Politicians might usually expect a weekend off from interview duties over the Easter weekend, but tradition is hardly the order of the day at present. The Business Secretary Alok Sharma joined Sophy Ridge to discuss the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis at a sombre time, with the total number of fatalities soon expected to pass 10,000. Today, the Royal College of Nursing has issued guidance advising that nurses should refuse to treat patients with coronavirus if they do not have sufficient personal protective equipment available to them. Sharma defended the government’s record on PPE:
Sharma said:
No medical professional should be placed in a position where they have to make that choice… We are making sure that we get PPE to the front line… We’ve made sure that there is a huge distribution network that’s now been set up so that over 700 million pieces of protective equipment have been distributed over the last few weeks.
Government ‘needs to do even more’
Ridge pressed Sharma for an apology on behalf of the government for those health and social care workers who had not received adequate PPE at various points during the crisis. Her request comes after an apology made yesterday by the Home Secretary Priti Patel was felt by many to fall short of accepting responsibility. Sharma did not apologise for that specifically, but suggested that the government would be increasing its efforts on this front:
Right now, your viewers will be asking, does the government have a plan to get this PPE out to the frontline? And the answer is, yes, we do have a plan… Of course, we need to be doing even more.
Changes made to speed up business loans scheme
Ridge also challenged Sharma on the government’s Business Interruption Loan Scheme, designed to help ease affected companies through the difficult months ahead. The scheme has received over 300,000 applications for help so far, but only 4,200 have been granted. Sharma defended the scheme’s slow uptake:
This has been set up at speed, and we’ve made additional changes over the last few days… We need to get money out of the door as quickly as possible… and banks know that on this occasion they have to be part of the solution.
Keir Starmer – government would ‘be smart’ to apologise over PPE
Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer conducted his first interview with Ridge since his election. He said that while he was aiming to keep party politics to a minimum during the current crisis management, he felt that it was appropriate for the government to say it was sorry for some cases of inadequate PPE provision:
Starmer told Ridge:
I think it would be smart of the government to acknowledge that their ambition for the equipment to be where it should be, in the right quantity at the right time, isn’t being matched, and probably just to apologise for that and get on with it.
We need ‘urgent talks’ on how parliament will continue
While Starmer was on air, the Leader of the House of Commons’ office confirmed that parliament would begin sitting again on 21 April. Starmer called for ‘urgent talks’ on the nature of how this would take place, and looked to New Zealand for a possible answer:
How we sit is obviously a question we’re going to have to discuss, because physically, it’s impossible to see how we can sit in the usual way… In New Zealand, they’ve set up a special select committee… chaired by the leader of the opposition… That may be one possibility.
Sir Jeremy Farrar – UK ‘likely’ to be among the worst affected
Andrew Marr spoke to Sir Jeremy Farrar, the Director of the Wellcome Trust health research charity and a member of the government’s science advisory group SAGE. Farrar had some bleak predictions for the UK death toll:
Farrar told Marr:
The numbers in the UK have continued to go up. I do hope that we’re coming close to the number of new infections reducing… But the UK is likely to be certainly one of the worst, if not the worst affected country in Europe.
Lisa Nandy – Labour will support continued lockdown
And finally, the Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy told Marr that Labour was fully prepared to support a continuation of the current lockdown for as long as it was guided by scientific backing:
Nandy said:
We’d be led by the science. The key thing here is to save lives. If the lockdown has to continue then of course we’d support it… It may be that we look at a partial lifting of restrictions. There are other countries where small shops and parks have opened… We could look at measures like that.
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