Financial and Social Emergency Support Package

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend is right. There are lots of enthusiastic volunteers, which is great, but the initiatives need co-ordination and protection. We are dealing with assisting vulnerable people, so we have to be quite clear that the people who are volunteering are responsible and are doing it for all the right motives. All the volunteer groups that I have been in touch with and met are clear about that. They are well organised and responsible in the way that they are doing it, and I thank them for that. All those efforts will help us to overcome the crisis.

It is also necessary to say thank you to those delivering essential public services, especially our national health service staff on the frontline: the medical professionals, healthcare workers, auxiliary staff, administrators, ambulance drivers, paramedics—the whole team in every health facility. They are already very stretched in normal times; now, they are coming under unimaginable pressure and stress at the same time as being vulnerable themselves to contracting coronavirus. We should acknowledge that and say thank you.

We should also say thank you to those in our social care sector, who are so often unrecognised and ignored, and almost always badly paid. They are caring for the most vulnerable people in our society. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) explained earlier, the problem of contracting the virus in a home where people have not been tested only gets worse the longer we delay.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend’s approach and the fact that we should all give a socially distant hug to care workers, and to those in other parts of the economy with precarious employment and housing situations. Does he agree that, against the background of the biggest crisis we will ever know, we need a collective approach, and that policies such as nationalising the railways, providing economic stimulus to kick-start our economy, and free broadband do not look so outlandish after all?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

It was not so long ago that I was making lengthy speeches about those subjects, and I am quite prepared to hand a copy of our manifesto over to the Government. They are already being forced to implement a great deal of it because of the crisis and because of the deficiency in public services that we exposed during the election campaign.

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[Jesse Norman]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for registering that point and putting it on the record. I will come to the question of communications, and perhaps I can include that point when I do.

As I have said, we stand ready to do whatever it takes to protect our society and economy. The first task has been to buttress our frontline public services. In the Budget, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor announced a package of support for the public sector—notably a £5 billion covid-19 response fund. Those investments will save lives here and now, and will also fund the research, diagnostic testing and surveillance that will bring the virus to heel over the longer term.

Meanwhile, the Government are working with the business community to bring our nation’s scientific, industrial and commercial expertise to bear behind the public health effort. We are seeing examples of this “can do” attitude all the time, as red tape is slashed, timeframes are condensed, and the public and private sectors pull together as one. Let me give one example. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is fast-tracking applications to authorise the production and use of denatured alcohol. That means that Scottish distilleries and others can turn the ethanol that they have over to the production of alcohol-based hand sanitiser. The usual turnaround time for such requests is 45 days. Since the beginning of March, HMRC has cut that to five days. This has resulted in an additional 2.5 million litres of alcohol for sanitiser being authorised in the last three weeks. We have now gone even further; as announced on 23 March, licensed distillers and gin producers operating in excise warehouses may now use their stocks to produce hand sanitiser without HMRC approval, provided that it is made to World Health Organisation standards or the alcohol used is denatured to the prescribed formulations.

Here, as elsewhere, we see a common approach: decisive action as soon as we can take it; feedback, often from colleagues across Parliament; and improvements as we go. We now have excellent consolidated information on coronavirus available through a single link on gov.uk, and there is specific guidance for businesses from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on a new web page. I had a text message myself from the Government yesterday and the Prime Minister’s broadcast was watched by 27 million people, so I think it is fair to say that the message is getting out there. We have even had Ministers leaving behind their red boxes in order to work online. We know that we must be in the grip of a national crisis when Ministers leave behind their red boxes.

[Dr Huq]

I am pleased that the Minister is giving us some good news about this advertising campaign—at last, because it seems to have been a bit slow. Could he shed light on two anomalous categories of business, examples of which have contacted me? Buttons Nanny Agency says that domestic staff fall into the category of workers who do have to physically turn up, but it is not clear whether they will retain 80% of their salary; they are in a strange and anomalous position. What is to be done about them? West London English School is a private language school that falls above the rateable value level, but it is an educational service. It is very worried that it is about to shut down. The rateable value of many businesses in my constituency is above £51,000 because it is London and it is different here. Could the Minister do something for them? Very briefly, let me also say that domestic violence is set to rise. Where has the abortion amendment gone? Many of us are concerned that it seems to have vanished.

[Jesse Norman]

I was just discussing the process of improving the Government response through feedback, often from colleagues, so I am very grateful to the hon. Lady for giving her feedback on those specific areas. In so doing, she will have activated Government processes with the relevant Departments, which will then look at the issues that she has mentioned.