Flu Vaccination and Blood Test Cancellations

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Tuesday 14th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I do not quite know how to answer that question. When it comes to test tubes for blood collection and the flu vaccine, I am not sure that there is a Brexit angle and we have it covered.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I cannot be the only Member of your Lordships’ House who is slightly confused by the Minister’s answers in relation to disputes of fact about whether cancellations are even happening, and then perhaps the passing of the buck to GP surgeries. When he writes to my noble friend Lady Thornton, will he place his answer in the Library and not just address the vital issue of fact—and trust—as we head into a very difficult winter, but be clear about the priorities between routine testing and vaccination and the more acute category that he describes?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

I would be absolutely delighted to put the letter into the Library as requested by the noble Baroness, but please do not think for a moment that I am in any way seeking to pass responsibility. I am pointing out the very clear fact that GPs are responsible for implementing the flu vaccination programme. It is something that they do brilliantly. No other country has a flu vaccination programme with the impact that ours has. GPs are taking on more responsibilities this year with secondary school children being vaccinated. The rate I am expecting for this year will be higher than we have ever seen before.

Elderly Social Care (Insurance) Bill [HL]

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 16th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for creating this opportunity for such an important debate this morning, but I am afraid that I cannot recommend a rather convoluted homemade attempt at a sticking plaster for the gaping wound that is our national care crisis.

The regressive conceptual contortions that some will go to to avoid the logic of paying for essential public goods by taxing the wealthiest corporations and individuals in our society are almost as ingenious as attempts to privatise such public goods—whether our health data or the desire to care for our vulnerable people—or indeed the highly successful attempts of the wealthiest 1% to avoid paying their fair share of tax.

Our National Health Service is probably the greatest communitarian experiment in world history, and it is so easy to be truly patriotic about it. Given the working people from all over the world who have contributed to it, it encapsulates a positive patriotism that is not remotely xenophobic, yet years of underfunding and its current limits have been cruelly exposed in recent times. Last year, many of our elderly were tipped out of hospitals, untested, into private care homes with inadequate PPE provision, social distancing and testing arrangements, constituting one of the biggest scandals of the Government’s pandemic management—about which the future inquiry will no doubt have much to say.

But this fault-line between health and social care is a more permanent design flaw in a model that cares for the terminal cancer patient at public expense but puts caps, charges and all sorts of constraints on our provision for the patient of identical age and means who is suffering instead from dementia. Such anomalies are only increased with the ageing profile of our population. It is simply unacceptable to leave our older people, or indeed many much younger vulnerable people, isolated, destitute or at the mercy of profiteers who pay too many carers minimum wage on zero-hours contracts.

I look forward to seeing the details of the Government’s plans suggested in the press today, but nothing short of a publicly funded national care service providing rewarding work and dignified care will fit the Bill.

Covid-19

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend for his campaign on Nepal. His remarks are heartfelt, understood and heard clearly. We all recognise the debt we owe, not just to those from Nepal who have served in Her Majesty's Armed Forces, but their families and the entire nation for their contribution throughout Britain’s history. The PM has announced that the UK will donate 100 million doses over the next year, and the majority of those will be donated to COVAX. My honourable friend in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office will be best placed to clarify the precise arrangements and where Nepal will stand in that supply chain.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab) [V]]

I wonder if the Minister could help me a little with the Government’s logic. Care home workers on zero-hour contracts are to be forced to get vaccinated without even a single guaranteed paid day off to recover from side-effects. A significant step change on domestic Covid passports is to be decided on by businesses themselves and regulated by them, despite all the problems with testing and tracing. Yet something as light touch and common sense as wearing a mask in shops and on public transport is not to be a legal requirement. What is behind this mask aversion and confusion—scientific evidence or Trumpian culture wars?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, in terms of care home staff vaccination, we are in the midst of a consultation on the subject. The noble Baroness should not necessarily pre-empt the consultation. We take into account the views of those we are consulting with. It is a measure that has caused an enormous amount of concern both here in the Chamber and with the public. It feels right that we should be consulting on a measure that ultimately protects the elderly and vulnerable.

In terms of certification, the ultimate use of certification in domestic surroundings has not been fully decided. At this stage, with the country enjoying the benefit of the vaccine, it seems right to be leaving that to businesses to decide how they wish to use it themselves.

Women’s Health Outcomes

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, for leading this debate, an initiative wholly consistent, if I may say so, with her long record of campaigning on behalf of women.

Even in these days of deliberately stoked and exaggerated culture wars, there can be few who do not agree that millennia of structural inequalities have undermined women’s health worldwide. Further, it is obvious that the current devastating pandemic has magnified every such inequality on the planet. This includes the shocking, yet predictable, rise in domestic violence during necessary lockdowns, reduced access to sexual and reproductive healthcare and other vital women’s health and social services internationally.

Women are more likely to be involved in childcare, social care and cleansing, whether in the home or outside it, placing millions of them on the front line of infection. While older men seem more likely to die of Covid-19, it seems that women who survive it may be more likely to suffer from the chronic symptoms associated with long Covid. That means that every current decision in the debate about how best to either combat or live with the virus is likely to have a gendered impact.

The extent to which casting off the mask has become associated with one’s love of freedom is unfortunate indeed. I worry about the way in which some in government have become so wedded to irreversible “business as usual” from a particular date that they are risking more than necessary and perhaps forgetting that, for many, business as usual, even before the pandemic, was far from free, fair, safe or healthy.

If the Government want to honour their promise to vaccinate the planet and an earlier pledge for a new era of global Britain, they must stop siding with Germany in blocking the TRIPS waiver at the WTO and join the United States, India, South Africa and most of the Commonwealth—celebrated here earlier this afternoon—in demanding that industry shares know- how around vaccines, tests and treatment manufacture so these can be decentralised and scaled up to meet global demand.

19 July is not “freedom day”, but it could yet be solidarity day in a global race against vaccine-resistant variants and even more deaths.

Coronavirus Act 2020: Temporary Provisions

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Monday 28th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, what a rare pleasure it is in such dark times to be able to join the welcome and congratulations to both new Lords—my noble friend Lady Clark of Kilwinning and my older but equally dear friend, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham.

I gave this legislation qualified and heavy-hearted support in the spring because of the urgent and drastic scale of the pandemic in which we were all engulfed. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, said that we should have locked down earlier but that everyone would have been up in arms. I disagree with him there; I and others on this side of the House called for that lockdown to come earlier and harder. However, that is not a point for today.

The Minister said at the outset that he was checking in with your Lordships’ House—it is an interesting, casual and American phrase, but he had a point. One of the flaws in this legislation is that it is seemingly unamendable by either House and not even subject to renewal by your Lordships’ House. That is at the heart of the problem and of where we need to go beyond this legislation. The Government need to come forward with amending legislation to the framework so that these provisions are not just reviewed or “checked in” on at periodic intervals. Parliamentarians, particularly elected ones, need to be able to amend this vast, draconian scheme.

I fear that the Government have squandered a great deal of not just parliamentary good will but public support over the last six months with a clumsy and asymmetric authoritarianism. Powers to ban mass gatherings and break up picnics may well have been necessary, but where were the additional powers and resources to go into unsafe workplaces or requisition manufacturing plants or private healthcare facilities and labs to crack this test and trace problem which is still such a scandal?

The Minister referred to the easing of care provisions. This may have contributed to the untimely deaths of so many of our older people, who should not have been sacrificed to the virus. He did not mention Schedule 21, a draconian set of provisions that has allowed the police to detain people for no good reason. We have learned from the Joint Committee on Human Rights and the review of the prosecutions that 100% of prosecutions brought under Schedule 21 have been found unlawful. The Minister really should have spoken to us about that.

Today’s debate will not achieve this, and neither will these Motions, but this legislation must be subject to amendment. The Government must do the decent thing, in terms of Parliament and the rule of law, and ensure without delay that this legislation is subject to amendment.