Public Health

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I will not be supporting the Government’s regulations in the Lobby later this afternoon.

There are two reasons for a lockdown: to save lives, and to buy time to improve the situation. I do not believe that, when one looks at the details, the Government have provided the information necessary to vote on those issues, or that one can have any faith that they will improve the situation at the present time. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), the Leader of the Opposition, made a devastating case for the Government’s incompetence over this period.

If we look at saving lives, the problem is that we have had exaggerated claims, both by the Government and some scientific advisers, about the consequences of not having a lockdown. People are undoubtedly dying of this dreadful disease, but we have not been given the other side of the equation. We have not been told how many people will die of cancer or need various other treatments. We have not been told how many people are likely to commit suicide. For us to take a decision in the round, we need both those figures. We need the figures on the economic catastrophe that is happening in my constituency and in other parts of the country because of the lockdown, and on the long-term consequences for the jobs of the people we all represent. That is one side: we simply do not have the information about that.

In terms of improving the situation, we have a national test and trace system that does not work because the Government do not want it to work and because it is fundamentally flawed. If contracts are given out beforehand to private companies, which need to be nimble on their feet and act quickly in order to respond to a particular outbreak, the contracts often cannot respond to that. In one case in the centre of Manchester, workers from the central test and trace system walked off site because the contract said that they did not have to work after 10 o’clock.

The central system simply will not work. It cannot pass on the information in time and the responses are getting back to the people who can do something about them in more than three days. I talked to the north-west regional health people earlier this week, and they said that their time for returning the information is more than three days. If people are going to infect other people, that time is lost.

The system does not work because it is centralised. The history of public health in this country is of decentralisation. Local people can find out where there is a problem, whether it is in a school, a factory or a street, and do something about it. They can test and get people to isolate. The central system will not work. If I believed that the Government were going to improve it over this period, I might be tempted to vote for these regulations, but they will not. They have failed to give us information not just about the economy and the other side of the equation—the damage to people’s health —but about what is happening in the health service, so I cannot join them in the Lobby.