My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend on the Front Bench for his dogged persistence. I also congratulate our new arrival; her sense of timing is clearly quite brilliant.
I believe that it is time Parliament spoke out. I was a Deputy Speaker in the other place, and it is very important that Parliament remembers that at the end of the day we represent the people of this country, particularly those in the Commons. I pay tribute to Graham Brady MP for tabling an amendment, which I hope the Speaker will select. Any major change needs to take Parliament with it; if it does not do so, we are in deep trouble. Time is of the essence. Let us remember that during the Falklands War we sat on Saturdays—and I, for one, am quite prepared to turn up at any time and at any hour.
I want to raise two issues. I know something about care homes—I had six in my constituency—and they are the key to reducing deaths and saving lives. We know what went wrong in the early stages when patients were just discharged from hospital without any test. Even now, in the memo that went out on 2 September, I note that the only real difference is that they are being discharged with a premium of extra money for the care home to take over. I say to my noble friend on the Front Bench: there are two things going wrong even today. There are inspectors going around care homes, some of whom have not been tested. In addition, there is the fact some care homes are not separating Covid patients from the ordinary patients—that has to stop.
The second area is sport. I have had the privilege to play a lot of sport in life—I am getting on a bit now —but DCMS is currently a disaster. I am sorry to put it that strongly. I have written several times to Mr Huddleston, the Minister for Sport, the last time on 17 August, but what do I get back? Nothing at all. Has he said anything, or has anything ever been reported on the issues facing sport? Nothing. It is not good enough. Let us take cricket. I am president of Northamptonshire County Cricket Club—there are 18 counties like it. It went to great trouble to get its open-air ground ready for cricket at the beginning of July. We had some pilots. Did anybody do an assessment of them? If they did, they never published them. Then we had more pilots, but they were cancelled at 24 hours’ notice. That is no way forward to help our sporting young people.
And then there is rugby—poor rugby. It faces financial devastation if grounds are not opened and matches do not take place for the next six months. Let us be clear: without direct financial support, clubs will fail. I know Northampton Saints well; I have been down and talked to them. If we have a stance of “no crowds”, that needs to be changed. Pilots have been done; they are successful. If we can go to the pub, why on earth can we not go a distanced rugby ground?
The other aspect is theatres. There was a working party called Operation Sleeping Beauty. It was working well but was then cancelled. That is not good enough. Time is of the essence, we know that. The public have had enough, frankly, of flim-flam. They do not want feverish promises of world-beaters and moonshots; all they want to know is that they can judge risks themselves. All they want is competence.
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