Government Response to Covid-19

Steve Baker Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Sir Charles, I am absolutely delighted that you are in the Chair, and I am sure my right hon. Friend the Minister is glad too. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) on securing the debate, and I am glad that he did so.

Having had the privilege of being a Minister with cross-Government responsibilities, I want to begin by reflecting on just how magnificently effective the Government have been in many ways in responding to the covid-19 outbreak. I regret that I will not be able to enumerate in five minutes all the ways in which they have been high performing, but I will touch on a few.

Starting locally, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust has been absolutely outstanding. It is under the leadership of Neil Macdonald, and I could not have asked for more from our local NHS, which has responded flexibly, kept services going and looked after the public. I do not mind putting on the record that even though I am fine and I got the all-clear, I had a genuine cancer scare in the course of the first lockdown. I was therefore delighted that cancer services were continuing and that I was able to have the necessary tests to discover I was fine. However, it was a frightening moment, and I was grateful to the healthcare trust for making its services available uninterrupted, as far as I experienced them, throughout the crisis.

Buckinghamshire Council is so effective and dynamic that I could almost become an advocate of the ephemeral term “the entrepreneurial state”. I have been delighted with how the council has risen to the challenge of looking after local people, whether that was those who needed food delivered, local children or the homeless. I am delighted by the council’s performance. Fire, ambulance and GPs have all also risen to the challenge. This is about Government effectiveness, so I will not touch on the private sector, but I am grateful to it too. I have been delighted, both personally and on behalf of my electors, by the performance of the full spectrum of local public services.

The Treasury’s performance in delivering economic support has been absolutely tremendous. The gaps in support have been well rehearsed and argued over, and I will not go over them again here. I suspect it is futile to ask my right hon. Friends to close the gaps in support, but I particularly plead for the self-employed earning just over £50,000 a year. They have been especially hard hit, and there are a number of other groups, which we do not need to go through now. However, I encourage the Government to close those gaps. The key point with the Treasury is how easy it is to forget just what a stellar performance it was to get the furlough scheme, the self-employed schemes and the various loan schemes in place as fast as it did. It was an absolutely incredible performance.

We could also talk about the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government getting the homeless off the streets, apart from those who did not want to be reached, as far as I can tell, and about the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Cabinet Office, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department for Education.

However, I want to press one issue with my right hon. Friend the Minister, which is PPE supplies. It has been raised already, and it has rather dropped off the radar between waves. I hope that in the next wave we do not find we have any shortages of PPE. I do not think the public will take that kindly at all. In the Department of Health and Social Care, there has been tremendous success with testing, and we are now looking forward with energy and enthusiasm, I think, to a further expansion of testing, particularly in Liverpool.

In my remaining minute and a half, I want to touch on some suggestions in terms of areas for improvement. I have four, if I can rattle through them. The first, which is possibly the one that has been most alive in our minds this week, and which hon. Friends have touched on already, is the communication of complex data. In particular, the modelled death projections have quickly been shown to be out of date, never accurate and not the most relevant factor to the decision—yet they are repeatedly put to us. I use those three factors because those are what come out of the answers I have been given. Every time officials and Ministers have shown us those charts, it has been like sunshine on the morning mist—the importance of the charts has just evaporated when prodded. That is regrettable; I will try not to go any further than that. This Government are supposed to be very good at communicating complex data. There are some exceptional data scientists in the Government—it has been my privilege to have contact with them over the last week, and these are really impressive people—but something went wrong when those charts came out.

The second area is expert advice. I have made some proposals for competitive multidisciplinary expert advice with red teams. I thank the Government for letting me be a red team. Modelling also needs to be improved; I will make some suggestions. Finally, there is cost-benefit analysis. It might be practically impossible to give us a cost-benefit analysis, but in the context of these momentous decisions, we really should be looking at some figures to help inform our choices.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) for securing the debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), and I am sorry for his recent loss.

I do not want to be negative, but I am going to be quite negative, so I apologise up front. There is a lot that the Government—especially Treasury—have done that is extremely good, and I know that all Ministers are working as hard as they can, but I am concerned that people are losing faith in their use of data and science. Because the debate is such an important one, I want to focus on that and to park a lot of the good stuff, although I am not ignoring it.

First, scientists are becoming increasingly sceptical about the use of lockdowns. Edinburgh’s Professor Woolhouse says that lockdowns are a strategy that is “visibly failing”. Oxford’s Carl Heneghan—thank God for him—says that lockdowns push peaks into the future, just requiring more lockdowns. Anyone who thinks we are all coming out of lockdown on 2 December is living in a parallel universe. One can dream about it, but frankly the reality is slight. Sunetra Gupta has said:

“Lockdown is a blunt...policy that forces the poorest and most vulnerable people to bear the brunt of…coronavirus.”

Everyone making decisions about coronavirus is in a well-paid job with a cushy pension. There are many people who are suffering about whom one cannot say that. The WHO says that lockdowns are a last resort.

So disturbed are Heneghan and Tom Jefferson by the use of Government stats—the predictions, projections and illustrations—that they have said that the Government’s use of them is “abysmal”. I would love to know from the Minister why she thinks that senior independent scientists are being quite so caustic about the Government’s use of facts.

One reason, as far as I can see, is Professor Ferguson and Imperial College. I shall be careful what I say, because they are professionals and worthy of respect, but Professor Ferguson has for 20 years had a history of predicting mass death from almost every public health emergency. I am not a scientist, so I will not quote myself; instead, I will quote a bunch of other people, because it is strongly in the public interest that the Government, as a matter of urgency, conduct a peer review of the evidence that they have been receiving.

Johan Giesecke, Sweden’s former chief epidemiologist, said Ferguson’s model was “not very good”. In academia that is fighting talk. The Washington Post quoted him as saying that the forecasts were almost hysterical. Lund University applied Ferguson’s models and found a massive difference between his predictions and what happened. Professor Angus Dalgleish said that there had been “lurid predictions”. Viscount Ridley has criticised Ferguson’s modellings. Professor Michael Thrusfield of the University of Edinburgh said that Ferguson’s modelling on foot and mouth was “severely flawed”. John Ioannidis of Stanford University said that

“major assumptions and estimates that are built in the calculations…seem to be substantially inflated”,

although he did say that the Imperial team seemed to be professional.

Other experts whom I have spoken to say that Imperial’s work is almost always an extreme outlier to normal forecasts. Yet it seems that the Government, because of their risk-averse nature—which I understand—have taken outliers as the norm, which they categorically are not. Let us look at Ferguson’s predictions: 150,000 deaths from foot and mouth disease, when the figure was between 50 and 50,000; 150 million worldwide from bird flu, when 282 died; and 65,000 British deaths from swine flu, when 457 died. I know that mitigations take place afterwards, but the Government need to look into some of the advice they are getting, because I think it is highly dangerous. Members of SAGE yesterday were arguing for a total shutdown, including schools, and I really wonder whether the Government are losing the plot over this. We are obsessive about the risks of covid.

[Mr Steve Baker]

I had a meeting earlier, which my hon. Friend knows about, with Sir Jeremy Farrar. One thing that he explained to me is that if schools are left open, that adds 0.3 to 0.4 to R, so if we are going into lockdown for a month, it is a big compromise. The Government needs to explain why their strategy is consistent with leaving schools open, much as I applaud the fact they will be there.

[Bob Seely]

Where is there any sense of balance? I speak personally, and I know the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) lost somebody recently. Over the last decade, both my parents died of winter respiratory flu, and that was really upsetting for me. Three years ago, 22,000 people died of winter flu. According to the logic of some hon. Members of this House, we would effectively have to shut down our lives for six months of the year in case people die. A bizarrely dangerous precedent is being set, whereby the Government now believe they can effectively halt death.

Once upon a time, we would go to someone’s funeral when they hit 85 or over—my dad made it to his mid-80s—and talk about a life well led. Now, if someone dies of covid several years above the national average lifespan, politicians are saying it is the greatest disaster facing humanity and must never happen again.

I understand the virulent nature of covid, and I understand the impact on the NHS, although I thought the NHS was there to protect us, not the other way around. We need some semblance of balance; if the Government were using statistics honestly, openly and transparently and, on balance, came down on the side of lockdown, that would be fine. However, lockdown is a dubious tool and the way we are presenting the data is a hazardous way to approach the subject.