Health Protection (Coronavirus, Collection of Contact Details etc and Related Requirements) Regulations 2020

Motion to Approve

Moved by

That the Regulations laid before the House on 14 September be approved.

My Lords, the virus continues to spread. We will put in place measures to break the chain of transmission and to protect the NHS, but at the same time our strategy is to support the economy, keep our schools open and, wherever possible, maintain normal life—for friends and family to meet and for businesses to remain open. These regulations play an important part in that objective by contributing to enhanced contact tracing, some, but not all, through the NHS app.

The instrument before the House requires designated venues to collect contact details and display an official NHS QR poster. To give a sense of the impact of these regulations, as of 9 am this morning there were 16,302,038 users of the NHS Covid app. Any one of them can check in at 634,488 posters that have been downloaded by designated venues. We know that this is proving popular, because there have been an astonishing 19,721,804 check-ins so far. I encourage noble Lords to exercise their digital skills and take advantage of this important protocol.

If local public health officials determine that one of these venues is linked to an outbreak, they can send a message with the necessary health advice to all those whose timing and proximity coincides with the infection. This might include a requirement to isolate for 14 days.

Privacy is key. An individual who has been in one of the venues in scope of this policy can rest assured that their contact details will be shared confidentially with local public health officials. This will then allow the individual to receive the necessary health advice. Alongside other requirements, this will increase public confidence to go out and use these venues.

I will now set out why this measure is necessary and how uptake has increased following the introduction of the regulations. On 2 July, the Government issued guidance to the hospitality sector and asked designated venues to collect contact details. This led to manual, handwritten logs in some venues, and homemade and commercial logging systems in others. The guidance was in place for two months, but there was a growing level of non-compliance. Surveys indicated that around two-thirds of respondents were asked for their contact details some or all of the time, but many were not. According to our surveys, only 43% of people said that they were asked for contact details in all the venues they visited. We saw video evidence as part of media reports showing multiple establishments not adhering. My experience endorsed this coverage: I pay tribute to the Prince Bonaparte pub in Notting Hill for its diligent commitment to these protocols, but I shall not mention some other pubs I have visited where standards have been more lax.

As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, is not contactable at the moment, I call the noble Baroness, Lady Barker.

My Lords, we return yet again to the subject of NHS track and trace. In view of our discussion yesterday, it is right for me to put on record with the Minister that we on this side of the House understand entirely the need for local and national action and for those to be complementary. However, they need to be informative of each other; it is not a matter of putting in place centralised top-down systems and not picking up on local data. Only by co-ordinating national and local action will we beat this thing.

We come to these regulations with no regulatory impact assessment. More than that, after three weeks, we have nothing but assertions on the Minister’s part that they are working well and are necessary. The Government are very short on evidence when they come back with repeated requests for regulatory powers. That cannot go on indefinitely. We on this side of the House are quite willing to support actions that are necessary and proportionate—we have been from the very beginning—but frankly, the Minister is trying the patience of the House when he repeatedly requests powers without any evidence to back them up.

I ask the Minister: how many people have not engaged with this process only because they have concerns about the privacy of their data—about it being shared beyond the NHS and local authorities? If people could be absolutely sure of that, there might be far greater uptake. I say that, but I have eaten out only once in the last six months. I happened to be with a group of four people, and I was not the contact person. Had I subsequently tested positive, I would not have known how to go about telling the establishment. If this is going to work to maximum benefit, we ought to look now at how it works in practice and could be made more effective.

On refusal of entry, what evidence do we have so far that that power is being used, how it is being used and who is enforcing it? What evidence is there that it is working? On what basis was the £500 fixed-penalty notice decided, how does it compare to other fees and penalties, and who is in charge of tracking the evidence that that works?

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, who has very impressive forensic skills.

I thank the Minister for setting out the background to these regulations. His prodigious work-effort continues to be incredibly impressive. I am surprised that he has managed to make a tour of west London pubs to see which are complying with the regulations, but obviously, he has, so congratulations on that too.

I strongly support these regulations. It seems to me that we all have a great interest in having an effective test and trace system. For that to work properly, we do need back-up, and this provides it. I share many of the concerns expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, but I come from a position of thinking that these regulations are very necessary and, as stated, they came into force some 20 days ago. I have had a chance to look at the regulations, and I do have some questions on them. It may be that my noble friend is not able to answer them all on the hoof today, as it were, but I would be grateful for a response in writing, with a copy to other noble Lords and to the Library, if he is not able to do so.

My noble friend indicated that some 634,000 businesses or institutions have downloaded the QR code facility. Is he in a position to indicate what percentage of those needed for this to be effective across the board that represents? It may be that is a very high percentage, and that we are not looking significantly elsewhere for other institutions to sign up, but it would be interesting to know how many have not done so, and what percentage that represents.

Further, with regard to the specific persons and institutions affected by these regulations, I do have some specific questions. First, in the Explanatory Memorandum, there is an exemption for police and security officers visiting businesses. I understand that, in an emergency, it may not be appropriate for them initially to download or indicate with the app that they are present—they are pressed, in terms of doing other things. However, there will be visits by police and security officers that are not in that urgent situation, and indeed, in situations where there is an urgency, subsequently it is surely desirable that their presence there is also recorded. So I wonder why that exemption exists, and whether there will be some review mechanism so that we are able to extend these regulations sensibly to those who should be affected by them.

These regulations impose a number of obligations on relevant persons in order to protect against the risks arising from coronavirus. Businesses and other public settings where people meet socially, including hospitality, close contact and leisure venues, must record contact details of customers, visitors and staff on their premises to tackle the spread of coronavirus. The details must be stored for 21 days and shared with NHS Test and Trace if requested.

All that makes sense, but Jeremy Hunt, the former Health Secretary, recently questioned the current Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, on whether the entire system of testing needed to be overhauled. He argued that the underlying problem was that the Lighthouse laboratories—the Government-funded facilities there to supplement existing public laboratories—had been “overwhelmed by demand”. As the chancellor of the University of Birmingham, I say that we have a testing facility on site and one of the top medical schools in the country. And yet, I am told, there is a piece of machinery that NHS Test has—there are about six of them—which, if we were to get hold of one of them, would enable the testing at the university facility to go up multifold. Why is that being held back? Why are these pieces of equipment not being released to increase capacity? This is an urgent situation.

At the same time, business resilience—I say as president of the CBI—is lower than it has ever been, with cash and stockpiles run down. We must get this right. We know that business knows public health must come first, and we have been doing all we can to keep staff and customers safe, whether in pubs, shops, factories or offices. Local restrictions come as a disappointment for many businesses across the country, but the Government cannot stand by as infection rates rise in the region. We must aim for a no-surprises approach as far as possible when restrictions are put in place, and not all restrictions are one-size-fits-all. We have seen this from the full lockdown in Leicester and the household-based restrictions in Greater Manchester, west Yorkshire and elsewhere.

My Lords, I must remind the noble Lord—

Thank you very much, I am just about to stop. I would like to conclude by saying we need this testing urgently now.

My Lords, this debate is taking place three weeks after these regulations came into force. As Big Brother Watch points out, the impact of this legal change cannot be overstated. The regulations introduce the potential for the mass recording of citizens’ movements by an array of overstretched businesses.

I am not opposed to the regulations, but it is simply not acceptable—and I repeat what has been said in the last week—for these kinds of draconian measures to be introduced without Parliament having its say first. I listened to what the Minister said this morning; I also listened to the Secretary of State last week. Can we really have an assurance that this will not happen again?

Secondly, I want to return to the major point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, about the impact on the hospitality industry. I know that the Minister himself is doing his best to keep it going, but the fact is that, although this is a not a new provision and in a sense it has been voluntary, it will have an impact on the hospitality business. The Explanatory Memorandum accompanying the regulations says that a regulatory impact assessment is not required because it will cease to have effect after less than 12 months. But what we do need is an impact assessment on the series of such regulations, which are having a total impact on the industry, such as the 10 pm curfew.

It is being widely let out that the Government intend to introduce a new system of three levels of alert locally. My understanding is that alert level 2 would restrict meetings in pubs and restaurants, and alert level 3 would see the full closure of the hospitality sector, allowing for takeaway services only. Will this House and the other place be able to debate those regulations before they come into law? I certainly hope so, because they could spell the death knell for many businesses, and it would be quite wrong, although they are local regulations, for that to happen without prior parliamentary approval.

My Lords, I approve of the regulations, which came into force on 18 September. As the virus is spreading rapidly, the regulations are essential to collect certain contact details from customers, visitors and staff. Keeping this information for 21 days also seems reasonable and essential to enable NHS Test and Trace and local public health officials to contact vulnerable people and give them advice to help curtail the spread of the virus.

These debates and media discussions have been bedevilled by people who concentrate on destructive criticism but offer no practical solutions. For instance, we hear scientists saying, “There is no scientific evidence for the rule of six”, but is there any scientific evidence that such a rule would be harmful? Why do they not say what number they would suggest? Some of these scientists seem to behave more like party politicians than unbiased scientists. Should those doom and gloom merchants in Parliament and the media not realise that their repeated vitriolic outbursts do nothing but demoralise the public?

My Lords, I support everything that my noble friend Lady Barker said and declare my interest as a local councillor, in view of what I am going to say.

There are serious civil liberty issues here, serious data protection issues and, more to the point, serious issues about operational practicality, but I do not want to say more about those things, except: does it mean that everybody who is involved in collecting this information has to register with the Information Commissioner as a data controller? What is happening to make sure that happens, if that is true?

I really want to talk about the problems that issues like this cause in areas with two-tier local government, where there is the county council—the Health and Social Care Act set a public health function at county level—and the districts, which have always been the local public health bodies. The old public health inspectors, 45 years ago, became environmental health officers, but they are still there and do the work. They are the people who, for example, are skilled and trained in tracing infectious diseases locally, but the Government really have not been using them as well as they should have been during this pandemic. When it comes to checking premises such as pubs, restaurants and all the rest which are listed here, it is the environmental health staff from the district council, who do that anyway —for example, food standards inspections—who will be doing this work in many areas. They are employed by the district councils, but Regulation 4 on “Interpretation” states that

“‘local authority’ means … (b) a district council in England for an area in which there is no county council”.

Otherwise, it is a county council.

On power to close premises which are not carrying out all the distancing regulations—pubs, for example—it is the county council and the county officers who possess the powers, but it is often the district council officers, who are on the ground and know the patch in a way that county officers do not, who will be doing the legwork and investigations and deciding that a pub needs to close. The same will be the case in checking that data collection—names and addresses under this regulation—is being carried out. The people who do the work are from the district, but the people who have the powers to enforce are at the county. This is causing delays and extra unnecessary bureaucracy. If the districts were given the power alongside the county, this would be solved, and I hope the Minister will look at it.