I shall endeavour to be mindful of that, Mr Deputy Speaker, and shall try to put some of those questions on the record for the Minister.
As many Members have said, and the chief scientific adviser agrees, covid is going to be with us forever and variants are going to be with us forever. This is the first test that we�the Government, the House and society�face in respect of how we deal with covid in a post-vaccine world, where we have vaccines and have vaccinated
most of our population. It is important that we do not mess this up and fail that test. It seems to me that we need to respond calmly and proportionately, so I give the Government credit for resisting the calls for the economically damaging measures in plan B. Working from home, for example, does have significant economic consequences, as we saw from the Treasury�s own analysis. Vaccine passports are both illiberal and, as we have seen from the evidence�or lack of evidence�from Scotland, ineffective, so they are the worst of all worlds. They are an ineffective and illiberal policy, and we certainly do not want them introduced here.
Before I deal with the measures, I want to pick up on the point about the NHS made by the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats. She is absolutely right that the NHS is facing significant pressure, but it is not facing pressure from the number of patients in hospital because of covid, which is around 6% of total bed capacity. The NHS is under enormous pressure dealing with the significant number of patients who were both unable to be treated and scared away from the national health service during the pandemic. We must be careful not to repeat the mistake and scare away a whole new set of patients, as it will take the NHS another very significant period of time to deal with them. There is nothing about the measures that she suggested that will deal with those pressures; they will just make them worse.