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Standing Committee F
Tuesday 29 June 2004
(Afternoon)
[Mr. Eric Forth in the Chair]
Clause 2
Health functions
Amendment proposed [this day]: No. 8, in
clause 2, page 1, line 9, leave out 'infectious disease and other'.—[Dr. Murrison.]
2.30 pm
Question again proposed, That the amendment be made.
The Chairman: I remind the Committee that with this we are discussing the following amendments: No. 1, in
No. 4, in
Patrick Mercer (Newark) (Con): May I welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Forth? We had an interesting debate this morning, but I was just in mid flow when the clock hand turned to the appropriate hour for lunch.
If I may iterate, the great difficulty that we face is that since 11 September 2001—a convenient date to choose—our enemies have without doubt made lots of potentially lethal attempts to attack these islands. It is only by good luck and the extraordinary professionalism of our security services and police forces that those attacks have so far been avoided.
The fact remains that most people probably expect the sort of attack that we narrowly avoided about four weeks ago in west London, when the security services intercepted 150 lb of fertiliser. I do not know, but I suspect that that material would otherwise have been used for a series of conventional blasts that could have wrought all sorts of damage—probably something similar to the Madrid attacks or even worse.
When the vexing phrase ''weapons of mass destruction'' comes up, it is worth reflecting that there was an attempt to use such weapons against these islands in the not-too-distant past. That fact is particularly relevant to amendment No. 4. In January 2003, an organisation called Ansar al-Islam attempted to use a contact poison in north London known as ricin. Had that poison been successfully deployed, it could have caused hundreds or even thousands of casualties.
It is useful to bear that incident in mind. That plan was pretty crude, but had it worked, we would be looking at the work of the security services and the Health Protection Agency in a wholly different way. Amendment No. 4 is relevant to that, as it would add the words ''including education and promotion'' to
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subsection (1)(b), which makes provision for functions relating to
''the prevention of the spread of infectious disease''.
I would like to tease from the Minister some idea of how she believes we can cover such crucial matters as education and promotion without spelling them out in any more detail than the Bill already provides for.
What am I talking about? Currently, a number of different threats are explained to the population. For instance, we heard earlier about obesity, about which there is an informative campaign. However, I do not think that anyone could say, ''My God, the Government are being thoroughly irresponsible in the way that they are talking about obesity,'' or about the danger to children on the roads, for instance. However, the Government must feel that they are in a difficult position if we are to try to get across to the public at large the dangers, difficulties and lethality of the sort of weapons that might be used against this country. Clearly, chemical, biological, radiological or, in the worst event, nuclear weapons are likely to cause mass casualties. The worst possible thing to do would be to allow our population to remain ignorant of the effects of that style of attack and the diseases that it may engender.
Dr. Andrew Murrison (Westbury) (Con): My hon. Friend rightly talks about mass casualties, but does he accept that there is also a danger of mass hysteria? I am thinking about a dirty nuclear bomb, for example, when the hysteria caused would probably be well out of proportion to the number of likely casualties. The agency's functions may well include trying to be realistic about the level of casualties that may be engendered and about the effect on the population. Hysteria may well be worse than the number of casualties.
Patrick Mercer: I am grateful to my hon. and, indeed, gallant Friend for his intervention. Clearly, as a medical officer, his understanding of such issues is much greater than mine. I suspect that he has probably been peeping at my notes; half the problem with such weapons is that they will perpetrate panic, hysteria and difficulties out of all proportion to the effects of the weapon themselves.
Let us look at what might be used and at what has been used in the recent past. We have seen, for instance, the use of a non-persistent chemical, sarin, on the underground in Japan. We are conscious of the fact that sarin was one of the weapons in the armoury of al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam and other such groups. There is every possibility of non-persistent and persistent agents being used against the west.
Similarly, we need to start to think about the effects of radiation sickness. As my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) has just pointed out, any form of radiological device is likely to have effects far in excess of an initial explosion or the contamination that it spreads. Let us move from there on to a biological attack. What does the Minister believe is the possibility of smallpox being used as a weapon? [Interruption.] I see Government Members sneering, but the fact remains that smallpox is a deeply lethal disease that can be easily deployed and has the added
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benefit, from a terrorist's point of view, of the physical symptoms taking an extraordinarily long time to develop.
The problem about warning people, training them and making sure that they are aware of what is coming is that all such things are weapons of Armageddon. They all carry a degree of terror with them that is probably out of proportion to the casualties that they will actually inflict. The whole point of the amendment is to make it clear that the population need to be educated in such a way that they will understand what the threat is, will be able to react once the threat physically develops and will be taught by the Government what to do without spreading or engendering panic, which should be totally unnecessary.
It is interesting that in the past, in areas where there has been a threat of an accident with a nuclear submarine, iodine tablets have been distributed to the civilian population at large. I would be interested to know how, when the responsibilities of the National Radiological Protection Board switch to the Health Protection Agency—
The Chairman: Order. I am happy to let the hon. Gentleman develop his arguments, insofar as they relate strictly to the amendments. He has just managed to do that up to now, but he is now straying into another clause. I ask him to concentrate on the amendments and clause before us now; he may well be able to talk about submarines subsequently.
Patrick Mercer: Thank you, Mr. Forth. I will try to stay above the surface if I can from now on.
Mr. Mike Hall (Weaver Vale) (Lab): Torpedoed.
Patrick Mercer: Clearly, I have been torpedoed. I will try not to strike any more mines.
To return to the amendment at hand, I would be interested to know precisely how the Health Protection Agency intends to get its message across, and how it will move from the relatively comfortable environment in which it has been able to operate in the past to the environment of this whole new gamut of threats. Without the sort of phraseology included in the amendment, how will the Health Protection Agency get its message across?
Dr. Murrison: Would my hon. Friend agree that the Health Protection Agency might like to start close to home, given the confusion engendered in this place by an apparent terrorist, or person of ill disposition, throwing a bag of purple powder into the Chamber of the House of Commons? We knew very little about what to do. It appeared that no one else knew what to do, either. Would the HPA usefully direct its attention towards situations such as that?
Patrick Mercer: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for another useful intervention. He is absolutely right; it was very clear after that attack a few weeks ago that a group of people, who probably should have known better or at least should have had a well informed view of what was going on, reacted in a way that could have been highly dangerous. It was not their fault nor ours,
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but the fault of the authorities who were not in a position to inform and to train or, in the words of the amendment, to ''educate and promote''. I wonder where the HPA would stand on that.
To digress for a moment, I return to the Civil Contingencies Bill. During our consideration of that Bill, we covered a very similar issue.
The Chairman: Order. I would appreciate it if Members could cease conversations in Committee.
Patrick Mercer: During our consideration of the Civil Contingencies Bill, which related strictly to terrorism rather than to the health aspects of terrorism, we asked how the Government intended to warn people about—or how they intended to ''educate and promote''—the threat that was present then. In that broader debate, the Government were quite clear that the public did not need education or promotion to be put their way. Despite that, however, it was fascinating to see immediately after the Madrid incident that the British Transport police and the Metropolitan police started a campaign of public information about the terrorist-type weapons that might be used.
Without such an amendment, I wonder how the HPA intends to get its message across. I believe that knowledge will dispel fear. Perhaps the effects of these horrific weapons will be better controlled and the effects mitigated if our population is told what the threat is and how to deal with it. The Government need to include such an amendment to achieve that.
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