Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth Speaks to T&G on Vaccine Passports and More

Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth has told Times Radio he welcomes the decision to scrap the introduction of vaccine passports in England.

But speaking to Tom Newton Dunn and Jack Blanchard on T&G on Sunday, he said it's vital for the NHS to be prepared for what may be "the worst winter in living memory":

We've always been sceptical about the vaccine passport and we've said that you shouldn't need to show a vaccine passport to get into H&M or Next at the Highcross Centre in Leicester, for example. So we've always been sceptical but we know that winter is going to be difficult. The NHS is fearing the worst winter in living memory. We know we're going to have more flu, more respiratory problems, norovirus. So we need to prepare our NHS for winter. The way you do that is by driving up vaccination in those pockets of the country where the vaccination levels are still not as high as possible. If we get the green light for vaccinating adolescents and doing booster jabs we need to roll that out as quickly as possible.

And whilst calling the tax rise to pay for social care and help fund the NHS unfair he wouldn't commit to reversing the rise:

You don't get shadow health secretaries making budget announcements on Sunday radio shows but what we have said is that when you look at the long term trends, when we know more people will have dementia and need care over the next 10 years, when you know over the next 50 years we're going to have 500-thousand more diagnoses of cancer then you clearly need a long-term plan for health and social care to raise money for care. That has to be done in a fair way, which is why we have said that we shouldn't be clobbering the same people again, who are going to be clobbered with council tax rises, clobbered with the freeze in the personal allowance. Some of them are going to be clobbered because they are going to lose 20 pounds a week from the Universal Credit. We should be looking at a fairer way to fund these policies by asking those with broad shoulders to pay more, so we would have a fairer, taxation system instead.

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