My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
From the Liberal Democrat Benches, we support the Motion of Regret in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack and the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, are absolutely correct that this House does not like the fact that once again the Government have chosen to use secondary legislation to make major changes to the way the Government manage their business—in this case, public health.
The noble Baroness, Lady Merron, has set out the chaos of a series of announcements from August last year, followed by a variety of procedures and changes when the Government kept getting things wrong. I absolutely support her concerns, and, as have many other speakers, I start from the position that major reorganisations during a global pandemic are unsound and unhelpful, not just to dealing with the pandemic but to the performance of any successor bodies, including the UK Health Security Agency and the Office for Health Promotion and Disparities, with disparity work continuing in NHS England. I echo the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and others on the work of all the PHE staff, and Duncan Selbie in particular.
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As the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, reminded us, PHE was created in the coalition Government by him and Paul Burstow, the then Lib Dem Minister, to draw together the expertise on public health that had been so fragmented in many different places and bodies, none of which connected. It was done to support the coalition Government’s key aim to
“protect and improve the nation’s health”,
improving the health of the poorest fastest. That remains an admirable aim. After 2015, the subsequent Government cut its funding substantially, setting up Public Health England to fail.
PHE was to support the new systems of public health locally, whether the teams of directors of public health, other areas of public health such as CCGs or the work carried out by local authorities. PHE also did some key work on the public health burden of alcohol, and it certainly played its part in the global health response to Ebola—both significant pieces of work—before its funding was severely cut.
However, the pandemic has exposed a trait, all too familiar in Ministers in the Department of Health and Social Care, of placing blame elsewhere—in this case, on PHE. Anyone who was working out in the field from March 2020 onwards, whether CCGs, directors of public health, or local authority resilience forums, had to fight to get data and information from the centre. The Minister’s predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, became familiar with weekly questions from your Lordships asking when the department and PHE would start to treat local bodies on the ground as partners. It took many months for that data to come through. We know where it was blocked; it was not blocked by PHE.
The new body, the UK Health Security Agency, seems to have got off to a somewhat mixed start—no surprise; we are still in the middle of a pandemic. Ten days ago, Sir David Norgrove, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, said that it had published a misleading Covid-19 vaccination statement that had been used by anti-vaxxers to cast doubt on the effectiveness of vaccines. He said, at an event organised by University College London:
“Those numbers were misleading and wrong and we’ve made it very clear to UKHSA. I’m lost for words at the willingness to publish a table that led people to believe that, with a footnote that was too weak.”
Stian Westlake, chief executive of the Royal Statistical Society, called on UKHSA to
“turn the volume up to 11 on the corrections”.
This is particularly disappointing because, as we discussed yesterday in your Lordships’ House in relation to the vaccines Statement, anti-vaxxers are actively disrupting young people and those in key roles, such as care homes, from coming forward for their vaccines. But there are other worrying signs that these changes have been implemented too quickly. The UKHSA has been issuing muddled messages. Just one example will serve.
In September, it issued a statement about the new rules and guidance for those with underlying conditions that was quoted by the Department for Education in relation to return to schools and by the Health and Safety Executive in relation to whether it was safe for people to return to work. This was at the same time as shielding formally came to an end. Worryingly, UKHSA conflated vulnerable people with an underlying condition with the clinically extremely vulnerable, causing not just anger but real confusion for many. Worse, the advice for the CEV, as the Minister well knows, was very different, because, on 17 September, Sajid Javid issued a personal letter to all clinically extremely vulnerable, telling them completely different advice.
These two examples could just be one-off errors, but I fear that they are absolutely symptomatic of the hurried reorganisation of public health by this Government, at exactly the time when all staff were still trying to manage the Covid-19 pandemic because, as the Minister reminded us yesterday, it is absolutely not over yet. Can the Minister say what steps are being taken to ensure that public statements and statistics bear some relation to reality and that, when a particularly vulnerable group is given misleading advice, there is a correction? Finally, will the Minister take back from these Benches the message that secondary legislation in a hurry is not what the House wants to see?