Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Steps and Other Provisions) (England) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2021 — House of Lords, 2021-06-16
Topic: Health
James Bethell (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, this delay comes with huge regret—no one likes to see step 4 delayed in this way. I start by acknowledging that it will have an impact on many people’s lives. We have talked a lot in this Chamber about singing. I do not think that it is necessarily the biggest impact, but it is iconic and important. I am disappointed that I have not been able to satisfy my noble friend with my comments on it. I have the guidance on singing here, and I make it clear that the Government are not banning singing or dancing. We know that people want to get back to normal activities, but they need to acknowledge that singing and dancing can increase the risk of catching and passing on the virus. We know that singing is risky; that is proven. Covid can spread from person to person through small droplets in aerosols, and singing increases the risk of transmission through these. It is particularly dangerous indoors I return to the question of singing because I want to convey a sense of the science basis on which we have made these decisions and because of the importance we put on individual responsibility. We advise on amateur singers, sports matches, bars and restaurants and audience participation—I should be glad to share with the House a copy of this advice—we allow outdoor singing for amateur singers, audience participation and at sports matches, and professional choirs and singers are permitted to rehearse and perform in any number. That is a way of trying to say that a huge amount of consideration has gone into the practical impact of this advice and these guidelines, and where we have made tough decisions, it has been done with consideration I can give some good news to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. BEIS estimates that there will be 50,000 weddings in the four weeks from 21 June. To give the Chamber a sense of scale, assuming an average reception size of 50 people, that means that 2.5 million people will be able to go to a wedding this summer, and I know that that will be a huge relief to many of them I shall take a moment, a long moment, to address my noble friend Lord Lilley’s point seriously, because it is an important one. I agree with him wholeheartedly that we will learn to live with Covid, with some people catching the disease and, sadly, a very small number of them succumbing to it. The nation will need to commit to public health measures to fight new variants and outbreaks, as we have done through history. But let me address his strongly held view that we are today ready to unlock Yes, the vaccine programme is going well—and I can confirm to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, that the supplies are in place to commit to the programme as advertised—but the supply is still limited only to the supplies we have booked, so we need another month to offer it to everyone. Despite the effect of the vaccine on infection, transmission, serious disease and death, to which my noble friend referred in his very persuasive speech, infection rates are rising, and they are rising dramatically. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, put the statistics extremely well. The doubling rate in many LAs is just six days. The infection rate in schools is bubbling up. Outbreaks in social care are becoming regular We have been here before. To give your Lordships a specific example, in a city such as London, which has a relatively young population, there is a huge reservoir of potential novel, unvaccinated people, so we are just not quite out of this yet. Even if the vaccine does prevent severe disease, I remind noble Lords that there are more than a million—nearer 2 million—people who are immunosuppressed for one reason or another and for whom the vaccine does not offer a way out at all I also remind my noble friend Lord Lilley that if the infection were to be rife, even if the consequences were not disease and severe illness, it would not be consequence-free. We do not know the incidence of long Covid, but we do know that many of the people who have long Covid are completely asymptomatic, and we know that high rates of infection increase the conditions of mutation. That is what happened in Kent, to very grave effect, in September. So I say to my noble friend that I think this delay is necessary; it is right. I remind the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, that red-listing is not decided by some simple algorithmic relationship to infection rates. Red-listing is used principally to keep out variants of concern. During the period that he talked about, we were understandably focused on the South African variant, and it was the South African variant that was rife in Pakistan and Bangladesh and that led us to red-list those two countries. We did not have a copy of delta. We did not have the necessary sequencing data. The WHO had not attributed it as being a VOC. Let us look at what actually happened. The delta variant became a variant of concern on 7 May 2021. By this point, India had already been on the UK red list for a full two weeks I absolutely sympathise with the difficulties faced by individuals, families and businesses which my noble friend Lord Robathan reflected on. On his specific point, which was also raised by my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, an impact assessment was not published for this instrument because it is a temporary measure extending the steps regulations for only a short period. But I completely understand their point, and I reassure them both that in making these decisions, we continually assess the economic and societal impact of restrictions, balancing these with risks to public health On my noble friend’s substantive point, I am always grateful for the challenge he brings. Over the last 18 months, he has expressed his scepticism. He is sceptical about the effectiveness of lockdowns. On both 9 October and 12 November, he questioned whether additional restrictions in Leicester were having any impact at all, yet we know that lockdowns work. In Leicester, we managed to reduce the daily incidence rate from 135 cases per 100,000 on 28 June to 25.3 cases per 100,000 on 3 September My noble friend is sceptical about the accuracy of tests. On 6 October, he claimed that a high proportion of tests bring back false positives, yet after 193 million Covid tests, we know that this is not true. Independent confirmatory testing of positive samples indicates a test specificity that exceeds 99.3%, meaning that the false positive rate is less than 1% My noble friend has been sceptical about the rate of deaths from Covid here in the UK, and he is sceptical that the Covid death rate is a cause for concern. On 24 July last year, he questioned whether the death rate was really that bad. On 23 September, he told us that the death rate is still "only between 1% and 2% of the average daily death rate in this country."—[Official Report, 23/9/20; col. 1889.] My noble friend is sceptical that the NHS capacity has ever been at risk. On 29 July last year, he said that hospitals were "not particularly full" and that they had not been "swamped" My noble friend is sceptical that world leaders are right to consider and worry about this pandemic so much. In May 2020, he said: "According to the figures, perhaps 316,000 deaths around the world so far have been linked to CV-19. This is awful—every one is tragic—but it is not callous to point out that some 60 million people will die anyway around the world this year."—[Official Report, 18/5/20; col. 949.] My noble friend is sceptical about the Government’s whole response to the pandemic. I remember that he told the House: "A huge number of people, including me, are concerned that we will overreact—although the Minister has said that we will not—and cause panic in the country, where panic should not be seen."—[Official Report, 3/3/20; col. 521.] He said that in March 2020, and I did not agree with him then. With 128,000 deaths in the UK and around 4 million deaths around the world, with a million people in the UK reporting long Covid symptoms, and with the rise of this nasty, highly transmissible, vaccine-evading new variant which seems set to spread around the world, I do not agree with him now I do not believe in doing nothing in the face of the evidence. I do not believe in leaving the elderly and vulnerable to fend for themselves or hoping that the virus will somehow blow itself out. I do not expect the economy to rock and roll even as the death toll rises and public confidence collapses. We are prepared to take tough decisions to save lives, protect the NHS and get us out of this awful pandemic, and we will continue to do so. For that reason, I ask my noble friend to withdraw his amendment. I beg to move.