Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (North East of England) Regulations 2020

Motion to Approve

Moved by

That the Regulations laid before the House on 17 September be approved.

My Lords, we are all aware of the rising rate of infection, particular after this morning’s candid briefings, and the risks that it poses. Your Lordships will therefore understand the importance of taking the necessary steps to keep members of the public safe, while continuing to keep the economy running and schools open, and heading off the need for a second national lockdown.

We know that some of the rules put in place have become increasingly complex and difficult to enforce. That is why the Prime Minister has set out—or will set out—how we will further simplify and standardise local rules by introducing a three-tiered system of local Covid alert levels in England. This is not the subject of the debate today, nor does it change the legal requirement to wear face coverings, but it should reassure noble Lords that we continue to work with the local leaders to tackle outbreaks with more targeted restrictions that are simple and constructive.

The regulations being debated today introduced the requirement that members of the public should wear a face covering in taxis and private-hire vehicles. In addition, they should be worn when inside premises that provide hospitality, such as a bar, pub or restaurant, except when eating or drinking, for which people must be seated. This means that people must wear a face covering when entering, leaving and moving around the premises.

I think the Minister will find that we are supposed to be discussing the north-east, rather than the face coverings. It does not make any difference—I am quite happy to do them that way round, but we might get confused.

My Lords, I apologise and give great thanks to the noble Baroness for the polite and kind way in which she brought that to my attention. At this point, we are debating statutory instruments that apply to the north-east of England and were in force on 18 September. As your Lordships may know, a Prime Ministerial Statement in the other place will address these sorts of issues and we will of course keep a careful watch on the progress of that debate.

Over the past few months, local restrictions have allowed us to home in on areas where cases are high and rising, and put targeted measures in place. I understand that the measures we are debating have greatly affected families living in Northumberland, Newcastle, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Gateshead, County Durham and Sunderland. Families in these areas are no longer able to meet relatives as they used to. I recognise the disruption the measures cause, particularly for those relying on often complex networks of grandparents and friends to help out with childcare. We must celebrate the complex civil communions which underpin so much of our day-to-day regimes.

However, this virus is transmitted by people meeting up with each other and the horrible truth is that the closer our friendships, the more relaxed we are in each other’s company and the harder it is to keep socially distanced. These measures are not taken lightly. They are driven by our public duty to protect the most vulnerable people in our society and do our utmost to ensure that this virus does not adversely affect these groups. What is of concern is that the number of cases in the over-60s is rising; we know that coronavirus symptoms can be more severe for people in this age group. I recognise that the Government are asking many people living in these regions of the north-east to make sacrifices to protect those most vulnerable to this virus. We will need to make adjustments to our daily lives until we have suppressed or eradicated this terrible disease.

I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. I am sorry—it is the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath.

My Lords, thank you. Surely, the Minister was right to open by emphasising the gravity of the situation, but here we are again debating regulations that have already been superseded, which serves to underline the unsatisfactory nature of how we are dealing with local Covid lockdown regulations. I do not want to go over the grounds of my PNQ on Friday, but, when Mr Speaker called for the most significant of these regulations to be debated in Parliament at the earliest possible point, I think he spoke for the great majority of parliamentarians.

As the Minister has said, the Government propose to introduce a new tiered system of restrictions for local lockdowns, and, whatever the justifications for them—the noble Lord is right about the evidence that we are facing—they involve a serious reduction of people’s liberties and, of course, put many businesses in jeopardy. I am in no doubt that this House should be asked to approve them before they come into force, just as the Commons is likely to do. My understanding is that that is now likely, and, if so, this is very welcome.

Of course, the relationship between government and local authorities is highly relevant to this and the regulations the noble Lord spoke to today. Right from the start—going back to March—the Government seemed to exclude local bodies from the key part that they could have played in helping to combat and manage the virus. Public health directors were ignored, NHS and university lab capacity was overlooked and, as the Institute for Government has 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.”

I was very struck by a comment made by the Newcastle City Council leader Nick Forbes a few days ago. He said that confusion over the latest restrictions was deeply unhelpful and that they were very difficult to enforce and had left dangerous conspiracy theories to fill the void. We know that a frequent complaint of many leaders is that local authorities were often given little notice of when local regulations were to be made.

My Lords, I apologise again, particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. I was looking at the list for the next debate. I call the next speaker for this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves.

My Lords, I support and underline everything that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has just said. This is the latest set of local area statutory instruments that we seem to discuss on almost a daily basis. Yet again, they are out of date—it may be a little known fact, but this is actually now called the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (North East and North West of England) Regulations 2020 as a result of an amendment in another obscure statutory instrument that we received. This illustrates the confusion about the whole thing. If the new initiative that may be announced this afternoon provides more consistency and makes these things easier to understand, that, at least, will not be a bad thing. I will not talk about childcare today; I think we will want to talk about that when we discover what is being proposed today.

I do, however, want to talk about test and trace. I believe it is now generally understood that, whatever restrictions are imposed and whatever the legal background to them, an efficient, well-run and successful system of testing, tracing, tracking contacts and isolating as appropriate is key to tackling the coronavirus problem. It is clear that whatever claims are made about the number of people who have been tested and all the rest of it, the system throughout the country is a shambles. This has to be tackled, and I am sure that everybody wants that. The key to it must be to do it a local level and to involve the skills and knowledge of those who do it week by week as part of their normal jobs—not in the case of coronavirus but in the case of food poisoning and other outbreaks of disease. They are trained people and they know what to do.

As an illustration of how shambolic it has been, I want to go through what has happened in my own patch in Pendle, which of course is in the north-west and not in the north-east. Pendle Borough Council was desperate to get involved and to use its expert staff in setting up a proper system. It is about a month now since the Government, the authorities and the county agreed that we could do this. The first thing that we discovered was that where the local system identified contacts from positive cases—all of which had been sent down from national level, being cases which the so-called NHS Test and Trace system had not been able to reach, so they were the difficult ones; they were coming late but nevertheless quite a few of them were contacted—those contacts had to be sent back to national level to be dealt with by Serco or whoever in their call centres, even if they were in the same families or in the same street or working in the same factories, and even if local people using local knowledge could have contacted and traced them much more quickly. I would like an assurance that this nonsense has now been stopped, and that if there are to be a lot of local councils doing this work locally, they will be able to follow up the people they have found, because, otherwise, it is a nonsense.

My Lords, we all want the Government and this country to win the battle against coronavirus, but what if the present strategy is just plain wrong? What if the strategy of ever tighter restrictions on bigger swathes of the population is not only not containing the virus but will never do so, while causing untold damage to the lives of so many?

I am afraid that the evidence suggests that this is what is happening. People sometimes say that the cure is worse than the disease. Unfortunately, the measures may be no cure at all. As the Minister said, since tighter measures were introduced in many parts of the country, including the north-east, two months ago, we have seen a sharp rise in cases. At the same time, the collateral damage is mounting. The nascent economic recovery has stalled; unemployment is rising, albeit still the tip of the iceberg of what we might yet see. The poverty that will come as a result of those job losses is obviously not far behind. University students, already fearful for their future, are incarcerated in their halls of residence. Mental health issues are clearly arising and worsening. The arts, hospitality and sports sectors are on their knees. Everyone I speak to—I am sure that it is the same for everybody in the House today—is exhausted and dispirited and can see no end in sight.

Instead of doubling down on a flawed strategy, the Government should have a big rethink—after all, a popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and again and expecting a different result. The only plausible defence for this would be if it were the only way, but that is not so. We have seen in the past week the publication of the Great Barrington declaration by eminent scientists, now signed by 27,000 medical practitioners and other scientists, which sets out a different way. It recognises that younger, healthy people should be free to live their lives pretty much as normal, while the more vulnerable should be offered—not have imposed—greater, more focused protections.

My Lords, I declare my interests as outlined in the register. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morrissey, for her important contribution to this debate; I agree with much of it.

When I put my name down to speak, it was to express my concern that Parliament appeared to be managing rises in Covid-19 rates in different areas of the country through myriad secondary legislation instruments—at least 18, I believe. As a member of the committee that considers SIs in this House, I and other members were becoming concerned that it was increasingly difficult to understand the evidence base on which individual SIs were being developed. In addition, it has become crystal clear over the weekend that the public and local authority elected representatives, particularly in the north-east, Liverpool and Manchester, have begun to lose trust in the way in which we are dealing with local restrictions.

Fortunately, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet accept that we must adopt a more strategic approach to legislation, associated with changes in the number of infections per 100,000 of the population. Currently, different parts of the country have significantly different rates, estimated at between 16 cases per 100,000 where I live, here on Dartmoor, and 600 in Nottingham. However, any three-tier system to manage the virus should be applied in a uniform manner associated with virus increases, and hopefully decreases, over time. The three-tier system that the Prime Minister is expected to announce should be passed into law and applied across England equitably as the virus ebbs and flows. Any legislation should clearly indicate when an area will be enabled to move up or down a tier, associated with the ratio of virus cases to the population. This will ensure that the public can clearly understand the core reason for proposed restrictions.

At the core of managing increases in infections are the test and trace system and the public’s buy-in to restrictions of liberty, be this closing licensed premises or requests to reduce travel and meeting friends and family. In March, care homes were largely closed down in terms of relatives’ and friends’ visits; we know that this caused considerable distress in many cases. Careful consideration must be given to trying to ensure that we avoid transmitting the virus from the community to care homes, but we must also weigh up the devastating effects to people of not being visited by ones they love. What approach do the Government intend to take on this issue?

My Lords, I agree in particular with my noble friend Lord Hunt about the Government’s failure to consult locally and that countries using locally rooted strategies are far more effective than those using centralised ones. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves—a friend from a past political life—made similar points. Ministers are guilty of incompetent centralism, for two central reasons. First, outsourcing to Serco, Deloitte and Boots testing and tracing tasks that they have never undertaken before has not worked. It was an astonishing thing to do when there are ready-made primary health and care systems in place, with one of the most respected local GP networks anywhere in the world. We could have utilised this network and resourced it better, rather than cutting it, as has happened remorselessly over the last 10 years. We could have poured into it all the money that has been given to Deloitte, Serco, Boots and other agencies. They have failed for six months and are still failing in the second wave.

The second major mistake has been imposing decisions on local councils and mayors. In recent days, we have seen an explosion of protest from Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester. We have seen similar sentiments from Steve Rotheram, Metro Mayor of Liverpool City Region. Other leaders of English regions, including some Conservatives, have expressed similar protests that Westminster keeps varying the rules by Whitehall diktat, and that they learn what the Government intend to do, not through Ministers consulting them—the people on the ground who know their areas and communities and what is happening—but from the newspapers.

The other day, the leader of Gateshead Council complained on the BBC that the rules are just dumped on them. He pointed out that in Newcastle and Gateshead, although cases in student populations have soared, Covid cases elsewhere in those communities have actually been falling, so it makes no sense to lock them all down, at great cost, especially to local hospitality businesses and jobs. Manchester City Council’s leader, Sir Richard Leese, told the BBC this morning that it had a much more granular system of local intelligence and information than Whitehall could possibly have, and so is better placed to judge what to do and how to do it. Importantly—I hope that the Minister might respond to this—he also wanted more local powers to enable these to be deployed selectively, for example to close a particular pub if it was transgressing the rules or being responsible for a crowding experience that might spread the virus, not the whole lot in a blanket approach