Public Health — House of Commons, 2021-04-26
Topic: Mixed Topics
Mark James Harper (Conservative, Centre-right): I do not intend to detain the House for too long, but I have some questions, and I will explain to the Minister why I am raising them now. I think that they are in order. If I understand this correctly, the Government have indicated that, as of 17 May, more international travel may well be possible, subject to a review, and they have indicated that they will give people a week’s notice of those changes. Mr Deputy Speaker, you will have spotted that the date for that announcement to take place is when we are expecting the House to be prorogued before the state opening of Parliament, so this is probably the last opportunity—depending on whether we have Transport questions on Thursday—for Members to ask Ministers questions about the international travel regime before it might change. I happen to think it is important that those questions are asked in the House, rather than simply being left to be asked at a press conference Before I set out those questions, however, let me just follow up my question to the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds), who opened the debate for the Labour party. He answered one of my questions, when I could not quite work out why Labour had tabled a motion to revoke these regulations. He confirmed that Labour does not intend to press that to a vote, which makes sense, but he did not really deal with the other question I asked or with the companion question that my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) asked. I pressed the right hon. Gentleman on how long he felt a tougher regime should be in place, and in answer to me he indicated that it should be dependent on our vaccination roll-out, whereas in answer to my hon. Friend, he seemed to suggest that it would depend on what was going on around the world The reason that I am labouring this point—I am going to press the Minister on it as well—relates to what the regime is trying to deliver. If this is about worrying about what is going on in the rest of the world—given that it is entirely possible, even with a fair wind, that we will not have vaccinated the adult population around the world until the end of next year, 2022—this whole travel regime could be in place for the rest of this year and the whole of next year, which has very significant implications. If, however, the regime is to stay in place until we have vaccinated every adult in this country, that would have very different implications, as my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester pointed out, as we will have offered every adult a vaccination by July My question to the Minister is: will she set out for the House what the Government’s current thinking is? She has indicated that the regime should stay in place for little while, but I note that the explanatory memorandum to these regulations reminds us that the overall international travel regulations will cease to have effect on 8 June this year. That is not far into the future, so the Government will have to make a decision about whether to allow those regulations to lapse on 8 June, effectively resulting in no controls on international travel or, whether—as I suspect is more likely—to bring in further regulations, in which case they will need to be clear about how long they wish those regulations to remain in place The exchange between myself, my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester and the right hon. Member for Torfaen illustrated this question. Is this about how well we have rolled out vaccinations in the UK and therefore protected our population from covid? The Minister will know that we already have in place very good genomic sequencing, and as I understand it, all the manufacturers and developers are ready to tweak the vaccines they have already developed, if the genomic sequencing indicates any need to do so. At the moment, although these variants are called variants of concern, none of them evades the vaccine. My understanding is that the vaccines are effective against all of them, certainly in terms of preventing serious disease, hospitalisation and death. There is, I understand, a question mark about the extent to which the vaccines protect against the South African variant as far as mild disease is concerned, but if it enables mild disease to take hold then I am not sure that is something about which we need to be enormously concerned I press that point because if the Government are going to take the view that they are so worried about a potential variant that does not yet exist developing somewhere in the world and undermining the efficacy of our vaccine position, then it seems to me that that means we will have to keep the regulations in place at least until the whole of the world is vaccinated and the virus is driven down to a very low level globally. That may not be until the end of next year, on a best-case scenario. That has really quite dramatic consequences for the airline industry, the travel industry and the 3 million people who work in it, and the freedoms of our population, so if the Minister could say a little bit about that, that would be helpful.