Covid-19: Government Transparency and Accountability — House of Commons, 2021-04-22
Topic: Health
Robert William Henry Seely (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Tom Randall), who spoke very eloquently about the limits of knowledge and how much we know and do not know I thank the Committee for its report, and my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg), who was as eloquent as ever, and the hon. Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) for their leadership on this. The Government have a duty to provide the public with fair and balanced information. As the report says, at times, the Government have presented data well in very difficult circumstances—the coronavirus.data.gov.uk site and the vaccination daily updates are excellent examples—but it is also clear that they have sometimes used statistics without providing full data, providing context for the data or explaining uncertainties in the data The critical thing—I am delighted that we have the Paymaster General listening to this debate, because, as she knows, I hold her in high regard—is to keep trust with the people. The Government need to provide the public with full information and datasets to allow them to understand risk in the round. The use of partial data or data that is presented partially damages public confidence. Frankly, it has damaged my confidence in the Government, which is why I have been less willing to vote for the past couple of lockdowns. I sometimes do not know what the Government’s real agenda is. I do not mean that in a silly conspiracy theory kind of way. The pandemic clearly exists. Clearly, there was a very strong case for a harder lockdown earlier, and I think a lot of us now see that case, but at the same time there has been a lack of clarity. I would draw a rough comparison with the Iraq war. Mistruths or non-untruths finally catch up with Governments. At the time, Tony Blair was a highly popular leader, but he is now seen to be a shallow populist. New Labour still has not recovered, partly because of the damage it did to its credibility by not telling the truth and not levelling with people I believe there is a strong case, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) and others have argued, for fuller and franker datasets. Government can help people to rationalise risk, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling explained, so that we better understand Government policy. They need to explain better what is happening, rather than making a crude attempt at times to manipulate behaviour Specifically, it is difficult for us—all of us, whether we are in this House or out working in the country—to contextualise some of the numbers. Numbers of covid deaths were always released without a sense of proportion—without explaining that over 1,000 people die and are born in the country every day, or that between 7,000 and 25,000 people die of seasonal flu every year. In the last decade, that has included both myusb parents, for example. There has been so little contextualisation of the information. I saw not one Government spokesman, be it a Minister or a health adviser, say that the median age of covid death was 83. Why not? Because, as we know perfectly well, the Government feared a lack of compliance. For sure, that is a risk, but there is a greater risk by not being honest. There was a strong argument for saying why we should co-operate anyway; we did not need to have the information manipulated for us by a Government who, no doubt with the best of intentions, were trying to get us to do certain things. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling says, honesty is the best policy, even when we are unclear about the policy. I read some media stories—clearly, with a pinch of salt—suggesting that some Government scientists were happy to go along with this soft manipulation of data. If so, shame on them. My next point—I promise I will not be too much longer, Madam Deputy Speaker—is that not once was there a realistic attempt to offset covid data with other data to show the cost of lockdown. That may not have changed our opinions, because clearly the saving of life was the significant factor here, but in saving life people have died and it is right for us to be able to understand and see the datasets that explain honestly the true costs. Frankly, we still have not got them a year in Sometimes, I do not know what the Government’s aims on covid are. We are told repeatedly by the experts and Ministers that we cannot get rid of covid. Well, okay—so, as my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) says, if we cannot get rid of it, why are our restaurants not open? Frankly, so few people are dying of it that more people are now dying on the roads than of covid. More people will be dying from winter flu than from covid. So why are we still in a situation where we are encouraging long-term poverty, which will have a far greater effect on people’s lives than a pandemic that—thank God—is no longer killing people in anything other than tiny, tiny numbers? There is a lack of logic and consistency. If the Government had been clearer with the data, more honest and more open—if they had said, "Here’s the data. This is what we make of it"—we would have been able to do a better job I am happy to accept that the hard lockdown was probably the best option at the time. After that, we could have followed the Swedish model, lived with it and accepted that there were different prices to pay, or we could have continued to have a hard and aggressive lockdown every time covid raised its head. They were both variant options, and we sort of muddled through the middle in a slightly uncomfortable way. There was not great advice initially from Public Health England, but we understand that everybody in the beginning made mistakes, and I do not think that any Government would have done this any differently The pandemic created a unique set of circumstances, but I believe that more data and more context would have fundamentally created more trust, both here and, more importantly, out in the rest of the country. I know that my right hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt) is a diligent Minister and Member of this House. I urge her to advise the Government that more data and more context equals more trust, and we still need that for the future.