The Bishop of St Albans asked a question on the efficacy of faith networks to communicate vaccine availability on 11th February 2021:
The Lord Bishop of St Albans: I too add my congratulations to Her Majesty’s Government on an extraordinarily rollout of the vaccines. I pay tribute to all those involved, not least one group not often mentioned —the practice managers, who often work through the night. Can the Minister comment on the community champions scheme? Faith leaders across Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, where I live, have been waiting to use our huge, extensive network of people on the ground to communicate with hard-to-reach groups, such as ethnic minorities and so on. Only now are we being brought into that opportunity. Will the Government commit to working with us, since we are keen to use all our resources to help get those messages out to those hard-to-reach groups?
Lord Bethell (Con, DHSC): I am enormously grateful to the right reverend Prelate for mentioning practice managers. Managers in the NHS are sometimes given a bit of a hard time and are too often overlooked. But, my goodness, if the vaccine deployment has been a success and been run smoothly—and if the constant reports I get of two-minute turnarounds, accurate invitations and appointments made briskly and accurately are correct—it is because of those managers. The NHS practice managers are running a tight ship and delivering huge value for the NHS. They are too often overlooked but, boy oh boy, have they delivered on this occasion.
The right reverend Prelate is entirely right to raise the issue of not only community champions but volunteering overall. It has been one of the toughest aspects of our response to Covid to make use of the hundreds of thousands of people who have stepped forward in various schemes to help with it. There are returning practitioners from healthcare; there are community champions, which he rightly described, along with the faith groups; there is also St John Ambulance and the vaccinating volunteers. Quite often, hygiene protocols and the necessity to put in place measures to avoid transmission of the disease have meant that it has been difficult to mobilise the army of volunteers. One thing that we should look back at, when we do our post-mortem, is how we as a country can deploy civic society more effectively.
Regarding the faith groups the right reverend Prelate specifically mentioned, I pay tribute to their role in the vaccine deployment. The sight of vaccines being given out in synagogues, mosques, gurdwaras and temples up and down the country surely has a huge part to play in their successful deployment among many difficult-to-reach groups.
The Church of England in Parliament 
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