Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Birmingham, Sandwell and Solihull) Regulations 2020

Motion to Approve

Moved by

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

My Lords, the Government set out their approach to preventing, containing and managing outbreaks in the Covid-19 Contain Framework, which sets out how national and local partners work together to break the chain of transmission. In other words, it represents a partnership between national and local government. At the national level, the Government have increased the powers available to local authorities through the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (No. 3) Regulations 2020 so that local leaders can take targeted action as early as possible.

Public Health England makes detailed data on infection rates available to local areas as well as providing public health advice. Where required, NHS Test and Trace seeks to increase testing resources to support the rapid identification of cases. For their part, local leaders can complement their legal powers by using all the resources at their disposal to target communications, promote compliance and maximise the reach of testing.

The process of monitoring that the Government have put in place allows us to spot emerging areas of concern early. The Government and local leaders then consult regularly to identify problems and solutions. Our aim is always to consult local leaders on proposed legislative changes and, so far as possible, reach a consensus. This partnership approach has been very visible in Birmingham, Sandwell and Solihull.

These regulations came into force on 15 September, following an announcement by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care that the latest epidemiological data and local insights supported targeted action being taken to tackle the outbreak in Birmingham, Sandwell and Solihull. The incidence rates in Birmingham had increased to 95.1 per 100,000 of the population over a seven-day period from 2 to 8 September. Test positivity was also high, at 8.1%. Incidence rates had also increased in the neighbouring local authorities of Sandwell and Solihull.

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her explanation. I declare an interest as a Brummie—born, bred, educated and apprenticed. I had the privilege of serving the constituency in which I was born for 27 years in the other place. I live in the West Midlands, in Ludlow, which is of course not in Birmingham, but I still have close connections. My wife and I are members of the police family in Birmingham. I was in the city a few days ago and was really impressed by the Covid precautions in both Snappy Snaps and the Apple Store in New Street.

As the Minister said, the regulations are really the result of the household growth of the virus. Schools and industry do not appear to be the transmission areas. The seven West Midlands local authorities in the conurbation are very closely connected. It would be useful if the Minister could say something in her wind-up about the other four.

My contacts tell me that as far as hospitality is concerned, the pubs in the city centre are being meticulous in how they operate during the day, with their staff rules, and at closing time. But something really ought to be done about other premises selling alcohol after 10 pm. That really ought to be looked at.

Looking at the coronavirus maps for the area, as I did recently, it is very clear that things are mixed across all three local authorities. In some parts the virus hardly figures; in others it is very high. It is also obvious that in areas of high-density housing where multiple generations live, the rates are a lot higher. It would be counterproductive, in my view, to separate areas within a local authority. That would do worse than stigmatise the high areas—but I do not intend to list the possible consequences, so that I am not misunderstood.

I understand, for example, that the right honourable Member for Sutton Coldfield wants his constituency to be removed. Sutton Coldfield has since 1974 been an integral part of Birmingham, and it is to Birmingham that residents pay their council tax. I appreciate that some areas of Sutton, such as Little Aston, are not included, but its residents do not pay their council tax to Birmingham because they do not live in Birmingham. This needs to be made abundantly clear in the confusion about postal codes. It has nothing to do with the postal codes.

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. I am afraid that my knowledge of the greater Birmingham area is nowhere near as good as his, so I do not know whether he is among the people who were delighted when Aston Villa ignored the rule of six on Sunday—for those of your Lordships with a passing interest in football.

The noble Baroness, Lady Penn, was extremely helpful in her introduction of these regulations. She not only explained that the increase in infection rates was much more localised this time than in March and April of this year but was able to tell us that the principal transmission route in Birmingham is multiple households, rather than hospitality venues. These regulations therefore contain the rules about two households and linked households. My point to her is that this is not the first area where this has been the case. Like me, the noble Baroness will have listened to the debates on the instruments for Leicester, in which there were similar patterns of transmission. What has been learned from the authorities in Leicester, where I understand that the transmission rates have gone down, with regard to these areas?

The Minister said in her remarks that this measure was due to be reviewed on 8 October. I believe that paragraph 4(2) says that the first review was to be carried out by 29 September. Is that 29 September reporting on 8 October, or what? As the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, will attest, we are now well into a number of these regulations, and there are more to come. With each one, every time we come into Parliament, we must build on the knowledge of what has happened in preceding areas. We now need to know what is happening. Why is there an increased rate of infection in these areas, but one which is lower than in other areas that are not subject to lockdown?

Finally, I ask two things. Given that this is about transmission between households rather than in the hospitality sector, is the use of fixed penalty notices an appropriate means of enforcing these regulations? Secondly, we need to get to the point where we are on the front foot with this virus. We need to pursue active strategies to knock it back. So what is being done to look at areas nearby, such as Dudley, Wolverhampton or Coventry, where there may be a similar demographic? What information is being exchanged by local authorities, environmental health officers, public health officers and the NHS? These are fairly draconian measures, taken for reasons that we all understand, but we must get to a point where we can refine these orders in the light of experience and better data to get to the point where individual citizens can take their own pre-emptive preventive action, rather than being subject to draconian laws like these.

The noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath.

My Lords, as a Birmingham resident, I shall focus on the city itself, though mindful of the challenges in Solihull and Sandwell. However, before doing so, I want to focus on a more general matter: the relationship between the Government, local authorities and other public bodies. We have debated this before. I accept that there is a good working relationship between the city councils and the Government, but right from the start the Government generally seem to have excluded local bodies from the key part that they could have played in helping to combat and manage the virus. Public health directors were ignored and NHS and university lab capacity was overlooked.

As the Institute for Government pointed out in its analysis of government decision-making,

“The decisions on lockdown and school closures were taken and introduced swiftly, and with little consultation and planning for how they would work in practice.”

The institute said:

“We heard from senior government officials that, in some cases, they were taking their instructions directly from the prime minister’s daily press conference—with limited or no opportunity to feed in advice before decisions were made.”

Yet at the Conservative Party conference, the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, bemoaned the most overcentralised bureaucracy in western Europe. But was it not the noble Baroness and her colleagues who set up a hyper-centralised organisation to run track and trace, which is now making the most monumental mess of it?

I was struck by a comment from Newcastle City Council leader, Nick Forbes, who said confusions over the latest restrictions were “deeply unhelpful”, and that they were very difficult to enforce and had left dangerous conspiracy theories to fill the void. A frequent complaint from many leaders is that local authorities were often given little notice of when local regulations were to be made.

My Lords, I am tempted to say to Birmingham, Sandwell and Solihull: “Welcome to the party.” They are just behind a lot of the north of England in what is happening. I endorse the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, that the lockdowns are, at best, only partially effective.

I want to look at the questions of where the transmission is coming from and where the primary sources of the transmission are. It is being said that the main source of transition is within households—the noble Lord just mentioned 83%—and that is not surprising. If a couple is living together, or with children, and one of them gets infected, it is not surprising that the infection spreads within that household. But that is not the primary source of infection; a household that is completely isolated will not be infected at all. The infections are coming from other places where people meet together outside. It seems that the evidence for households and families being specifically targeted by the Government is not as strong as people think.

There are essentially three elements to this: there is the economy, and the Government say the economy has to go on; there is education, and the Government say education has to go on; and there is normal society—ordinary families living their normal lives in normal ways. They are the people who, right from the beginning, way back in spring of this year, seem to have been hit hardest. It hits individual people—single people, relatives, grandparents, aunties and so on—and it hits the way in which families operate. Where a couple of friends or sisters share the shopping or the collection of kids from school, they are being told they cannot do this anymore unless they are a specific linked household. That is very restrictive, because one of the households has to be a single adult household.

Some people are saying that household parties are the problem, and I suspect that that is a far greater problem than the ordinary life of ordinary households. But I have been trying to find out where the evidence is for all this, and it is very difficult to find. The leader of Birmingham City Council says that households are the problem and the Government say that households are the problem. I am not brilliant at searching the internet, but I have been looking for all the evidence—I have been looking at the Joint Biosecurity Centre evidence—and I do not find anything. I have been looking at the GOV.UK testing data that comes out every week; it is very thorough, but it does not tell me that households and ordinary families are the real problem. While infection within households is inevitably going to take place, infection between households, and among the slightly wider family, may not be the cause of what is going on to anything like the extent being made out.

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this debate, particularly with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, with whom I share a birthday—I know this because every year I check the columns of the Times to see his name in lights and mine ignored.

At some point with coronavirus regulations, whether local or national, the penny will drop with the Government and they will see that the emperor is wearing no clothes. It has become quite apparent that we cannot eradicate this virus and it will not be over by Christmas. We must find a way to live our lives as normally as possible. As noble Lords have been saying from the beginning of this debate—and no doubt in the preceding debate—nobody can really work out how these regulations are meant to work or why they are being imposed in the way that they are; nobody can work out why a wedding can have 15 people but a funeral 30; and nobody can tell me what on earth a bubble is. If my noble friend the Minister can tell me, I will ask her also to solve Fermat’s last theorem for me.

Noble Lord after noble Lord has talked about the impact on Birmingham. I want to briefly concentrate on the cultural infrastructure of Birmingham, which I know a bit about and which is, to coin a phrase, world-beating. Today, I am delighted that Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is reopening after being closed for quite a time—and reopening with a fanfare and optimism that has been far too lacking for far too long. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is a pretty remarkable place. It is of course the home of the Pre-Raphaelites, but it also recently appointed Zak Mensah and Sara Wajid as the co-chief executives. Two people of colour heading an institution is sadly remarkable, as only one in 45 of our national museums is currently headed by a person of colour.

The Birmingham Opera Company is showing optimism by commissioning a production of Wagner next year, hoping that things will be over by then. Birmingham Rep is the largest commissioning repertory theatre outside of London, but has had to cancel 16 productions. The Birmingham Hippodrome is the largest theatre in the whole of the UK, home to the Birmingham Royal Ballet, now headed by the remarkable Carlos Acosta. Sadly, the Birmingham Hippodrome has cancelled Christmas, but is planning new productions next year.

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her explanation of this SI. I want to make a couple of points.

The restrictions imposed by this statutory instrument can protect the people of Birmingham, Sandwell and Solihull only if the test and trace system that runs alongside it is reliable. Some 16,000 infectious people across the country being missed off the national test and trace dashboard, with their tens of thousands of contacts still to be traced, makes another huge dent in people’s confidence in the system. I see that the restrictions imposed by this instrument have to be reviewed every two weeks and that the last review was on 29 September, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, said. That date falls in the week when those thousands of contacts were missed because of the Excel error. Is the Minister confident that the conclusions of that review of cases are accurate with hindsight? Given the ongoing problems with the centralised system of test and trace, does she see any merit in the calls by many local authority leaders, referred to by my noble friend Lord Hunt, for test and trace to be far more locally based? Is there enough testing capacity in the centre of Birmingham, given the closure, as I understand it, of the Edgbaston site in the summer? How does the Minister see Birmingham City Council’s drop and collect testing service progressing? Does it have enough resources to complete this important initiative?

My second point is about communications. The message is obviously not getting through, despite the valiant efforts of strong local leadership in the West Midlands. Birmingham people say they are baffled, as my noble friend Lord Rooker said, by the new restrictions and how they operate. The message that transmission within the home is dangerous, which I am sure is the message that the Government want to put out there, is not being heard. From the serious rise in cases in a city that I know well and represented for 15 years, it is easy to see how Birmingham’s reaction to the Government’s often mixed and muddled communications on restrictions is an echo of the compliance-weariness and lack of trust in authority that have set in across the country, especially among young people. It is my personal heresy that that lack of trust can be carbon-dated, certainly among young people, from a spring tour of the north by a certain Mr Dominic Cummings. However, we are where we are, as they say, and for this SI to work alongside the penalties regime attached to it, the Government’s communication strategy must be crystal clear and reflect the rich diversity of modern Birmingham, modern Sandwell and modern Solihull, or things will be very much worse very soon. None of us wants that.

My Lords, after seeing cases in the West Midlands continue to rise, the Government, in collaboration with local leaders, had to take the decision to ban households mixing in Birmingham, Sandwell and Solihull. It is difficult for any Government to take such drastic steps, but that is what any responsible Government have to do. Such regulations affect many businesses, particularly in the hospitality industry, where many restaurants and bars will suffer. The most affected are the employees, whose incomes are decimated. Their families suddenly become poor and some become homeless as they are unable to pay their rents. Local government has to find them temporary accommodation in hotels and private properties.

The domino effect of these new rules to save lives from Covid-19 will affect individuals, businesses and the finances of local government. There are no easy answers to this. Saving lives must take priority over economics. The only hope is finding a vaccine, which seems to be a few months away. In the meantime, the Chancellor has to provide extra funding for the unemployed, local authorities and small businesses. Can the Minister estimate what extra funding the Treasury will have to give to reduce the effect of these new rules?