Police should have powers to make people wear face masks or force exemption evidence, Yorkshire MP claims

A Yorkshire MP has urged the Government to give the police more powers to enforce coronavirus regulations as he revealed he had confronted youths in a shopping centre for not wearing masks.

Speaking in the debate on the new lockdown in the Commons this afternoon, Labour MP for Sheffield South East Clive Betts raised a number of points as MPs were expected to pass the legislation required for the third national lockdown.

But he said: “Can we stop passing regulations that can’t be enforced?”

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Giving the example of wearing face masks, which he said was “very important”, he said: “I met a group of young people, saw them in Meadowhall shopping centre the other day, walking along saying ‘oh we’ll just tell them we’ve got asthma if anyone asks us’.

Sheffield South East Labour MP Clive Betts. Photo: JPI MediaSheffield South East Labour MP Clive Betts. Photo: JPI Media
Sheffield South East Labour MP Clive Betts. Photo: JPI Media

“We need the police to have the powers to make people wear a face mask and be required to produce evidence of an exemption if they have one.”

Giving another example he said: “Recently Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire were in Tier 4, Sheffield was in Tier 3, people were driving over the border to Meadowhall and Drakehouse [retail park] to do their shopping. The police had no powers under the rules to enforce the requirement that people shouldn’t travel over the border for those purposes.”

Mr Betts’ intervention came after Health Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs he does not expect a full national lockdown to be in place until March 31, although he failed to guarantee MPs the final say.

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Mr Hancock faced pleas from Conservative backbenchers to outline the road map to ease restrictions across England, as he moved regulations which would allow lockdown to run for three months.

Conservative Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the party’s backbench 1922 Committee, urged Mr Hancock to promise votes in the Commons at the end of January and end of February to allow MPs to decide if the “extreme controls” remain in place.

While Conservative former minister Mark Harper, chairman of the Covid Recovery Group of lockdown sceptics, asked about what happens when most of those who are vulnerable have been vaccinated.

Mr Hancock replied: “We have to see the impact of that vaccination on the reduction in the number of deaths, which I very much hope that we will see at that point, and so that is why we will take this – an evidence-led move down through the tiers, when we’ve broken the link, I hope, between cases and hospitalisations and deaths.

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“We will need to see those numbers of – we will need to see the protection in reality, in lived reality on the ground, but we will watch this like a hawk and my aim is to keep these restrictions in place not a moment longer than they’re necessary.”

Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford Labour MP Yvette Cooper said coronavirus cases across the Wakefield district had risen by more than one third in just one week.

She said: “They’re lower at the moment than in November when Pinderfields Hospital was pushed into crisis, but they’re rising fast and none of us want to go through that crisis again.”

While Barnsley East Labour MP Stephanie Peacock pushed for more Government support, raising the case of one constituent who when asked why he would not isolate said: “If I don’t work, my family don’t eat.”

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People want to do the right thing but simply cannot afford to,” Ms Peacock said. “Proper statutory sick pay would make it much easier for people to take a test and isolate and it is absolutely crucial in stopping the spread of this deadly virus.”