Public Health

Debate between Steve Brine and Nick Thomas-Symonds

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.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Steve Brine and Nick Thomas-Symonds

2nd reading & 2nd reading - Day 1
Monday 15th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the importance that is being put on statues over women, and the Government should be ashamed. This comes at a time when—

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

In one moment, because I need to deal with the issue of the rape statistics that has been raised. We are seeing fewer people being prosecuted and convicted for rape than at any time since records began, and that is at a time when the number of reported rapes is increasing. What message do the Government think that that sends to victims about coming forward? As I said to the Minister—he is a Justice Minister; he really should be concentrating on trying to deal with this problem—99% of reported rapes do not even get near a court. That is absolutely shameful. I say to the Home Secretary: think again about the Government’s priorities on this, make changes, such as end-to-end support for victims pre-trial and post-trial, and fast-track these trials through our system, instead of the two years that there have to be at the moment.

[Steve Brine]

If the desecration of our war memorials does not move the right hon. Gentleman, can I check this one with him? Two of my constituents lost their daughter when somebody impaired by the incorrect use of prescription drugs careered across the carriageway and hit her car head-on at high speed, killing her outright. In part 5 of the Bill, on road traffic, we introduce clause 64, on increased penalties for causing death by dangerous driving. Does the shadow Home Secretary support that and will he vote for it?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I do absolutely support that and I will come to it in a moment but, to deal with the first part of the hon. Gentleman’s question, he seemed to imply that I did not understand the value of war memorials. I absolutely do. The difference is that this Bill has now been extended to every form of memorial, including statues of slave traders. It really sums up the problem with the Government’s approach. If they genuinely wanted to introduce proportionate measures to protect war memorials, they could have done so and not introduced the measures that they actually have.

I come to the sentencing elements of the Bill. It is of course right to extend whole-life orders to cover the premeditated murder of a child. The tragic murder of Ellie Gould on 3 May 2019 highlights the failure of the justice system to impose strict enough sentences on those who murder in a domestic setting and the issue of the age of the killer. But this measure is insufficient. The current approach to sentencing seems to forget the context in which many female victims are killed—in the home, with a weapon taken from that location. The minimum tariff in such cases is 15 years, but it is 25 if the weapon is brought to the scene of the crime. That is a systemic problem; violence against women and girls seems to be seen as less serious than other forms of violence. This has to be addressed.

The Opposition also say that tougher sentencing on its own is not enough. We know that wider change across our society is needed, and we know that the Government who have decimated our public services over the past 11 years have totally lost sight of addressing the causes of crime as well, with the sadly predictable consequences of rising violent crime in every single police force area of England and Wales. The Bill is shamefully short of measures to address the unacceptable violence women and girls face. In that, it fails woefully to meet the urgent need for change.