Covid-19 Update

Before I call the Secretary of State, I would like to point out that a British Sign Language interpretation of the statement will be available to watch on parliamentlive.tv. I call Secretary Javid to make his statement—and I welcome him back to the Front Bench at the same time.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I am extremely grateful to you for accommodating the timing of this statement.

I would like to update the House on the pandemic and our road map to freedom. This morning, I joined some of the remarkable people who have been at the heart of the pandemic response at a service to mark the NHS’s 73rd birthday at St Paul’s Cathedral. Together, we reflected on a year like no other for the NHS and for our country. I know that hon. Members on both sides of the House will join me in celebrating the decision by Her Majesty the Queen to award the NHS the George Cross. I can think of no more fitting tribute to the NHS. I know that everyone in this House—indeed, everyone in this country—will celebrate that award.

There is no greater demonstration of our high regard for the NHS than the manner in which we all stepped up to protect it. Now, it is thanks to the NHS and many others that we are vaccinating our way out of this pandemic and out of these restrictions. Eighty-six per cent. of UK adults have had at least one jab, and 64% have had two. We are reinforcing our vaccine wall of defence further still. I can tell the House that we are reducing the dose interval for under-40s from 12 weeks to eight, which will mean that every adult should have had the chance to be double-jabbed by mid-September.

And those vaccines are working. The latest data from the Office for National Statistics shows that eight in 10 adults have the covid-19 antibodies that are so important in helping our bodies to fight this disease. When we look at people aged over 50—the people who got the jab earlier in the programme—that figure rises to more than nine in 10. Allow me to set out why all this is so important.

Before we started putting jabs into arms, whenever we saw a rise in cases, it would inevitably be followed by a rise in hospitalisations and, tragically, a rise in deaths. Yet today, even though cases are heading upwards, in line with what we expected, hospitalisations are increasing at a much lower rate and deaths are at just 1% of the figure that we saw at the peak. Our vaccines are building a wall of protection against hospitalisation. And, jab by jab, brick by brick, that wall is getting higher.

I start by paying tribute to our NHS on its 73rd anniversary and thank again our extraordinary health and care workforce. The best birthday present they could have, of course, is a fair pay rise, not the proposed real-terms pay cut that is currently on offer.

We all want to see these restrictions end. Lockdowns are a sign of policy failure and I hope that, when the Secretary of State makes the final decision next week, it will be based on the data, the modelling and the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies advice, but let us be absolutely clear about what he is talking about today. When only 50% of the total population across England are fully vaccinated and another 17% are partially, his strategy, as he indeed was gracious enough to concede, accepts that infections will surge further and continue to rise steeply, and accepts that hospitalisations will continue to rise until they reach a peak—presumably later this summer. Some of those hospitalised will sadly die, and thousands upon thousands of mostly children and younger people, but others as well, will be left exposed to a virus mainly because they have no vaccination protection—we also know that even double-jabbed people can catch and transmit the virus—and many of them will be at risk of serious long-term chronic illness, the personal impact of which may be felt for years to come.

Even though vaccination may have broken the link with mortality, there are still questions about the link to morbidity. As part of the Secretary of State’s strategy of learning to live with covid, will he spell out today for the British public what that actually means? How many deaths does he consider are acceptable when we are living with covid? How many cases of long covid does he consider acceptable when we are living with covid? Given that we know that covid can escape and evolve when the virus circulates at high rates, what risk assessment has he done on the possibility of a new variant emerging? Will he publish it?

The Secretary of State says that every date for unlocking carries risk and that that is why we need to learn to live with covid, but we should not have to take a high-risk approach. We should be pushing down risk. Indeed, we mitigate risk across society all the time. We do not just accept other diseases; we intervene to try to prevent them. Why is he therefore collapsing all mitigations completely when he knows that covid rates will continue to rise? He will be aware that Israel has reintroduced its mask mandate because of the delta variant, so why is he planning to bin ours? Masks do not restrict freedoms in a pandemic when so much virus is circulating. They ensure that everyone who goes to the shops or who takes public transport can do so safely, because wearing a mask protects others. If nobody is masked, covid risk increases and we are all less safe. He must understand that those in the shielding community are particularly anxious. Why should they feel shut out of public transport and shops because he has abandoned the mask mandate? That is no definition of freedom that I recognise.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his comments. First, I think he started by asking for reassurance on whether the final decision on go or no go for 19 July, which we will make on 12 July, will be informed by the very best expert data. Of course it will be, just as every decision has been informed in that way. I am only about a week into the job, but I must say that I am incredibly impressed by our scientists, medical advisers and Public health England. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to all they have been doing.

Turning to the right hon. Gentleman’s second point about the link between cases and hospitalisation and death, that is absolutely central to the next step we are taking. Case numbers are high. As I said, they will go significantly higher and we need to be ready for that, but what is far more important is how many people are ending up in hospital and how many, sadly, are dying. That is where the vaccines have worked, alongside the treatments we now have that we did not have a year or so ago. That has meant that the link between cases and deaths has been severely weakened. The last time we had 25,000 new cases a day, we had around 500 deaths a day. The level now is a thirtieth of that. I know the right hon. Gentleman will welcome that and understand that there is no absolutely risk-free way to move forward, but we need to start returning things back towards normal and learning to live with covid.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about masks. Again, we have taken the best public health advice. He will know from what I have said that, although we will remove all legal requirements for anyone to wear a mask in any setting, we expect people to behave sensibly and think about others around them. The guidance will be there. If one is on public transport—let us say on a very crowded tube—it would be sensible to wear a mask, not least to show respect for others. However, if you are the only person in a carriage late at night on the east coast main line, then you can choose much more easily not to wear a mask because there is hardly anyone else around. We expect and trust people to make sensible decisions. That is the way we should move ahead.

I support the approach the Secretary of State is taking for the simple reason that two doses of the vaccine work against the delta variant, but with 350,000 new cases daily across the world the battle against this pandemic is far from over. Does he agree that if we want to prevent another lockdown in the run-up to winter, apart from the booster jab programme the most important thing we can do is to improve the way test and trace works? In Korea, they managed to use it to stop any lockdowns. Here, it failed to stop three lockdowns. The head of test and trace told my Health and Social Care Committee that between 20% and 40% of people were not isolating when they were asked to. With his fresh eyes in the job, will he ask officials for new advice on what we can do to improve test and trace to stop further lockdowns?

First, may I thank my right hon. Friend for his support for the measures? He speaks with great experience and I want to thank him for that. Regarding test, trace and isolate, he is right. There are many successes over the past year that we can be proud of, but there are also many improvements that can be made. I have already asked for such advice and I look forward to talking to him about that in future.

This pandemic is very far from over, so, with cases soaring across the UK, I am surprised that the Health Secretary is planning to end all covid measures. The delta variant, which was allowed into the UK due to the failure of border quarantine, is twice as infectious as the original, and is infecting younger age groups, including children. It also shows significant vaccine escape, with only 33% protection against infection from the first dose. While receiving two doses of either vaccine dramatically reduces hospitalisation, the numbers are rising and only half the population are fully vaccinated. That means that the other half are not, and many will not have that opportunity until near the end of September.

The Secretary of State talks about the percentage of adults who are fully vaccinated, but he must know that that is not how herd immunity works. It is achieved by reducing the number of susceptible people in the whole population to stop onward spread of the virus. The UK Government’s failure to lock down last September allowed the alpha variant to emerge in the south-east of England and spread across the UK and, indeed, the rest of the world. If the Health Secretary is going to just let it rip, how does he plan to avoid generating yet another UK variant with even greater vaccine resistance?

With more than 150,000 people dead, why has the Secretary of State returned to the false narrative that covid is just like flu? Is it just wishful thinking? Why is he planning to end even simple measures such as mask wearing? He has suggested that people need to learn to live with it, but appears to be completely ignoring the risk of long covid, which is already affecting more than a million people, including children. How does he plan to avoid soaring cases of long covid in unvaccinated young adults and children? Does he consider them to be collateral damage, or just a price worth paying?

The hon. Lady started off well, but her contribution completely degenerated into political point-scoring. She should know much better than to engage in scaremongering among the Scottish people and the British people. She has no respect for what is happening, as we try to treat this whole issue with a degree of respect and seriousness. She used the phrase, “Let it rip”. If anything, the only part of the UK where cases could be described as “ripping” is in Scotland where the case rate is higher than in any other part of the UK. In fact, it has seven of the 10 highest hotspots in Europe in terms of its number of cases, and she should reflect on that.

The hon. Lady claimed that I had suggested that covid is like flu. I have never said that. It would be complete nonsense for anyone to suggest that covid is like flu. She should think about the millions of people across the world affected by this and the thousands of people who have died in the UK. How dare she even raise that—it is as if she is suggesting that it is like flu. In the same way that we have had to learn to live with flu, even though, sadly, in some years, we have had 20,000 deaths from flu, we will have to learn to live with covid. The hon. Lady should reflect on what she has said and stop playing political football with this serious issue.

I welcome the Secretary of State to his role and say to him in public—I hope that I have also said it to him in private—that, when he was Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, he was one of the few Ministers who understood the plight of residential leaseholders, and I thank him for that, and I hope that he will do as well in this job. May I put it to him that, as well as the recognition of the National Health Service, it would be a good idea if we found some way of recognising the role of teachers and their assistants in schools who have done so much to keep the young people of this country in education and occupied, even though remotely? Many people have contributed to that. May I also say to him that, despite the occasional political remarks that any of us may make, I hope he will work with the other nations of the United Kingdom and around the world so that we can defeat the impact of this condition together?

I thank the Father of the House for his kind comments. He may have heard me say earlier that the Education Secretary will talk much more tomorrow about the action we will be taking around schools and educational settings, including the removal of the bubble requirement from 19 July. He made an excellent point about working not just across the United Kingdom—despite what the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) said a moment ago, there is great co-operation between us, which will continue—but internationally, both through our leadership of the G7 and the COVAX alliance.

The Secretary of State will be aware that, compared with the rest of the population, double vaccination provides a much reduced level of protection for clinically extremely vulnerable people with compromised immune systems. He will also be aware that pregnant women in their third trimester are considered clinically vulnerable. Many people in such groups are anxious about what today’s announcements mean for them. Will he confirm what advice is being published for the clinically extremely vulnerable? Specifically, will he consider allowing pregnant women to have their second jab after 21 days?

There will, of course, be people who are sadly more vulnerable to this virus who will be concerned about step 4. I entirely understand that caution and anxiety, and we will publish further guidance along the lines that the hon. Lady mentioned. As for her question on second doses for pregnant women, I will have to take advice on that.

Order. I warn colleagues that this statement will finish at 6 o’clock due to the need to get back to the debate on the Bill, so I urge them to be brief.

The majority of my constituents will welcome the Secretary of State’s statement, but NHS Digital data shows that the case rate in the council area is 591 per 100,000. That is considerably ahead of the national average and is causing inevitable concern, particularly among elderly and vulnerable groups. I have full confidence in the local NHS, the council and other officials dealing with the situation, but if it continues to worsen, will my right hon. Friend meet me and my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Lia Nici) to discuss whether additional support and resources are required?

I of course understand the importance of my hon. Friend’s question. As I said in my statement, I believe that the case rate nationally, including in his constituency, will worsen, but the hospitalisation and death rates are far more important. He will have heard what I said earlier, but I am more than happy to meet him on any occasion to discuss such issues further.

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement and for the central Government approach to drive the vaccine roll-out across all of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—better together, as always. The approach outlined by Government seems sensible. Will the Secretary of State outline what discussions have taken place with his Health counterpart in Northern Ireland to ensure that Northern Ireland moves forward cautiously and carefully at a similar pace, bearing in mind our level of transmission, in tandem with the need to be wise and wary?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his remarks about the vaccine. As he says, it is a successful UK-wide programme, and the take up of vaccinations in Northern Ireland is just as high as in any other part of the UK. I am working closely with my counterpart in Northern Ireland. We have already had two discussions in a week, and we will be speaking and co-ordinating on a regular basis. Things are working well.