One of the main reasons given for the national lockdown earlier this year was to get the NHS ready to handle a wave of CV19 cases. They expanded the Intensive Care capacity substantially, putting in new Nightingale hospitals as part of the answer, increasing intensive care beds in existing hospitals and buying more ventilators.

To increase capacity further they cancelled all non urgent operations in main hospitals, took over the capacity of the private sector hospitals to undertake some non CV 19 work for them and were keen to move patients out of hospital as soon as possible after treatment.

Today some people are still worrying about NHS capacity. Of course we all pay tribute and say thanks to the dedicated staff who bore the brunt of the first wave of CV 19 in hospitals, gave diligent care and pioneered treatments to respond. By now I assume more have been trained to handle CV 19, and we see the good news that there are better treatments with the death rate falling substantially as a result

Today I would like to ask a crucial question.

What is now happening to NHS output for non CV 19 conditions? Ministers tell me the NHS is operating again as before for non pandemic conditions. Is it? What is your experience of access to non urgent treatments, and to treatments for serious conditions like heart attacks and cancer .

The NHS England/DHSS budget for 2020/21 was £148bn at the start of the year, up from £140bn the previous year by £8bn or 5.7%. The NHS had been offered an increase of £33bn by 2023/24 as part of a five year settlement to allow growth and improvement. Special money to handle CV 19 has now added an additional £31.9bn to this year’s total to provide protective clothing, to introduce Test and Trace, to buy in private sector capacity, increase ventilators and provide extra facilities in the Nightingales.

I am seeking information from government about how output in the NHS now compares with this time last year. We know there was a large dip in activity during the intense period of the CV 19 crisis in the spring. It would be good to know we are more than back to normal, given the backlog and the resource now being committed. It would also be good to know when we can stop paying for the private sector capacity as well.

The UK passenger railway had a big business running commuters into and out of cities for their work five days a week. Even after allowing for the discount element of the season ticket, these travellers were made to pay premium prices for their travel, as there was little by way of alternative for most of them. The roads were jammed and there were too few car parks at work to make the car an alternative for many.

The railway always complained that it was very costly having to provide so much rolling stock and so many staff for a couple of peak hours in the morning and another couple of peak hours in the evening. It was that peak volume which the railways said justified the high fares. In an attempt to fill the rolling stock the rest of the time and to pay staff wages for more than four hours a day the railway adopted heavily discounted fares to persuade people to undertake leisure, shopping and entertainment trips by train to use the empty carriages.

Today we still see a pattern of dear tickets at peak times, and cheap tickets at off peak across the network. If we take some longer journeys as examples we see

Standard single ticket London to Manchester off peak £33 peak £157

Standard single ticket London to Birmingham off peak £15.50 peak £74

The peak fare is around five times the off peak.

Today the talk is of a major change of future working even assuming an end to special CV 19 lock downs. Office workers look forward to going to the office two or three times a week instead of five times, and want to be offered flexible hours so they can switch to the old off peak. Many have discovered how much better off they are working from home and saving all that money on rail travel and expensive coffees.

If some of this comes to pass it requires revolution on the railways. It means a substantial reduction in numbers of travellers and a bigger reduction in fares revenue if charging policies are unaltered. The railway managements are talking about how their leisure business has picked up but this is largely heavily discounted tickets that come nowhere near paying the high fixed costs of the amount of rail travel beign offered. They say it is very green, but creating more journeys on trains that otherwise would not have happened is not green but the opposite.Trying to run a railway around heavily discounted leisure use will leave a huge hole in railway finances. We cannot carry on for much longer with the current system of running 90% of pre pandemic services for Maybe a third of the passenger numbers. It is unaffordable for taxpayers. When will the rail experts tell us what Level of demand they think they can recapture anD what fares they can charge in this new world.

There are three government models for tackling the pandemic.

The first is to give priority in all policy matters to curbing the spread and reducing the death rate from the virus through strong national action. The UK and most other governments tried this in the spring. The problem with this approach is that as soon as governments relax the virus spreads again, leading to pressures to shut down more of the economy for a second or successive times. The concentration of resources is difficult to sustain for long periods, leads to unwelcome deaths from other conditions that can go untreated or may be exacerbated by the policy, and merely delays the spread of the pandemic itself.

The second is to see the problem of public health as one for local government. Patterns of infection and pressures on health services vary widely within the same country, so why not have a menu of possible actions for local government to adopt as they see fit? This is the US model, where State Governors led the responses to the virus, drawing on Federal resource and law where needed. The UK has also been moving more to this model in recent weeks with a three tier approach to lock down.

The third is to trust people and free institutions within a democracy to make their own decisions about how and whether to protect themselves from possible transmission. Government sets out the dangers and passes on national and international knowledge about the threat and the spread. Government also provides support for those who wish to shield themselves, offering the ability to work from home, to have home deliveries and help with technology to switch more of their lives to on line. Governments can message that people need to keep their distance from possible infection, wash their hands and reduce their risk through their choice of travel and work patterns.

Forming hybrids of these approaches is complex. Devolved and local governments often want a say but do not want to take full responsibility. They may wish to lock down, but see it as an opportunity to demand other policy initiatives and resources from central government. Some wish to play politics with it, to try to shift blame onto national government and cast them in a poor light.

My advice is to keep working away on a wide range of actions that can tame the virus and make living with it less dangerous. The medical teams are now coming up with a wider range of drugs to treat the severe forms of the disease, and the death rate in intensive care is dropping. More can be expected from improved understanding of the disease and from trials of better treatments. More knowledge and communication about how the disease spreads should lead to more people opting to take precautions voluntarily, to reduce the risks to themselves, which should help.

It is difficult to see a Test and Trace scheme which can guarantee success as democratic governments hope. Delays in testing and getting results, imperfect recoding of who was present in an infected location, false results from tests, and reluctance by some to self isolate owing to the difficulties it poses for their lives mean it is not the silver bullet some seek.

Yesterday in the Commons I raised again the issue of more home grown produce. The fresh food in supermarkets packaged with the UK flag is popular and usually of excellent quality. Many of us want to keep the food miles down, keep the standards up, and support UK agriculture.

I saw a film recently which said that tomatoes grown in modern greenhouses in carefully controlled environments can yield up to forty times the weight of product that a typical outdoors plant can achieve. It can also be much easier to pick. Modern methods of growing strawberries under polythene or glass can prolong the UK growing season, produce great fruit and simplify picking.

The same film reminded viewer of the how many orchards had to be grubbed up in the 1970s as a tidal wave of tariff free continental imports came into our market and offered cheaper product than the domestic fruit. Under the Common Agricultural Policy and the tariff free EU food regime we have seen a decline of around one fifth in domestically produced temperate food, whilst we have had at the same time to protect the EU growers from cheaper competition from outside the EU with tariffs against the most efficient world producers.

If the EU persists in denying the UK a Free Trade Agreement with no tariffs by insisting on there being a high price for such an obvious thing to grant, then there will be tariffs against EU food imports. We will presumably choose to lower our food tariffs compared to the high EU ones. As these tariffs come to apply to the EU it will give our own farmers a huge incentive to increase their capacity to supply us with much more home grown food, and to cut the food miles as they do so. It would be good to get back to the market share we had in 1970, and to think about restoring those orchards that were ripped out.

As a young man one of my first votes was in the original referendum on whether to stay in the EEC, misleadingly called the Common Market during the campaign. I was against the language in the Rome Treaty that warned us this was much more than a Common Market in the making, and disliked the Labour government’s lies about the nature and long term aims of the body. I also was asked to produce a decade forecast of the outlook for the UK if we stayed in by my employer.

As I drafted it five problems became clear. The first was the burden of our financial contributions was too high, and these would produce a nasty dent in our balance of payments as we sent that money away and it was converted into foreign currencies. I did not know or forecast Margaret Thatcher would become PM and negotiate a better deal, which limited the damage a bit – or that I would help her.

The second was the UK’s industry which had management and Union issues, some old capital stock and poor nationalised industries like steel and shipbuilding that were not cost effective. This meant it was going to have to face the full frontal assault of German and French competition with the full removal of tariffs before it was ready to withstand those pressures. My forecasts rightly assumed we would lose a lot of capacity in areas like steel, cars, foundries, ship building and textiles. Our car output halved in the first decade of membership.

The third was in the areas of services where the UK had a good competitive advantage the considerable barriers to trade were going to remain in place. As a result I reported a major and long lasting deterioration in our balance of payments as imports of foreign goods surged, exports of services were still limited and as we had to make new large payments away.

The fourth was the dreadful deal on fish, bound to damage our industry substantially.

The fifth was the complete removal of tariffs from EEC food, the imposition of tariffs on Commonwealth food, and the hugely damaging impact the EEC would have on areas like fruit and market garden produce.

Later policies as the EU emerged and increased its wide ranging legislative grip also drove us into importing everything from defence equipment to electricity. It was a great scheme for continental exporters. In those days running a balance of payments deficit required stringent credit and money control which slowed growth.

EU representatives still seem to think the UK wants special access to the single market and is desperate to stay in their trading arrangements. They may be fuelled in this mistaken belief by sections of the UK establishment who seem to think the single market is a good construct that we would be wrong to leave.

One of the few things Leave and Remain agreed about in the referendum was leaving the EU meant leaving the single market and customs union. The winners thought this a good thing and the losers thought it was some kind of threat hanging over us. I became a strong critic of the single market when I was the UK’s Single market Minister. I was given the task of supervising the UK’s response to and involvement in the so called “completion of the single market” in the run up to 1992 when they declared it finished.

The endless Council meetings and negotiations were to complete 282 pieces of law making to regulate all sorts of things people trade. Many of these added little or nothing to trade, and many entrenched in law the preferred ways of making and doing things of large continental companies. They stated “1992 will be a pivotal year in the development of the European Community. It marks the final year of the enterprise to complete the single market” and the year when they went on to economic and monetary union.

I lost the main argument within the UK government before when I was the PM’s adviser. I pointed out you do not need a whole lot of common laws to have a free market. The EU already had established the key proposition, that any good of merchandisable quality in one country could be offered freely for sale in another. This was sufficient in itself. It meant companies could get the benefits of scale and trade their goods freely across the whole EU without tariffs and non tariff barriers. Consumers could decide for themselves if they liked the product and the supporting standards of the sponsor country when making a purchase.

The EU was determined to use the excuse of a single market to greatly expand its legislative control over member states. They demanded the end of the veto over all single market legislation to expedite putting through regulations that were against the interests or traditions of individual countries. I advised the government to only surrender the veto for the 282 specified pieces of legislation, and for it to revert thereafter. The government was not even prepared to protect us to that extent, and the UK swallowed the idea of majority voting for huge swathes of legislation. By the time I became Single market Minister I had to construct blocking minorities of countries every time the Commission came up with another damaging or needless proposal.

As I feared the EU had no intention of limiting itself to 282 laws for its single market, but went on year after year long after the so called completion of the single market pushing out many new laws to exert control over many new areas all in the name of the single market. The single market was much better at ensuring tariff and barrier free access to the UK for continental manufacturers and farmers than it was at securing access for UK service providers to the continent.

As we exit the EU fully we need to be aware of just how far the EU had got in seeking our integration and submission to their system. They were always bitterly disappointed that the UK avoided joining the Euro, the main mechanism by which a fully integrated EU economy is being created. Greece and Italy have discovered the hard way that there are many policy choices they can no longer make as they are committed to the disciplines of the Euro.

Despite this they sought to ensnare us with various common policies. The Common Fishing policy took more and more of our fish to foreign ports, leaving us with one of the richest seas in the world to become net importers. The common energy policy got us to depend more on imports through interconnectors, making a country with plenty of its own energy partly dependent on a continental EU short of energy and committed to Russian gas. The common state procurement policy meant we bought more and more goods that the UK is quite capable of making from EU suppliers with continental factories. The Common Agricultural Policy led to a sharp decline in the proportion of our food we grow and rear for ourselves. The trade policy made us impose high tariffs on food products from outside the EU we could not grow ourselves. The animal welfare policy fell short of what we wanted, but we had to accept live movement of cattle and the standards the EU would accept for everything from chicken cages to sow tethers.

In future blogs I will be examining the scope there now is to improve so many things. The annoyance is the way the last Parliament and much of the UK establishment blocked preparatory work to grasp these many opportunities to do better more quickly.

I opposed the creation of a devolved Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly when Labour offered its second referendum on these matters in 1997, as did the Conservative party as a whole. I accepted the result fully, even though the Welsh one was very narrow. Since that day I have never asked for another referendum to test opinion again, and have always supported co-operating properly with the devolved bodies.

I have not felt the need to change some of the arguments I put at the time. For example, I argued that setting up these bodies would not create a happily united UK in the way Labour envisaged. It was more likely that nationalists in Scotland would use the excellent platform the Scottish Parliament offered them to campaign continuously to move from devolution to separation. This has predictably come to pass. Not even a full and fair referendum to ask the question did Scotland wish to be independent was sufficient to restore peace on this issue, as the SNP unlike Conservatives never accept the result of a referendum when it goes against them. Today in Parliament every debate on whatever matters is another debate on Scottish independence as far as the SNP is concerned.

Today we see the results of managing the CV 19 response when the devolved authorities of Scotland, Wales and some City Mayors wish to be involved and wish to differentiate what they do. We get mixed messages, public disputes, selective leaks of privileged conversations and variable responses around the UK. I think a good case can be made for more local decision taking on this issue. After all the virus spreads at very different rates and at different times around the country. Hospital admission needs and death rates are very variable. Local circumstances over testing, hospital capacity and Care home management are different.

This argues for a two tier approach. The national government should provide a menu of powers and national advice on the best medical, scientific and economic response to the crisis. The national government and Parliament can decline powers that are thought to be too damaging and unhelpful. Devolved authorities should be free to select from the menu of special powers and responses what they wish to impose in their areas. The U.K. Parliament needs to press harder for a plan which does less economic damage than the current one.

Trying to do it by collaboration is more difficult, as this blurs responsibility and allows devolved authorities to play politics with a national crisis. The SNP government is said to have selectively leaked confidential information about possible future options before a common position was agreed or announced. They also spent the first part of the pandemic setting slightly tougher rules in Scotland, claiming this would allow Scotland to be virus free whilst England would suffer from being too lax. It did not turn out like that, with the Scottish government now needing to explain why their different approach did not produce better results.

Today why not let devolved authorities decide what they should do about rising case rates. They do not seem to like the national government telling them how to organise their pubs and restaurants, and they want to be more responsible for track and trace in their areas. If a Council or devolved assembly wished it could ask the national government to take responsibility for it. Otherwise the government will need to be firmer with sending plans to local and devolved government that they just need to implement as agents of central government.

The best argument against local differentiation is the variety of rules that will apply. The best argument in favour is many areas of the country will not need the heavy handed lock down the government’s advisers think necessary for areas with a high incidence of the pandemic.

(In the 1979 referendum Welsh voters rejected devolution by a massive 4 to 1 margin. In 1997 they voted 50.3% Yes on a 51.3% turnout, with a majority of just 6721 votes for devolution)