Health Protection (Coronavirus) (Restrictions) (England) (No. 4) Regulations 2020

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con) [V]]

My Lords, these regulations will bring misery to the lives of millions of our fellow citizens. We know now what lockdowns do from our experience in the spring and from that of other countries which took the same course.

Jobs are destroyed and perfectly good businesses are forced to close their doors for the last time. Anxiety, depression, mental illness, suicides and domestic abuse increase, as the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, pointed out. Lives are lost as screening programmes are disrupted and people are fearful of going to hospital. Young people’s education is disrupted, their employment prospects blighted and their career paths distorted. The elderly are separated from their families and grandchildren as they ponder their own mortality. There is a cruelty here too, in cutting off folk in nursing homes from family visits, banning weddings and denying people the comfort of religious observance and the chance to join immediate families to mourn the passing of friends and relatives.

Tax revenues evaporate, and we add to the burden of our children a legacy of eye-watering debt. The deficit is now heading to £400 billion and probably on to half a trillion. Parliamentary democracy is a casualty too, as most of us in this debate get three minutes to speak, late at night, on the merits of nothing less than the shutting down of the entire economy and these extraordinary assaults on our liberty and prosperity. Who would have thought Ministers and officials would start telling people whom they can sleep with? The decisions are taken by folk in secure public sector employment, with inflation-proof pensions and good salaries. The highest price is paid by the poorest and those whose livelihoods depend on enterprise and the ability to make a profit. Lockdowns are the midwives of inequality.

Occasionally you see signs in shops saying, “If you break it, you pay for it”. I believe this applies to the Government today. It is irresponsible to present these regulations to Parliament without having done any analysis of the costs and means for mitigating all the consequences of their actions. I am grateful to Julia Hartley-Brewer of talkRADIO for succeeding where I failed through parliamentary questions in getting an answer from my right honourable friend Robert Jenrick MP, who told her it was unfair to ask whether the Government had done a cost-benefit analysis of the consequences of lockdown. After very robust interrogation, he admitted that he had not seen one, because it did not exist.

Again and again, Ministers rightly say they have to balance lives against livelihoods, but to achieve balance you need to weigh both sides of the scale. We are told that the models say we have no alternative, as the NHS will be overwhelmed. We of course have a duty to take this very seriously, but the Explanatory Memorandum for these regulations says the Government are assuming an R rate of 1.1 to 1.3. Professor Tim Spector from King’s College has suggested that R is now one in England and the UK as a whole, and Professor Heneghan from Oxford University says the infection rate in Liverpool is falling from a run rate of 490 a day over seven days to 269 and the R value is well below one, a point that the noble Lord, Lord Birt, may not have noticed. It seems the Government’s tiered approach is not only hurting but working.

The last financial crisis was caused by groupthink and people believing models which told them they could convert lead into gold at the expense of common sense. Then, the poorest paid the price, and those responsible became very rich. The fact that we were all scared by headlines over the weekend telling us that 4,000 people a day would die, and learned within hours that this came from a discredited model which predicted four times as many deaths as occurred in real life on 1 November, is worrying to say the least. With all models, the rule is very simple: garbage in, garbage out.

We also know that, once implemented, lockdowns are hard to exit. On Saturday the Prime Minister told us it would be for a strictly limited period, until 2 December. In less than 24 hours, Michael Gove was telling Andrew Marr it could be extended. When asked about this yesterday, Professor Whitty said:

“I think that the aim of this is to get the rates down far enough that it’s a realistic possibility to move into a different state of play at that point in time.”


What are people running businesses meant to do? Do they listen to the PM and take on more debt to survive another month if they can, or do they conclude, after listening to Mr Gove and Professor Whitty, that they should throw in the towel?

The Chancellor has done brilliantly, but he knows we are heading for Carey Street. What will this lockdown cost—perhaps £12.5 billion for furlough and the self-employed alone? He will need to extend the £20 a week standard allowance for universal credit from April. When folk who thought they were in secure jobs—say, on £25,000 a year—discover that they are not eligible for universal credit because they have savings or a working partner, his colleagues in the Commons with be inundated with constituents worried about how to pay their bills and feed their families. Where will he find the money for health, welfare and social care, and for the job creation initiatives that will be needed? To paraphrase Tacitus, we will have created a desert and called it protecting the health service.

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Tabled by

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

At end insert “but that this House regrets that no impact assessment has been published which sets out the (1) number of jobs lost, (2) businesses permanently destroyed, (3) costs to taxpayers, and (4) consequences for mental and physical health, of a national lockdown; and regrets that Her Majesty’s Government have not provided a strategy for the lifting of the restrictions put in place to address the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean’s amendment to the Motion not moved.