Covid-19: Ethnic Minority Disparities

Zarah Sultana Excerpts

Monday 1st March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kemi Badenoch]

Yes, I can assure my hon. Friend of that. It is what I responded to my hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Kate Griffiths), and I can reiterate it again now. What I would also say is that we want to assess the effectiveness of the scheme, so it is not just about letting people know that it has happened, but about checking that what we are doing and what we think is happening is working. Participating local authorities will provide regular progress reports over the course of the community champions programme, for example, so that we can evaluate exactly what is going on. One of the next steps in my report is to share the learning from the programme and to maximise the benefits from the funding we have given so that everyone, including those who have not participated in the scheme, can benefit.

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab) [V]]

When I challenged the Minister on the disproportionate impact of covid-19 on black and minority ethnic groups after the first wave of the virus, the Minister denied that systemic injustice was to blame. This new report shows that, in the second wave, Bangladeshi and Pakistani people were three times more likely to die from covid, and that black and minority ethnic communities as a whole are still significantly disproportionately in critical care with it. Does the Minister now acknowledge that it is systemic injustice that black and minority ethnic communities face from higher rates of poverty and overcrowded housing to higher rates of frontline work and barriers to accessing healthcare?

[Kemi Badenoch]

I think it is a really interesting question that the hon. Lady has asked. She says that I dismissed the claim that systemic injustice was to blame, but the fact is that we did not know what was to blame at that time. That was in June, three months before my report.

What we need to understand is what exactly we mean by systemic and structural. We have seen that the data show that, at some point, ethnic minority gaps in terms of disproportionate impact completely disappeared. If these were structural issues, that is not what we would expect to see. For example, at the beginning of the second wave, we saw the disparity between black groups completely close. It is not credible to say that people were being structurally racist and stopped being so during the summer, and then over Christmas these structural issues re-emerged. That does not explain what is happening.

We need to look at what the data tells us. We cannot start from the conclusion that we want this to be systemic injustice so that we can continue to move from a political ideological perspective. We are using a scientific perspective —what does the data tell us?—and the data is telling us that this is a very complex situation. There are multiple factors, and that is why the recommendations, which the Government have, are addressing those underlying factors. It is not a genetic disease, and being an ethnic minority is not the risk factor specifically.