Vaccination: Condition of Deployment

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement, and also for his regular contact and briefings on this issue at both ministerial and official level. He is right to say that Labour worked with the Government to ensure maximum take-up of the vaccine across health and social care, and we do not regret that decision. Indeed, we welcome the decision that he has come to today.

Let me be clear from the start: vaccines are safe, effective, and the best defence that we have against the virus. Whether compulsory or not, it remains the professional duty of all NHS and care workers to get themselves vaccinated, just as it is the duty of all of us to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our society from the greater spread of infections and hospitalisations, and from the need for harsh restrictions that impact on our lives, livelihoods and liberties. The debate over this policy is about whether the state should mandate the vaccine for health and care staff, or whether it should take a voluntary approach. It is not a discussion about the need to get vaccinated, the arguments for which are overwhelmingly one-sided. With five million people in the UK still to have their first jab, we cannot afford to take our foot off the pedal in getting the message out.

Labour Members supported the initial policy in early December. Since then we have seen a significant increase in vaccinations among NHS staff, with tens of thousands more staff now protected. I say an enormous thank you to the NHS trusts that worked tirelessly to persuade hesitant staff of the need to get vaccinated, and to those colleagues who have given up considerable time to have supportive conversations with their peers. I thank the health unions and royal colleges which, despite their misgivings about the mandatory nature of the policy, nonetheless did everything they could to encourage their members to get vaccinated.

Clearly, things have now moved on, in terms of both our overall levels of infections, and in our understanding of this latest variant. It has also become clear that to follow through with this policy could see tens of thousands of staff forced to leave their roles, at a time when our health service is already understaffed and overstretched—indeed, that has been a particular anxiety on these Benches and right across the House. However, efforts must continue to persuade those staff who are still hesitant.

What lessons have the Secretary of State and his Department learned from the Welsh Government, where 95% of staff were double jabbed by November without any mandate? What can we learn from the Welsh Government’s approach to persuasion, and how can we emulate their success? In light of today’s decision, it is all the more important that health and care workers are empowered to do the right thing and isolate when they need to, without the fear of being unable to feed their families. One in five care homes do not pay staff their full wages to isolate. If we are to learn to live well with covid, that must change. Labour’s plan for living well with covid includes making all workers eligible for proper levels of sick pay. Why have the Government still not sorted this? I appreciate that those are also Treasury issues, but that approach is penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to protecting public health.

The Labour party supported this measure in December, put the national interest before party politics, and made sure it had the votes needed to pass through the House. We understand the difficulties faced by the Government in coming to today’s decision, and we will continue to be as constructive and helpful as we can be in a national crisis, just as Labour has been throughout the past two years. I welcome very much what the Secretary of State said this afternoon about welcoming Labour support for this policy, and indeed about our wider support for the vaccination roll-out, but let me end on a point of criticism, which is not in any way levelled at the Secretary of State. Given the way that the Labour party has handled its approach to the pandemic response, and the constructive way that we sought to work with the Government, it is not unreasonable to expect the Prime Minister, and others in his party, to stop pretending that that has not been the case. Perhaps he might stop seeking to turn the pandemic—the greatest threat we have faced to our nation for more than 70 years—into a party political mud fight. Surely we can do better than that, and I would like to think that the Secretary of State and I have been leading by example.

[Sajid Javid]

Once again, I thank the hon. Gentleman for his approach to this policy area and to vaccinations in general. He is absolutely right in the comments he has made on that and the importance of working across the House and working together on such an important issue in the national interest, as he has done. I very much welcome that approach. Not all countries take such an approach to such an important issue, and they have sadly paid a price for that. I believe that one of the reasons we have such high vaccine uptake in this country is the cross-party approach that has been taken, and I thank him once again for that.

The hon. Gentleman is also right to point to the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines, as independently set out by our world-class regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, and other reputable regulators across the world. No one should doubt the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines. It is because of the success of this country’s vaccination programme that we are able to open up again in the way that we have and to start returning to normal life.

Very importantly for the people we are talking about today—the fantastic people working in the NHS and across social care—one of the key reasons we have been able to keep down the pressure on the NHS in particular is that so many people have come forward and got vaccinated. That is why it remains troubling that some people, in particular in the NHS, still refuse to get vaccinated, even when they know it is safe and effective, and do not do the responsible thing and act in a professional way.

We will keep going to work with those people in a positive way to try to persuade them about the benefits of vaccination and to provide them with the information they need. We will continue with the work of one-to-one meetings with clinicians if necessary and encouraging them to make that positive choice, but it will be about encouragement and helping them to come to the right decision. We will learn and look at what other parts of the UK have done in making sure that we have the very best practice and have learned from each other.

Finally, on the point that the hon. Gentleman raised about sick pay, I understand what he is saying. I just point to the fact that we have kept rules in place to allow sick pay to be claimed from day one, and a hardship fund is in place to give extra support where needed.