Business of the House

Gill Furniss Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

As I did point out earlier, there is a road map going through to the Commission on Monday. Also, the Leader of the House does have a duty of care to the staff, as I do, to ensure that we try to keep in line with Public Health England.

[Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

The vaccine roll-out is the most important national mission our country has undertaken in decades. While more and more people are being inoculated every day, I am concerned that there is a lack of a coherent national strategy for distributing oversupplies of the vaccine. Does the Leader of the House agree with me that we must ensure excess vaccines are distributed to those in need, especially in diverse communities like my own in Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough, where there are significant health inequalities and where, sadly, infections remain higher than the national average in some cases? Does he agree with me that the Government should urgently publish a strategy on this issue which can be scrutinised by this House?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Lady raises an important point. The vaccine roll-out is going extremely well and the best way of doing it is in accordance with the advice the Government have been given by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation—on the basis of age and people making appointments. Obviously, it is also sensible to use up any excess vaccine that is left at the end of a session, particularly the Pfizer vaccine which cannot be kept for a long time except at very low temperatures. I do not think, however, that it would be sensible to devise a specific strategy on this, because we want to focus the strategy on the delivery of the vaccine by age group. Therefore, I think it is absolutely right to leave the use of surplus to the discretion of the people who are handing out the vaccine, while accepting her important point that we make every effort, as the Government are, to reach the hard-to-reach groups to ensure that they are vaccinated, but they will all be covered by the age brackets