Covid-19 Update

Nusrat Ghani Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I remind the hon. Gentleman that the Government have already announced the biggest catch-up fund for electives that the country has ever seen in order to deal with that challenge.. There is an extra £2 billion for the second half of this year and a minimum of £8 billion over the next three years, and the NHS is working on a detailed plan which will be published as soon as it is ready.

[Ms Nusrat Ghani (Wealden) (Con)]

The Health Secretary should be very proud of our world-leading vaccination programme, and I join the Secretary of State in sending those who are anxious the message that they should come forward and get their vaccinations.

This morning, breakfast telly was being broadcast from the Buxted Medical Centre, a GP surgery in my constituency, where huge anxiety was being expressed about how NHS staff would cope with delivering the vaccinations. I am extremely anxious about the statutory instrument that is mandating vaccinations for NHS staff, because I believe it means that 126,000 of them will leave the sector. Is this the right decision, when NHS staff are already saying that they are working all the hours God gives?

[Sajid Javid]

We will debate the SI in the House, and I shall be happy to talk more about it then, but I think that the number to which my hon. Friend referred is the number of people whom the NHS estimated to remain unvaccinated at the time when the Government said they were going ahead with the SI. I am pleased to inform her that since then the number has fallen. Tomorrow I will come to the House with the latest figure that we have, but it is improving all the time. When we introduced a similar measure in the residential care home sector, we saw the number of unvaccinated people fall day by day as more and more of them had positive engagement and took up the offer of a vaccine.