16:02 Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)

I say this carefully, and I have stressed it from the beginning. We have a peacetime Government construct, with a Cabinet system that works well and is tried and tested, but we should have moved to a war footing. No. 10 is overwhelmed. There is not the bandwidth to cope with everything that is going on. There is covid-19, the economic intervention, Brexit, the integrated review, preparing for COP26 and then the G7 presidency as well. The people dealing with that are friends of mine, but I am afraid they are not trained in crisis management, strategic planning or emergency response. All the more reason why this place needs to do its job. Let me be the first to say—I say this cautiously—that we need to reconsider the five-day opening up over Christmas if we want to take advantage of the hard-fought gains that we have developed over the year.

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