Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 (Amendment) Bill

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

2nd reading
Friday 26th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Dame Andrea Leadsom)]

I am sure that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) will want to welcome the news that in the past 12 months to March 2024, 63 million more GP appointments were delivered by our superb GPs and practice staff than in March 2019. That is more than 1.4 million extra per working day. I am sure she would be delighted to praise our GPs and health professionals for that.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) for providing the House with an opportunity to debate an important area of public policy. I am aware of his ongoing interest in this area. We have discussed the pandemic on many occasions in this place, and no doubt we will do so again. The particular issue his Bill raises is parliamentary scrutiny of emergency legislation made under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. That is also a topic we have debated before, and a matter about which he has tabled two identical private Members’ Bills in previous parliamentary Sessions.

We take the parliamentary scrutiny of new legislation and of the measures that the Government took to respond to the pandemic extremely seriously. However, such scrutiny must be balanced against the need to act quickly and decisively to respond to a health emergency and to protect the public. During the covid-19 pandemic, the Government had to move quickly to introduce new laws and guidance to protect public health and maintain access to essential services. My hon. Friend will be aware that during the covid-19 pandemic, as decisions were made at pace, Ministers from the Department made regular statements to the House and invited scrutiny on policy—indeed, my hon. Friend spoke on many of those occasions himself—as well as regular calls for colleagues across the House so that they could ask questions and seek solutions for members of the public who were looking for answers. Moreover, the Government have responded to numerous parliamentary inquiries and Committee reports and responded on a range of issues, including legislative mechanisms employed during the pandemic response.

Turning to the private Member’s Bill before the House, my hon. Friend seeks to amend section 45D of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, which imposes certain restrictions on the power to make regulations under section 45C. Section 45C relates to the domestic regulations that can be made to counter the spread of infectious disease.

Part 2A of the 1984 Act, under which those relevant sections sit, was added following the global severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in 2008. Parliament gave the Government broad powers to deal with precisely the same types of threats as those we faced during the covid-19 pandemic. Parliament empowered Ministers to use regulations to prevent, protect against, control or provide a public health response to incidents, the spread of infection or contamination. Regulations made under section 45C that impose restrictions and requirements are subject to a requirement that there must be a serious and imminent threat to public health. That test was certainly met during the covid-19 pandemic.

The making of regulations is already subject to a test of proportionality, and where the regulations confer powers on others to impose restrictions and requirements, those persons must consider that their decisions are proportionate. So I do not support the proposal to make regulations under section 45C subject to additional—