Preparedness for National Emergencies

Peter Prinsley Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Peter Prinsley (Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. Across the river, we can all see the covid memorial wall with a quarter of a million red hearts—a quarter of a million of our people lost. Few families were unaffected. My son is an accident and emergency doctor, and he was then working at a London hospital. His accounts of A&E were terrifying, and my wife felt that we had sent our son to war. There was inadequate protection for staff, with masks that did not fit and plastic aprons. PPE—personal protective equipment—was an acronym we had never heard before. Our hospitals simply did not have enough ventilators or intensive care facilities, and were forced to triage those who could be salvaged and those who could not.

This must not happen again. We must be prepared, for who knows when there will be another pandemic. Let us learn the lessons and never forget those whom we have lost. Still today, there are healthcare workers with long covid and post-traumatic stress disorder. I think especially of our very young doctors and nurses, who were suddenly exposed to death and loss on levels quite unprecedented in our NHS. We must look after them.

We must invest in pandemic research and preparedness. Public health is national health, and we must invest in it. Jenner first discovered vaccination in 1796 when he took pus from a cowpox lesion on a local milkmaid called Sarah Nelms and inoculated his gardener’s son, an eight-year-old lad called James Phipps—the first person ever to be vaccinated. Our country has a strong record of medical research, and we are all proud of it. Our scientists developed a covid vaccine that saved countless lives. Let me use this moment to make a further plea to do all we can in this House to support basic and applied medical research, for it is upon such scientific advances that we will all rely.