Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Steve Brine and Andrew Murrison(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Dr Murrison
That is certainly my intention—I have not seen them yet but I intend to. The hon. Lady will have seen the list of 150; I think she will be disappointed about the content of those documents when she sees them, because very few of them will give us any information that will take us any further forward. But I committed to reading them and will certainly do so in the very near future.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
Ministers know that Sir John Moore barracks in my constituency is due for disposal in 2026 as part of the future soldier programme, which will bring phase 1 capability to the Pirbright site and put 900 houses in its place. Will a Minister meet me to ensure that the current ministerial team is right behind the move and, if it is, that we have an intelligent masterplan that does not just help Winchester City Council to meet its housing targets?
Public Health
Debate between Steve Brine and Andrew Murrison(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
I certainly will be supporting these regulations tonight, with a heavy heart, but nevertheless, they are clearly required at this particular juncture. I doubt that there is anybody in this country who loathes and detests more the restrictions on liberties and livelihoods that these regulations reiterate than the Prime Minister. I am confident that he would not be recommending them to the House unless they were absolutely necessary in his judgment. However, I think it is important that the House is provided with more granularity on numbers and it needs to have a better idea of what constitutes an exit strategy and the trigger points that would allow for that strategy.
Jabs offered are not the same as jabs put in arms, which is what is crucial. We need to have published—I suggest daily, since Ministers must have this information—what is being contracted for, the factory-gate delivery against that contract, the jabs in arms and the jabs that are awaiting deployment because of the three-week downtime caused by batch and sterility testing. We need to know how many jabs have been applied in the past 24 hours by priority group.
Steve Brine
I will add one to that, if I may: jabs given per area. In Hampshire, we are in a good place—I expect to hear so tonight in our briefing call, because we can scale up when the supply is there—but I know, from talking to colleagues across the House, that it is not the same everywhere. We need to know where the weaknesses are—or, rather, the vaccine Minister does, so that he may address that.
Dr Murrison
My hon. Friend makes a fair point, and that data clearly has to be available, because it is gathered locally. That would be very useful, particularly for constituency Members of Parliament.
The thing that worries me most is the exit strategy. The Secretary of State, perfectly reasonably, said that we have a sort of exit strategy in that we now have a vaccine, which we clearly did not have at the beginning of last year. However, we need to decide—this is a political decision, ultimately—what constitutes the criteria for coming out of this lockdown. Generally, it has been suggested, that will happen when we have vaccinated everyone up to group 4 in the JCVI’s list of priorities—that is perfectly reasonable—so when everyone over the age of 70 has been jabbed, as opposed to everyone over the age of 70 being offered a jab. The two, as I said, are quite different.
We need to challenge and push back on that, however, because notwithstanding the remarks made by the hon. Gentleman who speaks for the Opposition, the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth), long covid, awful though it is for those who are afflicted by it, does not constitute a reason for continued lockdown and the penalty that this country is paying societally, medically and economically for what we are about to vote on this evening. That does not stack up; what stacks up is the awful grisly calculus of lives saved.
We have a benchmark, which is the number of lives that, tragically, we are compelled to accept every year are lost to seasonal flu deaths. That gives a reasonable benchmark of what, politically, in society we might be capable of accepting and, because we can project how many deaths will happen—Ministers are keen to do that in recommending to the House, correctly, that we vote in support this evening—they must have an idea, given the number of people who have been vaccinated in key groups, how many deaths there will be in the ensuing month, or two months or whatever one might choose.
I will just push back, very finally, on one other issue: the people in group 4. It is reasonable, perhaps, for those who can be expected to remain safe through shielding to be considered part of group 5, because that will enable many of people over 65 to be vaccinated, which will enable us potentially to come out of this awful lockdown just a little bit sooner and to meet the challenging targets that have been set by the Prime Minister.