Glenrothes and Central Fife MP Peter Grant has welcomed the Scottish Government’s discussion paper setting out the conditions that need to be met before the coronavirus lock down can be eased.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon launched the document COVID-19: A Framework for Decision Makers, which sets out the current position of lock down and what must be considered before measures are eased.
The paper looks at how the pandemic has impacted on our daily lives and suggests that measures such as social distancing could be with us for some time.
Mr Grant said that while the lock down is in itself creating serious problems for many people, he welcomed the First Minister’s reiteration that saving lives has to be the priority.
He said, “We’re beginning to see the first tentative signs that the restrictions are working and that the spread of the disease is being slowed down. It would be very tempting to move too quickly to lift the restrictions and hope for the best. This could be disastrous. Through time and with the right political decisions we can fix the damage to our economy. We can’t bring back people who lose their lives.”
Mr Grant has said that while there is no indication as to when things might start to return to normal, it was right that people should start to think about what “normal” should mean in the future.
He said, “We’ve all been forced to make big changes to how we live our lives and we should maybe stop and think about whether some of those changes have delivered benefits and should become permanent. The obvious one is the amount of home working people are doing. When the crisis is over do we need to go back to seeing tens of thousands of Fifers commuting into Edinburgh every day, or can employers make changes to allow their employees to work from home more often? We’ve seen a huge drop in the number of car journeys, so perhaps we should think about whether all those journeys we used to do were really necessary?
“So while we all still need to focus on sticking to the lock down restrictions while waiting to return to normal, I’m keen that people should also use this time to ask ourselves what parts of “normal” we actually want to return to.”