Public Health

Steve Brine Excerpts

Monday 26th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

No, I am not suggesting for a moment that such a system should be in place forever, and clearly there has to be scientific evidence about that. However, we certainly need to be at a more advanced stage of our own roll-out before we give such consideration, as the right hon. Gentleman suggests. The comprehensive hotel quarantine system should already have been in place.

The second weakness in the current position is that there are countries with significant outbreaks of the South African and Brazilian variants that are not even on the red list. We understand that the recent South African strain discovered in south London came to the UK via a traveller from an African country not on the red list. Warning No. 2 was ignored, and it came to pass. We know that people travelling to the UK on connecting journeys from red list countries have been mixing with people from non-red list countries on planes and in airports, creating dangerous opportunities for cross-infection. We have seen that in scenes from airports in recent months. Warning No. 3 was ignored, and it came to pass.

The Government try to say that their quarantine measures are tough, but the reality suggests otherwise. It is not just the Opposition giving these warnings. Minutes from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies on 21 January show that Ministers were told

“that reactive, geographically targeted travel bans cannot be relied upon to stop importation of new variants…due to the time lag between the emergence and identification of variants of concern, and the potential for indirect travel via a third country.”

When the director general of Border Force gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, he set out a damning statistic that of the 15,000 people entering the country each day, only around 1% were entering hotel quarantine. That leaves 99% of visitors entering the country with virtually no controls. It is no use the Government saying that other quarantine measures in place are working, because their own figures show that just three in every 100 people quarantining have been successfully contacted. It is a record of negligence that leaves the doors open.

We know things are in a dire state when a video exists of the Home Secretary speaking against her own quarantine policy, and even the implementation of the half-baked measures we have now has been beset by mismanagement. It took 18 days after the announcement on 27 January for hotel quarantine to begin—more time lost. Even now, I hear reports from colleagues about mismanagement of the system—people unable to book in, poor service, lack of support for disabled people, and exceptions not working as they should for people in difficult circumstances. Then there is the Government’s glacial pace of adding countries to the red list.

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

May I probe a bit further the point raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) about the regime the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) is proposing? The right hon. Gentleman said he would like to see our domestic vaccine programme a little further advanced and mentioned the figure of 99%. Let me give him another 99% figure: groups 1 to 9 on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation list account for 99% of those who are hospitalised and then die from covid. Given that we have already vaccinated those groups and that by the end of July we will have offered a vaccination to the whole adult population, what more does he want?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

It is clearly about our own vaccination roll-out, but it is also about vaccination rates around the world, as the hon. Gentleman knows. However, I point out to him and to his right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean that this system should already have been in place, and I have been arguing for it for several months. I had the same debate with the Minister two months ago, back in February.

I think people watching this debate will be staggered to discover that travellers from India were required to isolate in hotels only from Friday, at a time when India, sadly, is in the midst of a devastating wave, with the highest recorded daily cases of covid anywhere in the world. The stakes for these failures are incredibly high. We have seen outbreaks of variants from South Africa, Brazil and India here in the UK. Until now, strict lockdown conditions are likely to have helped to halt the spread, but as lockdowns lift that handbrake comes off. The Government’s blasé attitude was summed up by the Prime Minister himself when he predicted that a third wave from Europe would

“wash up on our shores”.

It does not have to be this way. Throughout the crisis, the Government should have acted more decisively to secure our borders from the first emergence of the virus to failing to act swiftly on the devastating outbreak in India. In debating this statutory instrument, we are clear that the measures are nowhere near enough to provide the protections our country needs. The hopes of our country rely on guarding against vaccine-resistant strains of the virus reaching the UK, but the Government are just not delivering the protections we need. The Government must think again; they must bring forward the long-awaited sector support deal for our aviation industry and measures that deliver the comprehensive hotel quarantine system the country so desperately needs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I do not intend to detain the House for too long, but I have some questions, and I will explain to the Minister why I am raising them now. I think that they are in order. If I understand this correctly, the Government have indicated that, as of 17 May, more international travel may well be possible, subject to a review, and they have indicated that they will give people a week’s notice of those changes. Mr Deputy Speaker, you will have spotted that the date for that announcement to take place is when we are expecting the House to be prorogued before the state opening of Parliament, so this is probably the last opportunity—depending on whether we have Transport questions on Thursday—for Members to ask Ministers questions about the international travel regime before it might change. I happen to think it is important that those questions are asked in the House, rather than simply being left to be asked at a press conference.

Before I set out those questions, however, let me just follow up my question to the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds), who opened the debate for the Labour party. He answered one of my questions, when I could not quite work out why Labour had tabled a motion to revoke these regulations. He confirmed that Labour does not intend to press that to a vote, which makes sense, but he did not really deal with the other question I asked or with the companion question that my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) asked. I pressed the right hon. Gentleman on how long he felt a tougher regime should be in place, and in answer to me he indicated that it should be dependent on our vaccination roll-out, whereas in answer to my hon. Friend, he seemed to suggest that it would depend on what was going on around the world.

The reason that I am labouring this point—I am going to press the Minister on it as well—relates to what the regime is trying to deliver. If this is about worrying about what is going on in the rest of the world—given that it is entirely possible, even with a fair wind, that we will not have vaccinated the adult population around the world until the end of next year, 2022—this whole travel regime could be in place for the rest of this year and the whole of next year, which has very significant implications. If, however, the regime is to stay in place until we have vaccinated every adult in this country, that would have very different implications, as my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester pointed out, as we will have offered every adult a vaccination by July.

My question to the Minister is: will she set out for the House what the Government’s current thinking is? She has indicated that the regime should stay in place for little while, but I note that the explanatory memorandum to these regulations reminds us that the overall international travel regulations will cease to have effect on 8 June this year. That is not far into the future, so the Government will have to make a decision about whether to allow those regulations to lapse on 8 June, effectively resulting in no controls on international travel or, whether—as I suspect is more likely—to bring in further regulations, in which case they will need to be clear about how long they wish those regulations to remain in place.

The exchange between myself, my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester and the right hon. Member for Torfaen illustrated this question. Is this about how well we have rolled out vaccinations in the UK and therefore protected our population from covid? The Minister will know that we already have in place very good genomic sequencing, and as I understand it, all the manufacturers and developers are ready to tweak the vaccines they have already developed, if the genomic sequencing indicates any need to do so. At the moment, although these variants are called variants of concern, none of them evades the vaccine. My understanding is that the vaccines are effective against all of them, certainly in terms of preventing serious disease, hospitalisation and death. There is, I understand, a question mark about the extent to which the vaccines protect against the South African variant as far as mild disease is concerned, but if it enables mild disease to take hold then I am not sure that is something about which we need to be enormously concerned.

I press that point because if the Government are going to take the view that they are so worried about a potential variant that does not yet exist developing somewhere in the world and undermining the efficacy of our vaccine position, then it seems to me that that means we will have to keep the regulations in place at least until the whole of the world is vaccinated and the virus is driven down to a very low level globally. That may not be until the end of next year, on a best-case scenario. That has really quite dramatic consequences for the airline industry, the travel industry and the 3 million people who work in it, and the freedoms of our population, so if the Minister could say a little bit about that, that would be helpful.

[Steve Brine]

Perhaps it would be helpful if the Government were to say what level of reduced efficacy they would consider to be a cause for concern. Any flu vaccine that I ever purchased when I was doing the Minister’s job had about 60% efficacy. The three vaccines being used at the moment are way ahead of that, so even a reduction in efficacy of 10% would still significantly outpace the flu vaccine we currently roll out. Would it be helpful if the Government said at which level it would drop to where the indicators would flash red?

[Mr Harper]

That is a very good question. More widely, it would be helpful if the Government and their scientific advisers had a slightly better conversation with the public about variants and the impact they may have on vaccine efficacy, rather than this constant—I accept this is not always how they intend it, but it is the way it gets reported—conversation about scary variants or mutants.

Actually, at the moment—I am sure the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—all the variants we are aware of are dealt with by the existing vaccine portfolio to a greater or lesser degree. What we are concerned about is what may come along in the future, but we have a very good system in this country at least. My understanding is that none of the vaccine manufacturers yet feel they have to change the design of their vaccines to deal with any variant we are currently aware of anywhere in the world.

One further point I want to make is that how we name variants—the Kent variant, the South African variant, the Indian variant—is not actually terribly helpful. It gives the impression to the public that the variants only come from specific geographic parts of the world and if only we put in a sufficiently robust border arrangement, we could keep them out. The reality, of course, is that those variants could occur anywhere in the world, including here in the United Kingdom. I think I am right in saying that the best advice that exists is that even an incredibly tough border regime can, at best, only slow the transmission of viruses, rather than keep them out forever. At some point we will have to decide when we will allow travel to get back to normal, which is why I asked whether that would be about how the world is vaccinated or how the United Kingdom is vaccinated. I do not think that question has been sufficiently answered.

Specifically on the regulations, there is reference to the ports by which people are allowed to enter the United Kingdom. I want to ask one or two questions about ports of entry. The Minister answered some of this, in response to the concerns raised by the shadow Home Secretary, when talking about the efforts that Heathrow in particular has put in place to try to keep people separate. However, it is the case, having looked at pictures, and listened to the challenges faced by airport operators and the first-hand testimony of people travelling, that people from different countries, including red list countries and non-red list countries, are kept in airports for significant periods of time in a way that is not particularly well socially distanced. That is clearly a risk, if we then insist that they will have to spend time in quarantine, when they have just spent a considerable period of time next to people from completely different countries.

I mention that because I wonder what plans the Government have in place, as they think about increasing the volume of international travel, to automate the process. The Minister will be aware—I am, as a former Immigration Minister—that one of the ways in which we deal with the volumes going through airports is to have e-gates to automate the process of checking people’s travel documents. In order to deal with a significant increase in volume, the testing information on the passenger locator form will, I think, have to be put into some digital form, if airports are to have any hope of dealing with the volume of passengers. Given a significant increase in passenger volumes, even with an increase in the number of Border Force staff, in no way will airports be able to cope with checking all that information and dealing with the volume of flights without becoming absolutely overwhelmed. If the Government might change the position in just a couple of weeks’ time, will the Minister say how far forward those plans are?

My final point—you will be pleased to know, Mr Deputy Speaker—is about vaccine passports. I am not at all persuaded of domestic vaccine passports. They run a great risk of creating a two-tier society. Also, once we have vaccinated the adult population, in particular with the take-up rate among the groups so far of more than 95%, I am not at all sure what a domestic vaccine passport gets us once we have reached that level of vaccination coverage.

It seems to me that vaccine passports would be a big mistake. As the Paymaster General, who responded to the debate last Thursday, said to me, domestic vaccine passports and international ones are quite separate and should be treated separately, and it would be a mistake to run them together. I was heartened to hear that, and I hope that is the position the Government will stick to.

Internationally, however, some questions arise from the regime put in place here. I am much more relaxed about international vaccine passports than about domestic ones. We have already have precedents—people have to have yellow fever vaccinations to go to specific countries—and of course if a country requires people to be vaccinated to enter it, it is entirely up to it what rules are set for people who want to visit that country.

My first question for the Minister is because I understand that the World Health Organisation states in its most up-to-date policy paper of 5 February—the latest one on its website—that it does not recommend that countries have proof of covid vaccination to exist before they allow people to travel. The reason it sets that out is that it fears that that would in effect incentivise countries that had already had a good roll-out of vaccine to hog the global supplies for themselves, setting up some unfortunate sets of incentives. That is the organisation’s latest position. Will the Minister say whether the British Government will go along with that position?

I have two questions. First, if the UK Government ease up on the travel rules in May, is their position that they will require foreign nationals to be vaccinated before they come to the United Kingdom, or will the Government stick to the testing regime? Secondly, what steps have the Government put in place, working with the International Air Transport Association and other international bodies, for any kind of international vaccine passport? Perhaps the Minister will update the House on the Government’s plans.

I raise that because, if the Government announce a change to the international position in the next couple of weeks, knowing what plans are under way—and, I hope, this House being asked for its authorisation to implement such measures—would be very welcome. With those few questions, I conclude my remarks.