Covid-19 Update

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts
Tuesday 5th May 2020

(3 years, 10 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Jonathan Ashworth Portrait Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab/Co-op)
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(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care if he will make a statement on the Government’s response to covid-19.

Matt Hancock Portrait The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock)
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We have flattened the curve of this epidemic, ensured that the NHS is not overwhelmed and expanded testing capacity to over 100,000 tests a day. As a Government, we are working resolutely to defeat the coronavirus, and there are two important areas where I want to update the House today.

First, on the expansion of our work to test, track and trace, we have now built a national testing infrastructure of scale, and because we have this extra capacity, we will be delivering up to 30,000 tests a day to residents and staff in elderly care homes, making sure that symptomatic and asymptomatic staff and residents can all be tested. Our care system represents the best of us, supporting our loved ones with tenderness and dedication at their time of greatest need. Through this unprecedented expansion of testing, we can give them the certainty and confidence that high-quality testing can provide.

Secondly, we are working to build the resilience of the NHS. We currently have 3,387 spare critical care beds in the NHS and that does not include the capacity provided by our Nightingale hospitals, including the 460-bed Sunderland Nightingale, which opened earlier today. We should all be very proud that we built up the NHS so fast and that our collective national effort has helped to protect the NHS and flatten the curve. As a result, we are now able to start to restore some NHS services and we are in a position to be able to place the London Nightingale on stand-by. This is good news, because our NHS has not been overwhelmed by this crisis and remains open to those who need care, and that means that this nation’s shared sacrifice is having an impact.

Throughout its time, this Chamber has borne witness to so much, and it has borne witness to the nation’s resolve once more. I am delighted that the British people are well and truly rising to this incredibly difficult challenge.

Jonathan Ashworth Portrait Jonathan Ashworth
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Our thoughts, as always, are with the loved ones of those who have lost someone to this awful disease. May we again pay tribute to our brave NHS and care staff? I say to the Secretary of State that clapping and campaigns for medals are appreciated, but does he agree that NHS and care workers deserve fair pay, mental health support and access to personal protective equipment? I am hearing reports that we may have problems with the stocks of sterile gowns. Could he update the House on that front or write to me if he is not able to do so today? We also rely on international staff, as he knows. Will he scrap the health surcharge that they have to pay? It seems particularly unfair at the best of times, but especially at this time.

We are tracking towards having one of the worst death rates in the world—we have seen the figures again today. I know that the Secretary of State said that we are through the peak, but can the same be said of the care sector, given the number of deaths we have seen reported today in the care sector? He knows that we support lockdown and it is right that we engage in a debate about it. The strategic aim must be to suppress this virus, not simply to flatten its spread, in order to save lives and minimise harm. Testing, tracing and isolation is crucial.

Does he agree that we should be mobilising our expertise in local authority public health services, as well as other specialists such as environmental health officers, and our expertise in primary care? Would that not be a better route than outsourcing the call centre work to firms such as Serco? We support digital tools, but he will understand that there are questions about privacy. Will he undertake to publish a data protection impact assessment?

As we heard in Question Time, deprived areas have experienced covid mortality rates that are more than double those in less deprived areas. There are disproportionate mortality rates among black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. Does that not show that covid thrives on inequalities and that we need a funded strategy to support low-paid, deprived and marginalised communities, including by enforcing protections in the workplace when we transition out of this lockdown?

Can the Secretary of State comment on the remarks that were made in a Select Committee earlier by the chief scientific adviser, who said that we imported many cases from Italy and Spain early on in March? That was when events such as Liverpool v. Atletico Madrid were still going ahead. What advice will he be taking about testing at ports of entry and quarantine when we transition out of the lockdown?

Finally, we are building up a huge a backlog of unmet non-covid clinical need in the NHS. What resources will be available to deal with that, and how will we get the waiting list down? We do not want the lockdown to result in excess mortality and morbidity among those with non-covid conditions.

Matt Hancock Portrait Matt Hancock
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I am grateful to the shadow Secretary of State for his questions, and he is quite right to raise them. I will go through them as fast as I can and respond to them in turn. First, gown supply is improving and we have a better distribution system for PPE, on which we have been working incredibly hard under the leadership of Lord Paul Deighton. He has come in to help on PPE and made a significant improvement already.

The shadow Secretary of State asked about the number of deaths in the care sector. It is incredibly important that we protect those who live in social care settings and those who receive social care in their own homes. I am glad that in the data released by the Office for National Statistics this morning, the number of deaths in care homes was slightly lower, but it is still far too high and there is a huge amount of work still to do.

The shadow Secretary of State rightly asks about making sure that we suppress the virus. That is the goal—not just to flatten the peak, but to get the numbers right down. In doing so, our local authority public and environmental health teams will be absolutely vital, and he is right to draw attention to them. In this Chamber, we often rightly praise the NHS and social care staff, but I think this is a good moment for us to come together to praise our public health officials and environmental health officials in local authorities.

Finally, the shadow Secretary of State asked about non-covid needs, which are incredibly important. People who need treatment should get that treatment. We are opening up and reopening the NHS, and that includes any temporary closures, for instance of A&Es that need to reopen. I can think of one example in Chorley, Mr Speaker, which we are working hard to reopen as soon as possible, as the NHS reopens. I am happy to put that on record. It sometimes seems slightly unfair that you, as Speaker, cannot ask open constituency questions, but I know that that is something you have worked incredibly hard on, along with your colleagues in Lancashire.

Finally, I want to reiterate the point about levelling up. The Government’s agenda of levelling up is unabated; in fact, it is strengthened by this crisis. There are many reasons for the disparate impacts of coronavirus on different groups. Public Health England work is urgently under way into, for instance, the impact on ethnic minority groups, the impact of obesity and deprivation, and the much greater impact of coronavirus on men than women. All those things need to be considered and looked into, and we need to level up our country once this crisis is over.