Burnley MP Antony Higginbotham column: Looking forward

This Tuesday I used my time in the House of Commons to highlight the impact that coronavirus is having on businesses and residents here in Burnley and Padiham.

It is taking an enormous toll, particularly on our local pubs and restaurants who are still unable to open.

Brilliant local pubs like the Craven Heifer, the Crooked Billet, the Kettledrum and the Royal Dyche.

And family run restaurants like Bellisimo, the Usha, Astoria and Palazzo. What they need more than anything else is to get their trade back.

The PM and the Secretary of State for Health know my deep unease with these measures - it comes from having had them in place for so long and I want to see them lifted because I want businesses trading and families together.

But after the huge sacrifices made locally, over many months, which have halved the number of infections locally I do, reluctantly, recognise that now is not the time to step back completely.

Going into winter, the local NHS, which has performed admirably, needs the space to treat Covid and non-Covid patients alike. And that means we in Burnley have a bit further to go, to turn our low R rate into a low number of cases.

We can do that but as I reiterated in Parliament we need some more support from government. Rapid tests which have been used locally in some settings now need to be rolled out to the general population with an operation like what has happened in Liverpool.

And we also need to know what needs to happen to move to Tier 2, and then Tier 1. As we enter the final stretch that transparency and clarity is essential.

The Government has published the five key criteria and when you look at the data – which is publicly available online – we are moving in the right direction.

New hospital admissions are down by 20% and the number of cases are down 10%.

Balancing the health of the nation and the economy has never been a more challenging task and whilst I don't see these tiers as a good option, I do understand why the Government has deemed them necessary.

But there is also light at the end of this long tunnel.

Only a few months ago the idea of a vaccine felt a long way away. We all read the news articles saying that it could take years, and we may need to learn to live with Covid.

Living with Covid isn’t always possible though – far too many people sadly lose their life to this awful virus and, for others, the impact of ‘long-Covid’ is still unknown.

So, the only solution is a vaccine. And it isn’t years away.

This week we saw what is the most positive news we have had all year – the Pfizer / BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, which is 95% effective, has been formally approved for use in the UK.

This is a huge achievement, not least because we have millions of doses on pre-order ready to go.

The first 800,000 of these will be delivered to hospitals around the country next week and vaccinations will start - looking first at our NHS staff, care home residents and their carers.

All of whom we know are at greater risk from Covid-19.

And as this continues, we will also wait to see the outcomes from the other vaccines, from Moderna and Astra Zeneca / University of Oxford.

These, as with the Pfizer vaccine, will only be authorised if absolutely safe. There has been no compromise or relaxation, just a concerted effort.

Reviews have been taking place of the clinical data whilst the trials have been taking place, giving our regulators the information they need to continually assess and evaluate.

I also want to quell another concern that may still exist.

No vaccine will be made mandatory, nor would I ever support it being made that way.

And in case there was any doubt, the Prime Minister stated this explicitly in the House of Commons on Wednesday.

I do hope, however, that as many people as possible get the vaccine as I will be doing. It offers the best chance we have of reclaiming our lives and getting the economy back on track.

As we enter what will be an unusual December, I hope others are looking at 2021 with the same sense of relief and optimism that I am.