I very much thank noble Lords for an incredibly broad and wide-ranging debate. It has been a really honourable birthday party for the Coronavirus Act, and I hope that the Act is grateful for the tributes it has had. I confess that I am proud of the Act, and proud of the collaborative spirit in which it was drafted and passed. I am proud of the measures it supported to make the lives of the people of Britain a lot better during this awful pandemic and I am enormously grateful for the wide-ranging support here in this House during the last year. There has been scrutiny and challenge, but I am grateful to noble Lords for the general tone of support offered to the Government, and to myself in particular.
In terms of the regulations, I think the noble Baroness put it very well: the regulations we are debating today are tough but they are necessary, and I cannot think of a better way of putting it than that. On the specific question asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, on gatherings, I would be glad to write to her with an answer. On the questions that many noble Lords had on the road map, I am not in a position to do a road map pub quiz from the Dispatch Box right now. The Prime Minister has laid out a really clear schedule and there are update sessions already built into that schedule. Noble Lords will need to wait, I fear, for updates from Downing Street on that.
Instead, I should like to pick out two or three of the major themes that noble Lords raised in this broad debate. One of the most powerful came at the beginning with the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, reinforced by many other noble Lords, on the issue of health and the question of levelling up. I recognise the deep concerns, which I share, about the spotlight that the pandemic has put on the health of the nation. Without doubt, one of the reasons why we have been hit hard by the pandemic is that large parts of our population are simply not in great shape at the moment. They have either poor health, poor living conditions or poor circumstances. The noble Lord’s comments were absolutely spot on.
My noble friend Lord Moynihan put an emphasis particularly on BMI, weight and fitness in the country. They are clearly not good enough and there is widespread acknowledgement of that. That is in no way to shame any individual or section of society. It is a simple fact of life that we do not compare well to other countries. The Prime Minister has spoken movingly about his personal experience and the issue is something that the nation has to have a conversation about. The obesity strategy is a framework for that, but it is not the only thing that we will be doing in this area.
Our reach-in as government—not just as national government but in local government, agencies of government and the NHS—to some parts of society is just not good enough. This is not a BAME issue, although that is part of it; I am talking about everywhere
from the sweatshops of Leicester to the apple orchards of Herefordshire. There are too many communities where we simply do not get our message across or have a dialogue, and where our services are not provided in a way that people find accessible. We have to ask ourselves tough questions about how we can do better. That is because we are only as good as a nation as the health of the most vulnerable people in our society. That includes everyone from working-class white communities in South Wales all the way through to those in the mill towns of northern England. We have to work with faith groups, on our languages and on the services that we offer in a great many ways.
We have to join up our healthcare services. That is something for which the healthcare system has been calling for a long time, which was apparent during our engagement exercise two years ago. It is well built into the NHS Bill that will be coming our way very shortly. We have to join up primary, secondary and public health across the piece. Only in that way can we address the population health issues that have bedevilled the country in the past year.
Lastly, we have to embrace technology. We have done a huge amount of good work in the past year with data, med tech and a more 21st-century approach to healthcare. There is still a huge amount that we need to do. We need to encourage people to engage with their own patient records and data and help them to understand that they can take greater responsibility for personalised medicine if they engage with their patient records and systems. I am optimistic that we can make progress in that area.
My noble friend Lady Noakes and a great number of others remarked on the impact of the pandemic, not just on those who have been ill from Covid but on all the others who have not had either elective surgery or treatment, or missed out on diagnostics and testing—those secondary impacts on the healthcare system. That does not come as a surprise. It is neither a secret nor a conspiracy. It is exactly how epidemics hit healthcare systems. It happens time and again.