Contact Tracing: Personal Privacy
Lord Hain Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Bethell) (Con) [V]
My Lords, we have prioritised privacy and security in all stages of the app’s development, working in partnership with experts across government and industry, including the Information Commissioner’s Office and the National Cyber Security Centre. Demonstrating our commitment to transparency, we have published a data protection impact assessment and a privacy notice.
Lord Hain (Lab) [V]
My Lords, there have been numerous failings over the Isle of Wight contact tracing app meeting its promised deadlines, alongside other serious errors in the Government’s track and trace system. Also, the NHS failed to carry out its legal data protection obligations prior to the launch and entered into data-sharing relationships on unnecessarily favourable terms to large companies. Will the Government now give full disclosure on every aspect of how its track and trace currently works, and commit to fully disclose details of any changes to that scheme, including the app, before they are rolled out?
Lord Bethell [V]
My Lords, we have agreed up front to an enormous amount of transparency. We have open source for the code, we have published the data protection impact assessment and the privacy notice, we have committed to publish the privacy and security models, and we have published numerous blogs setting out the approach we are taking. The approach towards the app completely embraces transparency and we will continue down that path.
Care Homes: Covid-19 Testing
Lord Hain Excerpts(3 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Bethell
I am aware of that guidance. It is sensible guidance. It is necessary to free beds in our NHS hospitals to make them available to those who need them more. It is also necessary to isolate people when we are not sure whether they have Covid. These are 80uncomfortable truths and I do not deny that this will result in uncomfortable outcomes for some patients. One aspect of the disease is that it targets care homes and I make no apology for those arrangements.
Lord Hain (Lab)
Following the question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, why in an English care home where a close relative of mine lives do staff and patients—including, astonishingly, patients discharged from hospital—still have to wait up to 21 days for the results of their Covid-19 tests?
Lord Bethell
The noble Lord gives powerful personal testimony. I cannot possibly argue with the details of his story, but I reassure him that the data I have is that the turnaround time for tests is, in the vast majority of cases, radically less than what he described. We are on course for hitting the target of 48 hours for a very large number of tests and 24 hours for a lot of tests.
Covid-19: Social Care Services
Lord Hain Excerpts(4 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, I should declare that my wife is a board member of two care providers.
Even before this pandemic hit, social care in this country, with a bigger workforce than the NHS, was in crisis. During the past decade of austerity, more than £7.7 billion has been cut from adult social care budgets, leaving 122,000 vacancies, or 9% of care roles unfilled. Many providers struggle to remain financially viable despite their increased needs.
In 2017, the Care and Support Alliance highlighted that 29% of disabled people had seen a reduction in their package of care, leaving many without adequate personal care and preventing disabled people leaving the house or attending work. A full 25% were left without food. Covid-19 has massively accentuated this social care crisis, with funding pressures spiralling out of control—especially for charities and smaller care providers as they have been hit by rising operational costs, staff shortages and the collapse of fundraising overnight. Staffing shortages are severe. Between 10% and 25% of care staff are self-isolating, forcing more costly agency workers to be hired.
Costs of sourcing PPE are soaring, with government rhetoric to increase supply not matched by reality. Care providers report that the Clipper service is not delivering, with the Government’s four main suppliers of PPE all out of stock. Carers have had to source their own PPE, often at inflated prices. The charity Leonard Cheshire is spending an additional £250,000 a month sourcing PPE such as gloves and face masks; a south Wales care provider is spending £100,000 extra monthly. They are all struggling to find specialist PPE such as gowns and face masks due to national shortages, placing 4,700 Leonard Cheshire care staff and their 3,000 disabled residents at risk of infection.
Care homes and carer organisations are always on the edge of viability. That is immeasurably worsened because people are now reluctant to move into care homes, just as they are to visit A&E, for fear of infection. Managers are reluctant to take them in without proper testing. Every empty bed pushes a care home closer to financial collapse. NHS beds become clogged up and the additional £1.6 billion pledged to fund local authorities is nothing like enough to guarantee that social care can be sustained throughout the pandemic. The Government must act quickly to deliver PPE to the 1.5 million social care workers and rapidly increase access to testing. Then they must provide many billions more pounds of adequate funding to ensure quality care for all.
Instead of his shamelessly Trumpian attack on the Welsh Government yesterday, Dominic Raab should heed the latest Treasury statistics showing that public spending on social services for older people in Wales is 48% higher per head of the population than in England. Surely if the UK Government had followed the Welsh model of prioritising elderly care investment despite major austerity cuts, the truly terrible Covid-19 crisis in care homes could have been alleviated.
Covid-19: Extent of Infection
Lord Hain Excerpts(4 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, I declare that my wife is a board member of care providers. How on earth will the Government lift restrictions without universal testing, especially in care homes, where there is virtually no such capacity at all and not even enough personal protection equipment? The charity Leonard Cheshire Disability has been forced to spend an additional £250,000 a month sourcing PPE such as gloves and masks, and a South Wales care provider is spending £100,000 extra monthly. The Government need urgently to give billions more to care homes, instead of leaving them so badly in the lurch during this crisis,
Lord Bethell
I reassure the noble Lord that testing has been opened up to all care homes. I pay tribute to the CQC, which played a pivotal role in providing access to Britain’s 12,000 care homes in this regard. Mass testing is an option that we are looking at, but I remind the noble Lord that South Korea, where there is an extremely energetic track-and-trace facility, carries out on average 20,000 tests across the country—fewer than we do in Britain on an average day.
Coronavirus Bill
Lord Hain ExcerptsTuesday 24th March 2020
(4 years, 1 month ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Coronavirus Act 2020 View all Coronavirus Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 110-I Marshalled list for Committee - (24 Mar 2020)
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bates. We all owe a massive debt to the brave and skilled workers who are battling this crisis, including a close relative of mine on the NHS front line who is trying to keep her patients, as well as her husband and three small children, safe. Care workers who are without proper personal protective equipment are looking after another close relative who is in her 90s and in a care home under lockdown.
I thank my noble friend Lady Thornton for her diligent leadership, expertise and hard work, because key questions affecting this Bill remain. First, everyone in government has known for years about the probability of a pandemic at some point. Although I was never a Health Minister, as a Cabinet Minister 17 years ago I recall being alerted during the SARS outbreak. My noble and learned friend Lord Falconer might remember that too. Given that, why was it only last week that the Health Secretary appealed for companies to help produce many more ventilators? Why was this not done much earlier, especially after Chinese scientists gave deadly warnings about the pandemic? Why were plans not put in place for proper testing, especially for front-line NHS staff and care workers? Why were no preparations made to ensure the supply of sufficient personal protection equipment for doctors, nurses and carers?
Secondly, there have been mixed messages. For instance, the Prime Minister suggested that he would be seeing his mother on Mother’s Day, but that was later hastily corrected by No. 10. The contrast with the sober authority of Wales’s First Minister, Mark Drakeford, Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon and the Mayor for London, Sadiq Khan, has been striking.
Thirdly, although I congratulate the Chancellor on acting quickly, providing hundreds of billions of pounds in extra and vital funding to protect employees and businesses—although the self-employed still remain to be protected—and surely with even more to come, the Government must promptly make much more funding available to local councils and voluntary groups because they too are on the front line. However, they have suffered budget cuts of around a third over the past 10 years.
In his novel, The Corridors of Power, C.P. Snow wrote that,
“political memory lasts about a fortnight.”
A fortnight since the Budget, its contents have been eclipsed by the Chancellor’s subsequent coronavirus announcements. He is rightly injecting hundreds of billions of pounds of Keynesian stimulus into an economy that is facing certain recession and perhaps even depression. The scale bears comparison with our Labour Government’s response to the 2008 global banking crisis—a response lambasted by Conservatives ever since. The Chancellor has rightly abandoned all the Tory borrowing rules and spending ceilings because the urgent action needed to stave off disaster requires intervention on a scale that only government can provide. The Chancellor was right to turn away from 10 years of Tory austerity and to throw the power of the state at the most acute crisis we have faced since World War Two.
However, that previous Tory insistence on non-intervention and shrinking the public sector has left us battling the coronavirus with an NHS in England that is short of 10,000 doctors, 40,000 nurses and 110,000 adult social care workers. It did not have to be like this. The Government have been able to borrow at record low interest rates for years and there was no need to wait until catastrophe stared us in the face before discarding the financial straitjacket. Why start spending and investing only in a terrible crisis like this? Despite gargantuan levels of national debt and borrowing to defeat Hitler, Keynesian policies after World War Two—led by both Conservative and Labour Governments—rebuilt this country through huge public investment and spending, generating healthy growth and a buoyant private sector. When the coronavirus outbreak is over, let us not repeat the mistake made after the financial crisis in 2010 of reverting in knee-jerk style to austerity and starving public services of support in a futile attempt to balance the budget, with only feeble growth accompanying it.
After the 1956 Suez debacle, Tory Minister Anthony Nutting wrote: “It has taught us no end of a lesson. It will do us no end of good.” The Conservative Party did not thank him for saying so. Today, after 10 years of avoidable austerity, this coronavirus crisis has reminded everyone what Keynes taught us about the vital role for an active, investing state in a modern enterprising economy.
Covid-19 Update
Lord Hain Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Bethell
My noble friend is entirely right to ask about the exact guidance. I will be clear: everyone in the country is being asked to cut out non-essential social intercourse and to work from home where possible. In the case of over-70s, that is particularly true. If you are over 70, the guidance is very clear: you should take great care of yourself because you are in a very difficult position. Those who have underlying conditions, whether they are over 70 or not, must take particular care of themselves.
As the CMO explained very clearly earlier today, the advice is moving towards those people distancing themselves or even shielding themselves completely from social intercourse. My noble friend Lord Lamont is entirely right that that comes at an enormous cost. Isolation and loneliness will be extremely difficult challenges for those involved. There is a massive mental health issue on the horizon. As a community and as a country, we are going to have to figure out how we come together to provide support for those who have made the entirely right and responsible decision to stay away from society.
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, can I press the Minister on the question of financial support? In 2013, a parliamentary report stated that taxpayer outlays direct to the banks were £133 billion. People were not told then not to fly or not to go to restaurants, theatres or any kind of hospitality outlets. Now, we hear from the Chancellor that there will be £12 billion: £7 billion support for businesses and £5 billion for the NHS. This is nothing like the scale of financial support that is needed from Governments, either globally or particularly in Britain, to meet the challenge that he has described so eloquently.
Lord Bethell
The Government are under no illusions about the size of the challenge. The package announced in the Budget was an initial commitment. Whatever funds are needed will be made available, in particular to support the NHS and our social care but also to support hard-working businesses and those that provide employment and sustenance to the country.
Queen’s Speech
Lord Hain Excerpts(4 years, 3 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lady Blower on an excellent speech and look forward to her regular critiques of this Government’s dreadful schools funding record.
In the election, I campaigned for candidates in Cardiff, Newport and Gower in south Wales, and in Battersea and Putney in south London. There was a clean sweep for Labour in each but a truly terrible result across the entire country, our loss of 59 MPs leaving a mountain of seats to win and form a Government again. But Labour’s fundamental values remain, in my view, by far the best ones for the country, including ending the economic idiocy of 10 years of grinding, completely unnecessary and massively damaging austerity.
Some of us, including the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, made the case for ending austerity years ago. We did so in 2013 when George Osborne was squeezing the UK economy tighter than any in the advanced western world, and in 2015 when he was preparing to increase the Tory cuts in national spending from the £140 billion, which he and his successor Philip Hammond actually undertook, to the £200 billion by 2020 that Osborne planned in his last Budget, and which David Cameron endorsed in his memoir. In his September 2019 spending review, the new Chancellor pledged to raise public spending next year by nearly £14 billion. This is a miserly, derisory 10% of the total cut in national spending due to public spending cuts and tax rises since the Tories took office in 2010. Frankly, it is insulting to pretend that we are witnessing the end of austerity.
Moreover, 80% of the Government’s 10-year austerity programme has been in public spending cuts. Yet Downing Street is already briefing that the highlight of the new Chancellor’s budget will be tax cuts. With the NHS stretched to breaking point, with social care criminally underfunded—as my noble friend Lord Hunt pointed out—with millions desperate for housing, with volunteers overwhelmed by demand at food banks, with Britain’s skills, productivity and infrastructure poor, with schools reducing teaching days during the week to keep going, with all of these spiralling problems crying out for public investment and spending, it says everything that needs to be said about Boris Johnson’s priorities in the Queen’s Speech by going for tax cuts.
Labour has pressed consistently over the last five years for faster, fairer and greener growth, for a big boost to public investment in infrastructure, skills and green initiatives to stimulate Britain’s slowing economy, so that national output once again expands at the 3% annual rate it grew at during the last Labour decade before the global financial crisis. We are the ones who insisted that the squeeze on public services had gone too far and that current spending on staff numbers and facilities needed urgently to be raised, if Britain’s social safety net and the basic features of a civilised society were to be restored. We accepted that paying for better public services would mean higher taxes for some. I made the case for reforming national insurance by scrapping the upper earnings limit and introducing a financial transactions tax, to make the tax system fairer and lift the burden of paying for public services off the low paid.
The Queen’s Speech says that the Government’s top priority is to take Britain out of the EU at the end of January. Actually, we will still be in the EU until at least the end of the year—but no matter. Boris Johnson has never been one for sticking to the facts. Plenty of hard bargaining lies ahead before Britain’s future trading relationship with the EU is settled. There will be a big price to be paid for frictionless trade with a club of which we are no longer a member. No one expects the EU to stand idly by while the Prime Minister pursues his vision of a post-Brexit Britain: a low-tax, lightly regulated Singapore-upon-Thames haven on the EU’s doorstep, intent on winning a race to the bottom. Boris Johnson did not get his EU withdrawal agreement by suddenly becoming a shrewder poker player than Michel Barnier. He got an agreement by doing a deal and giving ground that he swore he would never concede, notably and shamefully on Northern Ireland. I expect him either to do more of the same by the end of this year or to end up with the hardest of hard-right Brexits, or no deal—both utterly disastrous.