Covid-19

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is right. We are doing everything we can to protect people, particularly those in care homes, who are so vulnerable, as we saw during the early stages of the pandemic. We have massively increased the winter action plan for care homes: putting in another £546 million; stopping movement between care homes; and taking the tough decision to stop visits to care homes in lockdown areas, which is very difficult for elderly people in care homes. The reason that we are taking those and other difficult measures now is that we want to avoid another national lockdown of exactly the type that my hon. Friend also rightly wants to avoid.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Some of my constituents have been waiting for four days, five days or even longer to get their test results back. In July, the Government rightly promised that 80% of in-person tests would receive their results within 24 hours of booking. That figure is now down to below 20%. That is dangerous: it means that people are not in the tracing system and their contacts are not being traced; it makes it easier for the virus to spread; and it makes it more likely that we will face even tougher restrictions, which the Prime Minister has described, across the whole country. Given that the Government made so many mistakes on testing in the first wave, we cannot afford for him to get this wrong again now. When will that 80% target now be met?