Covid-19: Government Transparency and Accountability

Baroness Winterton of Doncaster Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wragg]

My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head, and the short answer is no. If the Government were to express the view that these are arbitrary decisions made because this is a difficult situation, that would be a more honest approach than vague references to following the science without bringing forward the evidence to underpin decisions. He hits the nail exactly on the head. I try to say this without sarcasm, which is a great effort for me, but we are surely driven by the data, and not dates.

The report also notes that local leaders did not always have access to the data that they needed to respond quickly at the height of the pandemic. As such, we recommend that going forward, the Government must share all available data with local areas in as much detail as possible, and ideally to patient level. Data that will be key to decision making on the road map should be shared immediately, and the road map indicators should be added to the dashboard with clear links to the data at lower local authority level underpinning each one.

Changing the topic slightly before I conclude, the Committee is now inquiring into the vexed proposal of covid vaccine certification or, indeed, wider covid status certification. The evidence we have heard so far reinforces the importance of transparency and accountability of data, as we highlighted in the report. Before the considerable ethical and legal issues about vaccine certification proposals are even taken into account, the purpose and effect of such certificates must be understood and the data and evidence underlying such a proposal set out. That means that the data needs to be made clear on issues such as transmissibility after vaccination, especially when considering implementing what we heard would be a permanent solution for what may well be a temporary problem.

I should say that I am pro-vaccination. I believe it is for the individual to decide whether they wish to take it. I would encourage them to do so and, indeed, when it is my turn—I am younger than I look, although perhaps not younger than I act—I shall indeed take the vaccine.

I will leave the House with one statistic, which I saw on the pages of The Daily Telegraph yesterday. It is that just 32 of some 74,000 hospitalised with covid between September and March had been vaccinated at least three weeks before. If we can get hold of more recent data than that, we will be proving that we can have confidence in the vaccine to deal with the worst aspects of this horrendous pandemic and that we can look forward to unlocking society, regaining our freedoms and allowing this country to move forward. I look forward to hearing the contributions of hon. and right hon. Members this afternoon.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Before I call the next speaker, I emphasise that we have two debates this afternoon and a number of Back-Bench colleagues wish to speak. To save me having to put a time limit on, it would be helpful if speeches were confined to around five minutes. That will enable everybody to get in.

[Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg). I thank him for the fair and inclusive way in which he has chaired the Committee.

The sense of shock, uncertainty and genuine confusion that the public at large felt as this crisis began was in truth mirrored by the Government. That is at least in part understandable, and I will return to the issues of preparedness later, but the nature, scale and speed of that first wave was unlike anything our Government have ever faced before. It would have tested the boldest of leaders, the best prepared institutions and the most resilient of communities.

My father-in-law died in those early few weeks. I was grateful to be able to attend his funeral, but my children could not. Since last April, tens of thousands of families have faced this trauma, and the loss of life and destruction of our economy is not understandable, nor was it inevitable. The truth is that our leadership was woeful, our institutions already cut to the bone by funding cuts, our communities fractured and frayed, health inequalities widening, and it is no surprise that the poorest have faced the greatest burden.

In a democracy as old as ours, the Government rightly have less power to control us and force compliance than many others across the world, but that means that transparency and accountability are more fundamental to securing our agreement for the common good, and when the very Government who had previously eroded accountability and shirked transparency asked us to make those sacrifices, there were bound to be tensions. The starting point of distrust and dysfunction was made much worse by the unpreparedness with which we entered this emergency.

Emergency preparedness, resilience and response is a term that we use to make sure that we are safe before, during and after an emergency and national disaster. At our Committee session on 29 April the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster appeared to talk about the work of the Cabinet Office, and we looked at preparedness. The pre-2020 timeline to our report is really important. Public Health England’s pandemic flu strategic framework in 2014 had as a key principle preparing for the worst. That 2014 document built on work in 2011, which followed work in 2009 regarding the previous flu crisis. In 2016 Operation Cygnus, the exercise conducted to understand our preparedness and test our resilience in response, was shrouded in mystery, and it was only released in October 2020, as even The Daily Telegraph reported, following legal action and the threat of the Information Commissioner. That document really exposed how poorly prepared we were.

In addition, in our meeting with the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in April we discussed the national risk register, which had not been published since 2017; it is supposed to be published every two years. I asked him whether the Cabinet Office monitored whether various Departments and agencies had completed the mitigations in previous risk registers. He answered that it was the Cabinet Office’s responsibility to do so. He wrote to us later, on 21 May, with less clarity on the Cabinet Office’s role, simply stating that work on the risk register for 2019—for 2019—was advanced, but would need to be recalibrated in light of the current pandemic.

Also, we were running the NHS at over 90% of capacity, when the Royal College of Emergency Medicine and many other royal colleges had been warning that 85% was more in line with patient safety requirements. That, plus the additional year-on-year Government cuts, including to public health, all meant that we were not prepared when we could have been, and any look back at this dreadful time in our history needs to expose that failure.

But fundamentally and unforgivably, we were hamstrung by this Government’s ideological opposition to the very things that could have helped save lives—an ideological opposition to experts, an ideological opposition to local government and local expertise, an ideological opposition to the principles of good public health. And what was it replaced with? The absurd reliance on mates and acquaintances—approaching a pandemic in much the same way as most of us would look for someone to plaster our bathroom. Underpinning it, the idolatry of the private sector, trumping every time the institutions and people who actually understood the communities we were looking to protect.

Crucially, the Government were bereft of a strategy, with no accountability, and that includes the legislation and our role as Members of Parliament who were presented with that rushed legislation and reliance on ancient public health Acts, rather than the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and the scrutiny that had happened in this place before—a problem that we are still trying to extricate ourselves from.

The key part of that Civil Contingencies Act was the reliance on local resilience forums. None of us live in Whitehall; we live in our communities. That is why local forums are so critical, and any response should have been driven bottom-up and then supported by the national effort—and that is where so much damage has been done, in that local response.

For everything we have learned in our Committee, the transcripts are really quite shocking. As a previous emergency planner and someone who has worked closely with public health, I expected certain things to happen, and they did not. The test and trace debacle is the most obvious case in point—so many lives lost, so much time lost. Why would the Government not trust local leaders, and our colleagues in councils of all political colours, to get the job done that they were trained to do? Over the border from me only 20 miles, in Wales, the Welsh Test, Trace, Protect system is run as a public service and has delivered, by any measure, better outcomes for vastly less public money.

Things have got a bit better in terms of the local-national interface and response, but there are still some real issues that are hampering the public health response now and for the future. First, we must not reorganise the organisation that is doing this at national level in the middle of a pandemic and make people fearful of losing their jobs when they are trying to save our lives. Secondly, the consequence of the Lansley Act is that public health expertise in local government does not have the same access to NHS data that previously occurred. That has hampered the public health effort locally. Public health officials in local government need to be able to access data for public benefit and recognise the difference between identifiable personal data and non-identifiable data. That is something the Government can do something about.

We have to use this excellent report to look to the future. Does anyone here think that everything will be normal after 21 June? Again, after everything we have been through, the Government are still not on the front foot. They are still too late, as demonstrated by the decision about India going on the red list this week. I do not think everything returns to normal after 21 June, and the Prime Minister has now started hinting about a third wave. That means he has to take some actions. We are all so very weary. We are desperate to see our loved ones. We are desperate for everyone to get back to work, to go on holiday, to start planning our lives now. Our young people need radical change in our education system to be prepared for the future. Decisions need to be made now. We all want to be able to visit care homes and have people able to leave those care homes. It is an absolute disgrace, but the urgency is missing.

In conclusion, I am very proud to be a part of this Committee. I commend our Chair for the fair and inclusive way he has conducted it. Our Clerks and advisers have been superb in their support and responsiveness to allow us to do some great work in difficult conditions. I thank them for report they produced, and I thank our great witnesses. The Government, however, have not learned the lessons. I am not confident that they have taken on board these recommendations. If we are to secure compliance for the next stage, that really needs to happen: we need honesty and transparency about the data; honesty about the political choices that face us; honesty about the balance of risk; and, frankly, more respect for Parliament and the people we represent.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I reiterate that we need to keep to five minutes, otherwise I will put on a time limit.