Council not seeking extra Government funding for Covid tracking
Staffordshire County Council is not seeking extra funding from the Government for Covid tracking, its leader has said.
Tory leader Alan White said this week the authority was “moving on”, more than two years after Covid-19 hit the nation.
During that time Staffordshire councils have received grant funding worth millions of pounds from the Government to support communities, businesses and services affected by the Covid pandemic.
Councillor White’s comments came at a council scrutiny committee meeting on Tuesday, just days before free lateral flow and PCR tests for the general public came to an end in England. Free tests remain available for some people however, such as health and social care workers and those at higher risk from getting seriously ill if they catch Covid-19
Opposition group leader Councillor Charlotte Atkins said: “I picked up somewhere that the Government money for tracking Covid is shortly to end and some local government organisations have called on the Government to prolong that funding because we are dealing with a very high level of Covid infection at the moment and it’s important that we track it.
“Is the county council involved with that group of councils asking for that Covid grant to be continued?”
Councillor White responded: “We are not part of the group of councils that are appealing to the Government for an extension of the Covid grant for the tracking. Around June 2020 there was a realisation that at some point we were going to have to learn to live with Covid.
“This is part of the process of learning to live with Covid, the suspension of the various impositions that were made by Government. And I support that move in general. We’re not going to continue lobbying for Covid grant money.
“An acquaintance of mine was not feeling particularly well a couple of weeks ago and it was suggested that person did a Covid test. The Covid test came back negative and that person’s colleagues then said ‘you’re OK, you can come into work’. We’ve forgotten that people get ill with other things, so you can feel under the weather because you’ve got a cold or some condition.
“I appreciate, having had quite a long time in conversation with teaching unions, that there is concern about the legacy of Covid for people’s health in the classroom. Also, speaking to NHS leaders across the county, there is some concern about Covid and the effect on their ability to deliver services.
“But there comes a point where we just have to move on and in the case of this we are moving on.
“We still have local outbreak control meetings going on, we’ve still got the architecture in place to allow us to spring back into operation should a variant arise that is going to cause greater mortality. I think we should rest assured that that is the case.”
