Covid-19 Update

Before we proceed with the Secretary of State’s statement, I remind hon. Members that the conduct of another Member should not, other than by a substantive motion, be criticised on the Floor of the House.

With permission, I would like to make a statement on coronavirus. The virus is spreading, both here and overseas. In the past week, over 450,000 people tested positive for coronavirus in Europe, almost double the number of cases a month ago. Here in the UK, the number of hospital admissions is now at its highest since mid-June. Last week, the Office for National Statistics said that while the rate of increase may be falling, the number of cases is still rising. Yesterday, there were 12,594 new positive cases. The rise is more localised than first time around, with cases rising particularly sharply in the north-east and the north-west of England and in parts of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Now more than ever, with winter ahead, we must all remain vigilant and get the virus under control.

Let me turn to the operational issues on data publication, the future plans for medicine licensing and, of course, the announcement of 40 hospitals made by the Prime Minister on Friday night. I wish to take the first available opportunity to set out to the House the technical issue relating to case uploads that was discovered by Public Health England on Friday evening. It is an ongoing incident and I come to the House straight from an operational update from my officials.

On Friday night, Public Health England identified that over the previous eight days, 15,841 positive test results were not included in the reported daily cases. This was due to a failure in the automated transfer of files from the labs to PHE’s data systems. I reassure everyone that every single person who tested positive was told that result in the normal way and in the normal timeframe. They were told that they needed to self-isolate, which is now required by law. However, the positive test results were not reported in the public data and were not transferred to the contact tracing system.

I thank colleagues who have been working since late on Friday night and throughout the weekend to resolve this problem. I wish to set out the steps we have taken. First, contact tracing of the relevant cases began first thing on Saturday. We brought in 6,500 hours of extra contact tracing over the weekend. I can report to the House that, as of 9 am today, 51% of the cases have now been contacted a second time for contact tracing purposes. I reassure the House that outbreak control in care homes, schools and hospitals has not been directly affected because dealing with outbreaks in those settings does not primarily rely on this particular PHE system.

Secondly, the number of cases did not flow through to the dashboards that we use for both internal and external monitoring of the epidemic. Over the weekend, we updated the public dashboard, and this morning the Joint Biosecurity Centre presented to me its updated analysis of the epidemic based on the new figures. The chief medical officer’s analysis is that our assessment of the disease and its impact has not substantially changed as a result of the new data, and the JBC has confirmed that it has not impacted the basis on which decisions about local action were taken last week. Nevertheless, this is a serious issue that is been investigated fully. I thank Public Health England and NHS Test and Trace, which have been working together at speed to resolve this issue. I thank everyone for their hard work over the weekend. This incident should never have happened, but the team have acted swiftly to minimise its impact. It is now critical that we work together to put the situation right and make sure that it never happens again.

I thank the Secretary of State for giving me advance sight of his statement. In recent weeks, we have had people being told to travel hundreds of miles for a test; we have had hundreds of children out of school unable to get a test; we have had tracers sitting idle, watching Netflix; and we have had care home tests taking days to be processed. Yesterday, we had a Health Minister saying that this could be a moment of national pride like the Olympics, and we have had a Prime Minister in a complete muddle over the rules. Now, at one of the most crucial points in this pandemic, we learn that almost 16,000 positive cases went unreported for a week. That means that as many as 48,000 contacts have not been traced and are not isolating. Those thousands of people, blissfully unaware that they have been exposed to covid, are potentially spreading this deadly virus at a time when hospital admissions are increasing and we are in the second wave.

This is not just a shambles; it so much worse than that. It gives me no comfort to say it, but it is putting lives at risk, and the Secretary of State should apologise when he responds. No doubt he will complain about my tone, or say that he will not have any divisive talk, but people want answers. He has just said that over half the 16,000 people have been spoken to by tracers, and they have presumably handed over their contacts, but when will the other 49% be spoken to by contact tracers? How many of the contacts have now been traced and spoken to, and how many are isolating? Why did nobody notice this issue until Friday night? Why did it take until 9.30 on Sunday evening for this to become public? The Prime Minister was clearly aware of the problem, because he said on “The Andrew Marr Show” yesterday morning that there had been a

“failure in the counting system, which has now been rectified”.

Speed is of the essence when dealing with a pandemic, so when were local directors of public health informed? The Secretary of State says that this is an ongoing issue, so it has not been rectified, as the Prime Minister said on “Marr”. When will it be fully resolved?

Public Health England sources say that they report the data when they get the data from test and trace. Can the Secretary of State confirm that the data could not be handed over to PHE because of the size of the Excel spreadsheet files? Was this an issue at one particular Lighthouse lab, or across all the Lighthouse labs? Why are critical databases in a national pandemic being hosted on Excel spreadsheets? Why are they not using specialist database software? The right hon. Gentleman likes to boast of his background in software development, so did he sign off this system? Was he aware of it? The Department of Health and Social Care is responsible for the integrity of pillar 2 testing data. His Department is the data controller, so he is ultimately responsible for this mess. It is a mess made up of fragmented systems passing data back and forth between his Department, PHE and outsourcing companies such as Serco and Deloitte, and it is costing us £12 billion. Surely now is the time not to renew Serco’s contract and instead give responsibility and resources to NHS labs and local public health teams to deliver testing and tracing.

I will start by answering a couple of factual questions. As I said in my statement, as of 9 am this morning, 51% of these cases have been contacted by the contact tracing system, and their contacts are contacted immediately after the initial contact—concurrently.

The hon. Gentleman asked about the tiering system. Absolutely, extra support will go to areas where there is an increased number of cases. He asked about the criteria in the proposed approach. Of course, we cannot have fixed and specific criteria, because it depends on the nature of the outbreak. For instance, if there was an outbreak in one individual employer, we would not necessarily put the whole local area into local action. We try to make the intervention as targeted and as localised as possible, but sometimes it needs to be broad, as it is in the north-west and across large parts of the north-east. For example, the intervention in the west midlands covers four of the seven council areas of the west midlands, but not the other three, because that follows the data.

The hon. Gentleman asked about the particular IT system in question. The problem emerged in a PHE legacy system. We had already decided in July to replace this system, and I commissioned a new data system to replace the legacy one. Contracts were awarded in August, and the work on the upgrade is already under way. While, of course, we have to solve the problem immediately, we also need to ensure that we upgrade this system, and we have already put in place the contracts to ensure that that happens. In the meantime, it is critical that we work together to fix these issues, which were identified by PHE staff working hard late on Friday night. I want to thank the PHE staff who did so much work to resolve this issue over the weekend.

In answer to the hon. Gentleman’s final question, we need to ensure that we contact trace all those cases as soon as possible. In two days, we managed to get to 51% of them, and that work is ongoing.

The Health Secretary deserves enormous credit for the expansion of testing capacity that he has personally championed, but is not the underlying problem that the Lighthouse laboratories have been, and will continue to be, overwhelmed by demand? Do we not need to think about the structures and, in particular, whether the responsibility for NHS staff testing and care home staff testing should be moved to hospital laboratories and universities, in the way that was advocated this morning by Sir David Nicholson, the former chief executive of the NHS? Sometimes it is tempting to think that, by dealing with the latest problem, we will solve the whole problem, but ahead of winter and the second wave, we need to think about whether these structures are right for what we have to deal with.

The expansion of the NHS testing is, of course, critical as well. The system in question, where the problem was over this weekend, brings together the data both from the NHS systems and from the so-called pillar 2 systems. The challenge was in a system that integrates the two, rather than just on one side or the other, but my right hon. Friend makes a broader point, which is that as we expand the NHS’s capacity as part of the overall expansion of testing, we have to ensure that we use that capacity to best effect. In many parts of the NHS, increasingly, it is NHS testing capacity that is used for NHS staff testing. That system works well, because the test is local and convenient, and we are looking to expand in exactly the sort of direction that he outlines. I urge colleagues away from trying to bifurcate the two systems. Essentially, we have a whole series of different ways to access a test, and we need to make sure that people get the tests that are easiest to access for them as much as possible.

The delay in entering almost 16,000 covid cases into Government databases has resulted in last week’s case numbers being totally inaccurate. The Secretary of State says that the updated statistics would not have led to additional measures, but are there any new areas of heightened concern? PHE has blamed the problem on test result files being too big to load on to its central system. Was that, as has been suggested, due to the transfer of data between formats? If the underlying issue was due to the rapidly rising number of positive cases, why was that not anticipated or identified sooner? Can he be sure that something like this cannot happen again?

Just as importantly, this means that none of those cases was registered with the tracing system. While, as the Secretary of State says, people with a positive test got their result and, we hope, self-isolated, they did not get direct advice and they did not give the details of their contacts. From the Government’s data, people with covid report an average of three to four contacts each, so that would represent 50,000 to 60,000 contacts who were not identified and asked to isolate and therefore will have continued to spread the virus. While up to 10 days have lapsed and the opportunity to prevent onward spread may have been missed, the Secretary of State mentions that 51% of cases have been contacted, but on what timescale does he hope to reach all the contacts of those cases? Given that only about 60% of community contacts in England are currently reached, will he involve local authority public health teams in what is now a massive contact-tracing operation?

On the core of the hon. Lady’s point, the assessment of the epidemic on the basis of the updated data is core to our approach to tackling the epidemic. The chief medical officer has analysed the new data, which we have now published—on coronavirus.data.gov.uk we can see the data, and that is on the corrected basis. Based on Joint Biosecurity Centre analysis, the CMO’s advice is that the assessment of the disease and its impact have not substantially changed. That is because the just under 16,000 cases were essentially evenly spread, so it has not changed the shape of the epidemic. It has changed the level, in terms of where we are finding the epidemic and in what sorts of groups.

The hon. Lady asks how many contacts have been contacted, as opposed to how many of the primary index cases. As I said, that is happening concurrently, so as soon as the index case has been contacted by Test and Trace and interviewed, the contacts are immediately contacted. As I said, we have got through 51% of the backlog over the weekend, and we have brought in more resources to complete that task.

My right hon. Friend and everyone in the House hopes that there will be a safe and effective vaccine available during the months ahead, but the head of the vaccines taskforce has said that she expects it to be available to only half of the population, concentrating on the over-50s and the most vulnerable. Is that the Secretary of State’s understanding? What are the implications for the other half of the population?

This is a very important question. The vaccines taskforce has done incredibly important work in supporting the scientific development and manufacture of vaccines and in procuring vaccines—six different types of vaccine—from around the world. The work of deploying a vaccine is for my Department, working with the NHS and the armed forces, which are helping enormously with the logistical challenge, and we will take clinical advice on the deployment of the vaccine from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. My right hon. Friend the Chair of the Science and Technology Committee will know that 10 days ago the JCVI published a draft prioritisation, and it will update that as more data becomes clear from the vaccine. That is the Government’s approach: to take clinical advice from the JCVI.

The Secretary of State will know that south Manchester now has some of the highest infection rates in the country, but the figures are skewed by the very high rate among 17 to 21-year-olds. Many of those appear to be students who are confined to halls of residence, so the spread of the virus ought to be contained. May I therefore ask for an assurance from the Secretary of State that we will not have any extra local lockdown restrictions in Manchester as a result of figures that give a misleading picture of the extent of the virus in the wider community?

Yes. The hon. Member makes a really important point. This is why I resist the temptation to set a simplistic threshold above which a certain level of action is taken. That is because there might be an incident—I mentioned that there might be such an incident in a workplace, for instance; there might also be one in a halls of residence—where we get a very high number of cases, but if it is confined and not in the wider community, we would not want to take action to restrict the social activity of the wider community. That has to be taken into account, along with the data on the number of cases and the positivity, because the number of tests put in affects that as well. We take all these things into account in asking both when an area needs to have more restrictions applied and when we can take an area out of restrictions, which of course is so important for everybody living there.

Nobody can possibly doubt my right hon. Friend’s utter commitment to doing his very best in these circumstances, or indeed the good will and hard work of his officials, but this is another incident that further undermines public confidence in the delivery of the Government’s covid response, and it is another example of where logistics and planning have let us down. Why cannot the Government learn from previous successes with the Nightingale hospitals and personal protective equipment? The military were brought in much more overtly to deal with the logistics, planning and delivery of those programmes, and they should be on test and trace as well.

Of course they are involved, but this specific issue was in a PHE legacy computer system that we had already identified needed replacing; I had already commissioned its replacement and that replacement is currently being built. We knew that this was a system that needed replacing. That work is under way, at the same time as the remedial action to sort the problem more immediately.

We have lost a vital week in the fight against the spread of this virus in our country because of a problem with spreadsheets that the Health Secretary tells us was known about in July. We are paying £12 billion to these private companies to run this service, yet the Health Secretary has told us there are no penalties to them for poor performance. Who is going to get our money back, and who is going to take responsibility? Can the Health Secretary tell us: where on earth does the buck stop?

Of course, I have come to this House to be clear and transparent to it and to the nation as to the nature of this particular problem. It is wrong constantly to be picking on a small number of the many, many cogs in the wheel of this system, which was a Public Health England legacy system—although that does not quite fit the hon. Lady’s narrative, it is the fact of the matter. I like her, and she and I have worked together in the past, including on such issues. She is normally incredibly reasonable and sensible, and I would be happy to ensure that she gets a full briefing on this one and to answer any further questions she has.