Civil Proceedings

Motions 3 and 4 will be debated together. Under the terms of the Business of the House (Today) order, the Questions on the motions will be put separately, no later than 90 minutes after the start of this debate.

I beg to move,

That the Coronavirus Act 2020 (Delay in Expiry: Inquests, Courts and Tribunals, and Statutory Sick Pay) (England and Wales and Northern Ireland) Regulations 2022 (SI, 2022, No. 362), dated 23 March 2022, a copy of which was laid before this House on 23 March, be approved.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following motion on the Coronavirus Act 2020 (Review of Temporary Provisions) (No.4):

That the temporary provisions of the Coronavirus Act 2020 should not yet expire.

Throughout the pandemic, the Government have done everything in our power to protect the lives and livelihoods of people across the country .The Coronavirus Act has been a vital tool, allowing us to do that. Last week marks two years since the Act gained Royal Assent and the automatic expiry date for its temporary provisions. This is an opportunity to reflect on the progress we have made in our fight against covid-19 and on how the Act has supported us in that fight, as well as in encouraging important innovations in some of our public services, which we want to take forward.

First, I come to the support the Act has given us. It was an extraordinary piece of legislation for an extraordinary time in this country’s history, giving us the powers we needed to keep the country safe, and the economy and public services open at the time of need. It helped us to bolster the health and social care workforce by suspending rules in the NHS pension schemes for England and Wales, and allowing the creation of temporary registers enabling recently retired NHS and social care staff to return to the workforce and play their part. Almost 15,000 nurses, midwives and, in England, nursing associates joined these temporary registers to help deal with the impact of the pandemic, as well as more than 10,000 paramedics, operating department practitioners and other professionals, and about 6,500 social workers.

The Act also helped the Government to offer unprecedented economic support and to help people and businesses at a time when so many businesses faced disruption. That includes the coronavirus job retention scheme, also known as furlough, which has supported 11.7 million jobs.

Will the Minister comment on the figures released by the Office for National Statistics today, which state that men and women living in the most deprived parts of the country were five and six times more likely to die from covid than those in the least deprived areas? What can she say about the adequacy of the regulations for those people?

It has been clear throughout the pandemic that people living in areas of deprivation and different ethnic minorities have been impacted more than others. We are committed to addressing that, which is why we will launch a health disparities White Paper shortly that will look at all the different issues.

Following on from the point that was just made by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), the Minister must be aware of the massive effect of the whole coronavirus process on mental health, particularly among young people—even among children in primary school. Are the Government committed to putting the necessary resources into the hardest-hit communities where the mental health crisis is at its worst?

The right hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. We know that the pandemic has had a mental health impact not just on children and young people, but on people of all ages. That is why it is important that we are now living with covid and getting our lives back to normal, which is one way of helping restore that normality that we are so desperate to get back to.

The Government helped businesses at a time when many faced disruption, including through the coronavirus job retention scheme. We have also supported the self-employment income support scheme, which paid out more than £28 billion to nearly 3 million self-employed people and was one of the most generous schemes for the self-employed in the world.

The legislation covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Will the Minister reassure me that full consultation has taken place with the Health Minister and the Economy Minister in Northern Ireland to ensure that what she is mentioning is endorsed by the Northern Ireland Assembly?

I shall come shortly to the specific parts of the extension that are relevant to Northern Ireland. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that we have had ongoing conversations with the devolved Administrations throughout the whole two years.

The Coronavirus Act 2020 also helped to ease the burden on frontline staff in our critical public services. For example, provisions in the Act have helped the courts and tribunal system to keep functioning throughout the pandemic by allowing thousands of hearings to take place remotely.

The Minister has now turned to the subject I wanted to ask her about. She talks about our courts, but the reality is that they are in a terrible position. We are up to a record 708 days for the average time it takes to prosecute suspected criminals. The longer those delays go on, the more victims wait. No party can seriously claim to be tough on crime while allowing victims to be left waiting and allowing criminals to spend 708 days before they are prosecuted. Will the Minister apologise to those people who are waiting and tell us that the Government have some kind of strategy to address that appalling record backlog?

I was about to come on to why we have tabled this statutory instrument today, but I can reassure the hon. Gentleman that the backlog is now falling. The Ministry of Justice’s spending review settlement has put £500 million into addressing the issue.

Currently, more than 11,000 hearings take place each week using remote technology across 3,200 virtual courtrooms. The Act has allowed the courts to deal promptly and safely with proceedings, avoiding unnecessary social contact and travel and keeping justice going while upholding the principle of open justice. That shows how the Act has not just offered support at a time of emergency but has driven modernisation of important services that we want to take forward. We are looking to replicate several of those powers in other primary legislation.

We have always said that we would not keep these measures in place for a day longer than needed. When the Act was introduced, the temporary provisions within it were given a two-year lifespan so that we could make sure that those powers would be in force only for as long as they were necessary and proportionate to respond to the pandemic. Since the Act was first introduced, we have made huge progress in our fight against the virus thanks to a national vaccination programme that has now put more than 140 million doses in arms.

The scientific protection that we have built up, together with our greater understanding of the virus, has shifted the odds. Our fight against the virus is not over, but our living with covid plan showed how we can now take a different approach, protecting ourselves without restricting our freedoms. To do that, we are moving away from legal curbs towards an approach based on personal responsibility and public health guidance where we trust people to take the right decision for those around them. As we have built up greater defences against the virus, we have been able to suspend or expire early more and more temporary provisions from the Act and the vast majority of temporary non-devolved provisions are now expired. Only five temporary non-devolved provisions remain in force and they would be extended by the regulations.

I start by echoing the Minister’s thanks to healthcare and frontline public service workers and, indeed, the public for all they have done to get us to this point after two years of the pandemic. I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to the two motions before the House today on behalf of Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition.

Clearly, as the shadow public health Minister, I will be focusing primarily on elements of the motions that relate to public health, but I will also touch on the extension of the justice provisions relating to coroners’ inquests and remote hearings. I know my colleagues on the Bill Committees for the Judicial Review and Courts Bill and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill have already engaged constructively with the Government on those provisions and supported their being moved on to statute.

However, we have called for the Government to provide further evidence on the impact that those measures, particularly remote hearings, may have on people with disabilities and those who are digitally excluded. I would be grateful if the Minister reiterated those concerns to her colleagues in the Ministry of Justice—I notice the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge) sitting alongside her—and urge them to put the appropriate safeguards in place. With a Crown court backlog already at 60,000—caused, I may add, by the Government’s short-sightedness and incompetence—we must ensure that inequality is not further entrenched in our justice system.

Moving on to public health, the Coronavirus Act 2020 was an unprecedented Act for unprecedented times. It enabled the Government to take rapid and wide-ranging steps to limit the spread of covid-19, and in turn to protect lives, livelihoods and our national health service. Correctly, it was never intended to last forever. Vaccination, as the Minister has said, has proved an invaluable tool in our fight against coronavirus, and it is thanks to our incredible scientists, our NHS staff and the British public that we are able to be here today to debate the end of many of the Act’s provisions.

On behalf of the numerous immuno-suppressed people in Chesterfield and their families who have contacted me, I thank my hon. Friend for what he has just said. He is absolutely right that many of them still feel prisoners in their own home and feel utterly ignored, and the Government’s failure on sick pay has only added to their sense of being forgotten. Will he reinforce the message to the Government that those people are not being properly catered for?

I thank my hon. Friend for his kind remarks. I have met numerous groups representing the clinically vulnerable, the clinically extremely vulnerable and the immunosuppressed communities, and the level of anxiety and worry in those communities is clear. While we have all, to some extent, been able to get back to as near a normal life as possible, those communities still feel isolated, under pressure and incredibly concerned about what mixing and social interaction would mean for them, were they to get coronavirus.