The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Maggie Throup)
I beg to move,
That the Coronavirus Act 2020 (Delay in Expiry: Inquests, Courts and Tribunals, and Statutory Sick Pay) (England and Wales and Northern Ireland) Regulations 2022 (SI, 2022, No. 362), dated 23 March 2022, a copy of which was laid before this House on 23 March, be approved.
Madam Deputy Speaker
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following motion on the Coronavirus Act 2020 (Review of Temporary Provisions) (No.4):
That the temporary provisions of the Coronavirus Act 2020 should not yet expire.
Maggie Throup
Throughout the pandemic, the Government have done everything in our power to protect the lives and livelihoods of people across the country .The Coronavirus Act has been a vital tool, allowing us to do that. Last week marks two years since the Act gained Royal Assent and the automatic expiry date for its temporary provisions. This is an opportunity to reflect on the progress we have made in our fight against covid-19 and on how the Act has supported us in that fight, as well as in encouraging important innovations in some of our public services, which we want to take forward.
First, I come to the support the Act has given us. It was an extraordinary piece of legislation for an extraordinary time in this country’s history, giving us the powers we needed to keep the country safe, and the economy and public services open at the time of need. It helped us to bolster the health and social care workforce by suspending rules in the NHS pension schemes for England and Wales, and allowing the creation of temporary registers enabling recently retired NHS and social care staff to return to the workforce and play their part. Almost 15,000 nurses, midwives and, in England, nursing associates joined these temporary registers to help deal with the impact of the pandemic, as well as more than 10,000 paramedics, operating department practitioners and other professionals, and about 6,500 social workers.
The Act also helped the Government to offer unprecedented economic support and to help people and businesses at a time when so many businesses faced disruption. That includes the coronavirus job retention scheme, also known as furlough, which has supported 11.7 million jobs.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Will the Minister comment on the figures released by the Office for National Statistics today, which state that men and women living in the most deprived parts of the country were five and six times more likely to die from covid than those in the least deprived areas? What can she say about the adequacy of the regulations for those people?
Maggie Throup
It has been clear throughout the pandemic that people living in areas of deprivation and different ethnic minorities have been impacted more than others. We are committed to addressing that, which is why we will launch a health disparities White Paper shortly that will look at all the different issues.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)
Following on from the point that was just made by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), the Minister must be aware of the massive effect of the whole coronavirus process on mental health, particularly among young people—even among children in primary school. Are the Government committed to putting the necessary resources into the hardest-hit communities where the mental health crisis is at its worst?
Maggie Throup
The right hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. We know that the pandemic has had a mental health impact not just on children and young people, but on people of all ages. That is why it is important that we are now living with covid and getting our lives back to normal, which is one way of helping restore that normality that we are so desperate to get back to.
The Government helped businesses at a time when many faced disruption, including through the coronavirus job retention scheme. We have also supported the self-employment income support scheme, which paid out more than £28 billion to nearly 3 million self-employed people and was one of the most generous schemes for the self-employed in the world.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
The legislation covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Will the Minister reassure me that full consultation has taken place with the Health Minister and the Economy Minister in Northern Ireland to ensure that what she is mentioning is endorsed by the Northern Ireland Assembly?
Maggie Throup
I shall come shortly to the specific parts of the extension that are relevant to Northern Ireland. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that we have had ongoing conversations with the devolved Administrations throughout the whole two years.
The Coronavirus Act 2020 also helped to ease the burden on frontline staff in our critical public services. For example, provisions in the Act have helped the courts and tribunal system to keep functioning throughout the pandemic by allowing thousands of hearings to take place remotely.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The Minister has now turned to the subject I wanted to ask her about. She talks about our courts, but the reality is that they are in a terrible position. We are up to a record 708 days for the average time it takes to prosecute suspected criminals. The longer those delays go on, the more victims wait. No party can seriously claim to be tough on crime while allowing victims to be left waiting and allowing criminals to spend 708 days before they are prosecuted. Will the Minister apologise to those people who are waiting and tell us that the Government have some kind of strategy to address that appalling record backlog?
Maggie Throup
I was about to come on to why we have tabled this statutory instrument today, but I can reassure the hon. Gentleman that the backlog is now falling. The Ministry of Justice’s spending review settlement has put £500 million into addressing the issue.
Currently, more than 11,000 hearings take place each week using remote technology across 3,200 virtual courtrooms. The Act has allowed the courts to deal promptly and safely with proceedings, avoiding unnecessary social contact and travel and keeping justice going while upholding the principle of open justice. That shows how the Act has not just offered support at a time of emergency but has driven modernisation of important services that we want to take forward. We are looking to replicate several of those powers in other primary legislation.
We have always said that we would not keep these measures in place for a day longer than needed. When the Act was introduced, the temporary provisions within it were given a two-year lifespan so that we could make sure that those powers would be in force only for as long as they were necessary and proportionate to respond to the pandemic. Since the Act was first introduced, we have made huge progress in our fight against the virus thanks to a national vaccination programme that has now put more than 140 million doses in arms.
The scientific protection that we have built up, together with our greater understanding of the virus, has shifted the odds. Our fight against the virus is not over, but our living with covid plan showed how we can now take a different approach, protecting ourselves without restricting our freedoms. To do that, we are moving away from legal curbs towards an approach based on personal responsibility and public health guidance where we trust people to take the right decision for those around them. As we have built up greater defences against the virus, we have been able to suspend or expire early more and more temporary provisions from the Act and the vast majority of temporary non-devolved provisions are now expired. Only five temporary non-devolved provisions remain in force and they would be extended by the regulations.
I will now set out the detail of the regulations. Four of the provisions relate to taking forward innovations in the justice system until we make them permanent by other means. Section 30 of the Act removes the obligation for coroners to hold inquests with a jury when covid-19 is suspected to be the cause of death. Subject to parliamentary approval, that will be made permanent in the spring through the Judicial Review and Courts Bill.
Sections 53 to 55 enable participation in court and tribunal hearings to take place remotely by video or audio links, which will be made permanent this summer through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Again, that will be subject to parliamentary approval.
Covid has meant that a backlog of cases has built up in our justice system. Those provisions are helping courts to work more quickly through that backlog. They are therefore crucial to court recovery and it is vital that the powers are not allowed to lapse. A maximum six-month extension to those provisions in the Act is important to enable a smooth transition and avoid disruption to service before the primary legislation comes into force. The provisions will be expired once the new primary legislation is in place.
The regulations also extend section 43 of the Act on statutory sick pay in Northern Ireland for a period of six months. That enables the continuation of statutory sick pay to be paid from day one for absences related to covid-19 in Northern Ireland. Although statutory sick pay is a transferred matter in Northern Ireland, section 43 confers on the Secretary of State the power to make regulations in respect of Northern Ireland. As a result, the UK Government are asking for section 43 to be extended on the formal request of the Department for Communities in Northern Ireland.
I take this opportunity to note an addendum in the 12th two-monthly report on the Act, which was published on 24 March. It is regrettable that there was an omission of status updates for two temporary provisions in previous reports on the Act. Those are sections 42 and 43, which relate to provision of statutory sick pay and extend to Northern Ireland only. My Department apologises for the omission and welcomes the opportunity to correct it. The addendum provides information about the status of those provisions over the course of the pandemic. I reassure the House that the reporting omission has not had an impact on the policy relating to those provisions.
I thank hon. Members from all parties for the valuable scrutiny they have provided as we have debated the Act over the past two years. I am pleased to come before the House today with the vast majority of the temporary provisions in the Act having expired. That shows our commitment to removing powers that are no longer necessary, but also shows how far we have come since the Act was introduced.
Let me finish by thanking the health and care staff and all key workers who have worked so tirelessly throughout the pandemic as well as the British people for the extraordinary efforts they have made. The pandemic is not over, but we have made huge strides in our fight against the virus, which is why we can take these steps. I commend the regulations to the House.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (James Cartlidge)
We have had an interesting debate on these important measures. I am grateful to all colleagues who have contributed. Like the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), I thank all the workers in the NHS, and in social care, who put in such a shift over the pandemic. As a Justice Minister, I would say the same about all those working in the courts, particularly the clerks and others who had to go into work in the spring of 2020, when there was fear across society about the consequences of working face to face with others. They did that to keep justice going, and we owe them a great debt.
The hon. Lady asked about emergency legislation. Of course we want to learn lessons from covid-19, and we continue to review the effectiveness of our legal framework, and the lessons learned from our response to covid-19, as part of our preparedness for future pandemics and other health emergencies.
The hon. Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain) movingly discussed an important subject that matters a great deal to him, and to his constituents, and I pay tribute to him for speaking up for his constituents. These are very important matters. I can confirm that the general register office measures on death registration have been replaced in permanent legislation, except for the provisions for telephone death registration. We are trying to identify a legislative vehicle through which to put those provisions in place.
There were a number of comments on the immunosuppressed. I understand the concerns on the subject; it is one that my colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care take seriously. I remind colleagues that those who are immunosuppressed are eligible for three primary vaccine doses and a booster, and will be called forward for a spring booster when appropriate. We made 5 million doses of antivirals available for the immunosuppressed.
Ms Lyn Brown
Does the Minister agree with my GP that expansion of the use of antivirals might be a necessary tool in our campaign to keep people safe, as we learn to live with covid?
James Cartlidge
I am a Justice Minister, but I am happy to pass on from my health colleagues that they keep that issue under review. The hon. Lady raised a point about tests; from 1 April, free tests will be available for those in certain groups most at risk from the virus. More details will be set out shortly; I cannot say more than that at this stage, I am afraid.
The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) is absolutely right—the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) made a similar point—that we went through matters relating to remote hearings in detail when the Judicial Review and Courts Bill was in Committee. That was my first Bill as a Minister. We went through in great detail the support for vulnerable users, but let me restate this for the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish: remote technology has a huge role to play in our courts, and we should not underestimate the extent to which its use kept justice going, which was very positive for vulnerable users. He is right, however, that there must be measures in place, and we have set them out in detail. Only recently, we awarded a new contract that provides for a technical support line to assist remote hearing users, and to enable them to access their hearing in the most appropriate fashion. Of course, the type of hearing held is always up to judicial discretion, and dependent on the circumstances.
On the point about the backlog, the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish said—I address this to the hon. Member for Chesterfield, too—that we want to forget about the pandemic, but also that the backlog is entirely the result of Government incompetence. Let us be clear: before we went into lockdown, the backlog was smaller than when Labour was last in power. When we went into lockdown, the courts closed. The Crown Court’s output collapsed. That should not be a surprise; we did not have jury trials because of social distancing.
My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland), then Lord Chancellor, who has just emerged into the Chamber—he is probably out of sight to most Members—put in an extraordinary shift, together with the Lord Chief Justice and others in our courts, to get courts reopened, and to get jury trials going again in this country, but there was a consequence: a huge bottleneck of cases. That is why we had this record backlog. The good news is that the number of cases in the backlog is falling; it has gone from a peak of around 61,000 last June to around 59,000. However, we recognise that we have to go further, which is why court recovery is a priority for this Government.
The measures that we propose extending through the statutory instrument that is before us are helping to ensure that courts and tribunals have the resources necessary to deal with these outstanding cases. To be clear, sections 53 to 55 of the Coronavirus Act 2020 enable thousands of hearings to be conducted online—currently around 11,000 per week—so that courts and tribunals can be reserved for hearings, such as trials, that must be heard in court. Without section 30, the backlogs in our coroners courts would have been larger, which would have further increased the demand on local authority-funded coroner services. These temporary measures are in fact so important to court recovery that we intend to make them permanent, but we cannot afford any gap in provision while we wait for that legislation to complete its passage through Parliament. If courts were unable to continue to use these provisions, even for a few months, there would be a significant impact on our court recovery programme. That would mean defendants waiting longer than necessary for trial, more victims waiting longer than necessary for justice, and the bereaved waiting longer than necessary for inquests.
I express my thanks to all those who work in our courts for the sterling work that they did to keep the courts running during the pandemic. I hope that Members agree with me that, by extending the four provisions of the Coronavirus Act 2020 that are under consideration for a maximum of six months, we can continue to build on the progress that we have made in managing the virus, and in ensuring that our courts and tribunals can recover as quickly as possible from the effects of the pandemic. I reassure the House—this is crucial—that the four provisions will be expired under the Act once new legislation comes into force.
As was noted by the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup), who has responsibility for vaccines, statutory sick pay is a transferred matter, and the Government are simply facilitating an extension of the provision relating to it, following a formal request by the Department for Communities in Northern Ireland.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That the Coronavirus Act 2020 (Delay in Expiry: Inquests, Courts and Tribunals, and Statutory Sick Pay) (England and Wales and Northern Ireland) Regulations 2022 (SI, 2022, No. 362), dated 23 March 2022, a copy of which was laid before this House on 23 March, be approved.
Coronavirus Act 2020 (Review of Temporary Provisions) (No. 4)
Resolved,
That the temporary provisions of the Coronavirus Act 2020 should not yet expire.—(James Cartlidge.)