I completely agree. I hope that Ministers on the Treasury Bench have listened carefully. If they are prepared to bring forward legislation, we would work constructively across the House to ensure its speedy passage. May I thank my hon. Friend for the reference in his amendment to the impact of alcohol abuse on children? He knows that it is a subject very close to my heart; on behalf of the children of alcoholics community, I am grateful that he referred to it in his amendment.
Although we have often said this in the House, I still think that the whole House will want to remember today the 127,691 people so far who have lost their lives to covid-19, this awful disease, including the 850 health and care workers. Although repeating the numbers has become almost routine in this House, that does not make the scale or gravity of the loss any less shocking.
We grieve as a nation and we all pay tribute to our healthcare workers, our social care workers and our public sector workers.
I am sure that the whole House will want to dedicate itself in good faith to learning lessons for the future. Sadly, we are in an era when, according to the experts, pandemics are becoming more predictable and will become more regular because of climate change and biodiversity loss, so learning lessons is about preparing better for the future rather than settling scores.
We know that the B1617.2 variant is spreading. From the data that I have seen, it appears to have a growth rate advantage of about 13% over the B1117 variant. It could well become the dominant strain in the United Kingdom. Although vaccination should mean that many are much safer and ought to avoid hospitalisation, the Government still have a responsibility to do all they can to contain its spread, minimise sickness and ensure that the 21 June target is not disrupted, if at all possible.
That is why I said on Monday that we need more surge vaccination in hotspot areas. We know that with vaccination there are always pockets where rates are lower than necessary, and we need to drive those rates that up. We have seen that throughout history—with measles, for example. So we urge the Government again to do all they can to drive up vaccination rates in Bolton, Bedford, Blackburn and other areas where we know there is an issue. We also need the Government to do more to contain the virus through test, trace and isolate. We need more surge testing. We need more enhanced contact tracing locally, with local authorities given the resources to carry it out. We need sick pay and isolation support fixed as well.
For those who are going in to work, or for those who are now socialising in premises, those buildings and premises need proper air filtration systems. There are experts now who can easily fix filtration systems in buildings to make them much more covid secure, and we should be inspecting workplaces in all these areas to ensure that every workplace is covid secure.
We need transparency in decision making as well. For the first time in my life, I think, I find myself agreeing with Mr Dominic Cummings. I know the Secretary of State does not often agree with Mr Dominic Cummings, but I find myself agreeing with Mr Dominic Cummings, who tweeted yesterday:
“With something as critical as variants escaping vaccines, there is *no* justification for secrecy, public interest unarguably is *open scrutiny of the plans*”.
Mr Cummings, on this occasion, is correct. [Interruption.] A wry laugh from the Secretary of State. Mr Cummings may well have been saying something different when he was in government; I do not know, but at least his public statement yesterday is correct. That is why our amendment calls for the publication of a Government lessons-learned review; not so that we can try to undermine the Government or find some hole to use across the Dispatch Box, but so that we can learn the lessons in our efforts to contain variants, and ensure that we are better prepared for the future. I hope the Secretary of State looks sympathetically upon that request, and perhaps joins us in the Division Lobby this evening.
I now turn to the contents of the Gracious Speech more generally. This should have been the Queen’s Speech that unveiled a new NHS plan to bring down the
elective waiting list, which now stands at 5 million. This should have been a Queen’s Speech that outlined proposals to tackle the backlog of 436,000 people waiting over 12 months for treatment—many of them waiting in pain and anxiety, many of them facing permanent disability as a consequence of those waits.