Public Health

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 6th January 2021 Commons Chamber

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

Cases in the Wakefield district have gone up by over a third in a week. They are still lower at the moment than in November, when Pinderfields Hospital was pushed into crisis, but they are rising fast, and none of us wants to go through that crisis again. That is why measures are clearly needed, but this is a really difficult time for everyone. I want to thank the staff of Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, the NHS healthcare staff and the key workers working non-stop to get us through this difficult time, to whom we owe so much. The community hubs we set up in Normanton, Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley, supported by Wakefield Council, are working hard again, with volunteers and neighbours helping each other, but we urgently need more support from Government for businesses and families, especially those excluded from economic support from the start.

We need rapid action to roll out the vaccine, and we need the programme to work. That is why I want to raise concerns about the potential threat to the vaccine programme from the new South African variant. Senior scientists have said that this may be less susceptible to the vaccines because of the additional mutations. I know the Government are worried about it, but I do not understand why they are not taking urgent action to prevent it from being brought into and spreading across the UK. Rightly, the Government have stopped direct flights from South Africa, but the first wave shows that that is not enough. Genomic evidence quoted in our Home Affairs Committee report in August showed that 34% of imported covid cases came into the UK from Spain and 29% came from France. Less than 1% came directly from China. So when the Prime Minister says that we have taken strong action by stopping direct flights, he is kidding himself. The South African variant has already been identified in France, Austria, Norway, Japan and Australia. Currently, our border checks are weak and not taken seriously. Travellers are not tested before or on arrival. Untested, they get public transport from the airport and pop into the shops to get milk before going home, and the checks on self-isolation arrangements are minimal.

The Financial Times says that the Government’s plans to introduce pre-travel testing have been delayed because the Department for Transport wants UK residents to be exempt. If true, that is ridiculous and dangerous, because covid does not discriminate, and we cannot afford delay. Other countries have strict rules including quarantine hotels, regular tests, airport testing, repeated testing and quarantine taxis with screens—look at New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Italy or South Korea. The UK has to get serious about this too. We failed to do that the first time round and, as a result, we face our third difficult lockdown. We cannot afford further waves of this virus. We have to make sure we do not make those mistakes again.