pessimistic warning that the UK could experience a further 203,000 deaths by next June, which is around 50,000 more than the first and second waves combined. Yet how can that be when we know the vaccine works, and the data show a likely 90% take-up rate?
Those doomsday models by largely anonymous wonks with no remit for considering the impact of further lockdown on life at large seem to trump all the other data, and the Government put them on a pedestal above all others. They are confusing modelling for scientific forecasts.
Tim Loughton
The trouble is that there are lots of different scientists and they do not agree with each other, yet only certain scientists seem to have an impact on the Government. Usually, it is the most doomsday of those scenarios.
Where is the data that shows that allowing six people inside a pub has increased infection rates, and by how much? Where is the data that shows how much faster an infection has spread because up to 30 people have been able to meet outside since the original journey out of lockdown? Where is the data showing that the NHS is being overwhelmed, not by covid patients, but by a huge increase in children and families suffering mental illness, including many worrying episodes that we have seen as constituency MPs, or by the surge in advanced cancer cases that could not be diagnosed and treated early? Where is the data showing how many businesses, particularly in the hospitality sector, cannot wait a further four weeks to be profitable and are likely now to fail, with the accompanying impact on people’s jobs, livelihoods and wellbeing? Where is the data showing the impact on the wellbeing of children now denied sports days for another year and school proms? Students are again being denied graduation ceremonies for a second year, having missed out on so much of their university experience. Where is the data on the impact of domestic abuse, which has risen so much, as we have seen? Where is the data showing the continued impact on babies? The problem is that the only data considered seems exclusively to be the worst-case scenarios about the spread of covid, regardless of the current single-figure average death rates.
No covid strategy is risk-free, but a further delay is by no means a victimless decision. It is time that we trusted people to live with covid just, as the Prime Minister announced in February, in the same way that we “live with flu”: we do not let flu get in the way of living our lives. The Government promised at that stage that we would move to personal responsibility. My fear is that if the Government continue to try to nanny people, they will just not take any notice and no amount of retained rules will make any difference. People are already increasingly making their own risk assessments. As somebody tweeted the other day:
“I had Covid. I have antibodies. I have had both jabs. I’ve worn a mask. I’ve sanitised to within an inch of my life… But now, #ImDone no more. It's over.”
My fear is that this will become a much more widely held view if the Government just keep delaying freedom day, without the evidence to back it up.