Health Protection (Coronavirus, International Travel) (England) (Amendment) (No. 7) Regulations 2021

Motion to Regret

Moved by

That, while welcoming the Health Protection (Coronavirus, International Travel) (England) (Amendment) (No. 7) Regulations 2021, this House regrets that they were not laid until 15 February despite the warning from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies on 21 January that “reactive, geographically targeted” travel bans “cannot be relied upon to stop importation of new variants” of COVID-19; further regrets that Her Majesty’s Government failed to prevent the Brazilian strain of COVID-19 entering the United Kingdom; further regrets that the policy only applies to 33 “red list” countries and that 99 per cent of passengers arriving in the United Kingdom are therefore exempt; and calls upon Her Majesty’s Government to implement a comprehensive hotel quarantine on all United Kingdom arrivals to prevent the importation of new variants of COVID-19.

My Lords, I very much look forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Chapman, who I know will bring great experience and wisdom to the House.

This Motion is necessary because of the lack of parliamentary scrutiny and the inadequacy of the Government’s policy for preventing the importation of new variants of Covid-19 from international travel. The Health Protection (Coronavirus, International Travel) (England) (Amendment) (No. 7) Regulations 2021 were made on 12 February—I think the Minister and I agree that it would be really helpful if the numbers of these statutory instruments were put on to the agenda by the House authorities—and came into force at 4 am on 15 February 2021 without any parliamentary scrutiny.

Although the Minister will be aware that the House is concerned about the use of the emergency “made affirmative” procedure for coronavirus regulations, in this instance the Government have gone one step further by using the “made negative” procedure to introduce the powers contained in these regulations, which requires a debate—a Motion to debate them at all. Frankly, there is no emergency here, just a lack of prompt decision-making over a year when the regulations could have been in place and could have been properly debated and scrutinised. Given that the regulations create a system of mandatory quarantine backed by criminal sanction, give the police power to enter people’s houses and allow individuals to be detained, searched, and their belongings seized, these are not minor changes in the law and should not have been enacted without proper scrutiny.

Furthermore, the regulations were laid before Parliament fewer than three days before they came into force. This is a breach of parliamentary convention that a negative statutory instrument will not come into force until 21 calendar days after it has been laid. Laying these regulations under the emergency procedure at the supposedly eleventh hour, as so many other coronavirus regulations have been made, means that individuals and businesses affected by hotel quarantine had less than one working day to get to grips with the details of the scheme, raising several rule-of-law concerns surrounding the accessibility and foreseeability of the law. The Minister needs to explain to the House why these regulations were laid under the “made negative” procedure and the use of urgent powers.

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, raises several serious issues. She is right to criticise the delay in acting following scientific advice. Sadly, slowness to react has been a feature of this Government’s handling of the pandemic and has probably contributed to the fact that we have almost the highest death rate of any country in the world. The fact that the regulations failed to prevent the Brazilian variant coming in indicates that they are ineffective, unmonitored and not supported.

It is illogical to force travellers coming directly from red-list countries to isolate in a hotel while allowing those from the same countries, via a short stop in a third country, to isolate at home. I have to accept that the only way to ensure that people do isolate is to ensure that they go into suitable accommodation, with proper support. Since the Government have not provided that, the very least that they should be doing is monitoring that those who are supposed to isolate at home are doing so—but microscopically little of that has been done. Why?

There is also the issue of support. No amount of pre-travel testing will get over the fact that many travellers, like others who are asked to self-isolate for other reasons, are not able to do so. The reasons are usually financial but may be caring responsibilities. These Benches have been calling for many months for paying people their wages to enable them to isolate, but our appeals have fallen on deaf ears. To get the benefit of the NHS vaccination programme, we must do more to prevent variants coming in. Will the Government now look carefully at the evidence from other countries that have put all travellers from abroad into isolation accommodation? It worked at the beginning of the pandemic, when passengers from a cruise ship with an outbreak were isolated in vacant nurses’ accommodation on the Wirral. It could work now.

My Lords, if these regulations were intended to pull up the drawbridge and prevent new strains of Covid-19 entering the country, they fail. I support the arguments of the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornton and Lady Walmsley, on the inadequacy, and indeed inconsistencies, of these regulations. For a start, only those coming from red-list countries are forced to self-isolate in government-approved hotels, yet those arrivals inevitably will have travelled on the same flights as people coming from non-red- list countries, as direct flights are cancelled. Bugs do seem to circulate freely on aeroplanes, so can the Minister explain why those who may have been sitting for many hours in a crowded plane with a collection of potential Covid carriers are able to disembark and head straight on to public transport to go and quarantine in a place of their choosing? Indeed, can the Minister explain the logic of allowing any traveller who arrives in this country to travel on public transport, potentially on several different vehicles, before going into quarantine?

For those who do have to go into hotel quarantine, the rules are, rightly, very strict, but are the hotel workers who look after these people being properly protected? What are the risks of them contracting the virus and then spreading it into the community? Many hotel workers have several different jobs. Can the Minister assure us that this is not the case with those working in quarantine hotels?

Finally, perhaps I can ask the Minister a question on quarantine that I put before but which I think time prevented him from answering. If test and trace contacts an individual and instructs them to self-isolate, there can be a hefty fine for disobeying—but test and trace counts as having been contacted for this purpose all the individuals living at the same property as the person instructed to self-isolate. If these people fail to self-isolate, can they be fined?

My Lords, I too regret the amendment to these regulations. Indeed, I regret these regulations, but for a rather different reason from that which has been expressed so far.

With huge respect to the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornton and Lady Wheatcroft, I say that it seems to me that we are trying to catch water in a sieve, and we may make the holes smaller, and we may reduce the number of holes, but water will still come through. Therefore, the Government must make reasonable judgments as to what they can reasonably achieve and what they will fail to achieve. To some degree, as I have said before, I fear that the Government have been bounced into trying to control something that they have not much chance of controlling.

There are exemptions to these rules, including seasonal agricultural workers, hauliers, diplomats, business travellers and people who go on the Tube after having flown. All of them are at risk of bringing in a new variant. It does not take more than one or two people bringing in the variant for it then to spread.

The vaccine programme is the way forward. I congratulate and commend the Government on the success of their extended vaccination programme and their speed in delivering vaccines, so that the vast majority of people whose lives have been at risk of the virus now have a significant degree of protection. Clearly, there may be new variants—but you could say that for ever, and when would this then end?

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to make my maiden speech while the House is considering such important matters, and also for the very warm welcome I have received since being introduced.

I am sure that, like many others here, I never expected to be sitting on these red Benches. I grew up in Darlington with my parents and brother, and I have many of the same friends now that I had then—and it is fair to say that Darlington made me who I am. It is the birthplace of the railways and the home of the Northern Echo and pioneering bridge builders. It is an exceptional place and I was proud to represent it in the other place for almost 10 years. It is where my two sons, Ted and Dan, are getting towards the end of their school education, and where they will always be proud to say that they are from. The maternity unit where they were born still has consultant-led births, and Darlington Memorial Hospital still has its accident and emergency service, because of the campaigns that I led. Hundreds of Department for Education jobs remain in Darlington because of the argument I won with the Government. Darlington and the north-east is a great place to live, to grow up and to grow old.

However, like people in too many other towns, the people of Darlington chose to turn away from my party in 2019. The party of the NHS, the minimum wage and the Good Friday agreement was no longer speaking for the priorities of the women and men working in our towns. It was our greatest defeat since 1935. When this happens, a party cannot say, “What is wrong with the electorate?”; we must ask ourselves where we went wrong. I was glad to chair Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign. He is a good leader, with integrity, compassion and experience, and he will make a great Prime Minister. He has built a good team of people, who have no airs and graces and who roll their sleeves up and get stuck in. The Labour Party’s director of communications, Ben Nunn, was at ease knocking on doors in my home town in the freezing cold in 2019. He knows, as all of us in my party know, that we need to listen and to change if we are to win. The challenges of the gig economy, demographic change, the climate crisis and now pandemic disease must be faced by political leaders and the public together.

My Lords, I am very proud to follow my noble friend and to offer her the warmest possible welcome to this House. I congratulate her not only on an excellent maiden speech but on the ability to get so much into such a short period. The time constraint has not prevented her presenting a picture of what has happened and what must happen in a way that I would have been proud to have delivered myself. I warmly welcome what she said and I hope that she will forgive me—because she spelled out why—for remarking that this is one of those very rare occasions when I can say that I wish that someone was not on our Benches but was instead down the Corridor. But I am very pleased that she is here and that she will make a continuing contribution, as she has described, to Labour taking its full place once again as the Government of our country.

I am diffident about the short time I have available, because my noble friend Lady Thornton was well ahead of me in understanding the extent of the impact of the virus over 12 months ago. I pay tribute to her for that. I agree entirely about process and procedure, but I share the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, about where we are going. As she rightly said, we have those delivering to all of us both essential goods and equipment across the country on a daily basis, and by necessity coming in to deliver what otherwise would not be possible. I simply put this on the table: if the vaccine is safe and successful—I believe that it is—and if the upgraded PCR tests are to be as successful as I know they will be, we will need to find new ways of being able to open our economy, to trade again, to keep people in jobs and to ensure that the economy of the future is secured.

The doom and gloom merchants must be very careful in what they say and how they say it in the months ahead because, quite honestly, enforcement is one thing but compliance is another, and we need the people of this country to feel optimism and hope, because the world is going to have to live with this virus—but live with it safely—for a long time to come.

My Lords, there is much to regret in the way that the Government have handled travel issues during this pandemic. First of all there was far too much travel. Now, with these regulations, there are still some really big loopholes. The guidance is unclear. People cannot travel for holidays: that much is clear. But they can travel for business. What actually constitutes business and what checks have been done on that? There have been plenty of reports of so-called influencers travelling for business to places such as Dubai because it is sunny. Does that qualify?

There is another very unequal bit of these regulations. The very wealthy may well have two passports and fly in their private jets. If you follow a flight tracker, you will see that plenty of private jets are still going to places such as Farnborough. What checks are done on them? It would not really affect them hugely if they were fined, so what does the Minister intend to do about that? They are more likely to have been to many countries around the world as well.

I have one last point. Could the Minister give some guidance for those needing to travel for imperative family reasons? That has really been lacking. I am talking about family death or severe illness, for example. If your parent is at death’s door—say with end-of-life cancer— you can hardly quarantine for 14 days before arriving at their bedside. It is obviously different if they have coronavirus. A clear statement is needed on what are imperative and humane reasons to travel in family situations. Could the Minister make one?

My Lords, may I first—unusually—pay tribute to my noble friend the Minister? At the weekend we had what I thought was a rather unpleasant article in the Sunday Times about hereditary Peers. Well, he is without doubt one of the most industrious and diligent Ministers in place and I think he justifies the presence of at least one hereditary Peer in this Chamber. Also, we agree entirely on the need for healthier lifestyles—referred to at the end of the previous business—and tackling obesity, which is closely linked with death rates in this pandemic.

I do not enjoy agreeing with the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton—she probably does not much enjoy me agreeing with her—but the lack of parliamentary scrutiny and the use of emergency procedures to bring in these draconian measures are frankly not acceptable in a democracy. It is a year since this started and we really should have sorted this out by now. Furthermore, perhaps I might say to my noble friend the Minister—in less congratulatory tones, although it is not necessarily his fault—that there is terrible confusion and inconsistency in these regulations. Can anybody be surprised that the public are confused? I am confused, and I think that Ministers are confused. Nobody is really sure about what country is on what list, and what countries they are allowed to visit.

I certainly regret these regulations, although I am not going to vote for the regret Motion. Furthermore, like my noble friend Lady Altmann, I fear that they are unlikely to make much difference to the spread of the virus.