The Minister for Care (Helen Whately)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered Dementia Action Week.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) on securing this debate to mark Dementia Action Week. I pay particular tribute to her work as co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on dementia, and to the charities that she and I both work with, including the Alzheimer’s Society.
I know how hard the last 12 months have been for those living with dementia and their families. Living with dementia is hard in normal times, but harder still during a pandemic. It has been an incredibly difficult year. I know that, and I have seen that. There are more than 850,000 people living with dementia and around 670,000 carers looking after them. I thank everyone who is caring for someone with dementia.
While many thousands of people have dementia, we must not, and I do not, see it as an inevitable part of ageing. Although one in six of those over 80 have dementia, five in six do not. Around a third of dementia cases are estimated to be preventable. I am ambitious—ambitious about preventing dementia, ambitious about developing treatments, and ambitious about one day developing a cure. However, first I will update the House on what we have been doing under the umbrella of the challenge on dementia 2020 and in response to the pandemic.
Last year, we assessed delivery of the 2020 challenge, which showed that we now have more than 3 million dementia friends, thanks to the Alzheimer’s Society. We have 437 areas across England and Wales signed up as dementia-friendly communities. We have 137 trusts signed up to the dementia-friendly hospital charter and, thanks to Skills for Care and Health Education England, more than a million care workers and another million NHS workers have received dementia awareness training. Added to that, our commitment to spend £300 million on dementia research over five years was delivered a year early, with £344 million spent over four years.
Timely diagnosis of dementia is really important to help people to understand what is going on, find out what support is available and get advice on what happens next. Since 2016, we have consistently met the challenge on dementia target of two thirds of people living with dementia receiving a formal diagnosis. However, at the start of the pandemic many memory assessment services had to close, and the dementia diagnosis rate has dropped below the national ambition for the first time since 2016.
While we have supported remote or virtual memory assessment services, I recognise that that is not for everyone. I want to see in-person services fully functional as soon as possible, because a diagnosis can make such a difference, allowing people to access the support that they need.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
The charity Music for Dementia says that those who have started to sing or listen to music on a daily basis have
“more than doubled their quality of life…whilst halving their depressive symptoms.”
Could that charity be introduced to the Government’s strategy?
Helen Whately
The hon. Member makes a really important point: music is one of the things that is known to really help people who are living with dementia. It helps to improve the quality of their lives, and it has been one of things that has been hard to access during the pandemic. I am determined that we see that kind of support restarted, and develop further support along those lines in the months and years ahead.
We have allocated £17 million of funding to NHS England to get the diagnosis rate that I was talking about back up to where it should be, to support the needs of those waiting for a diagnosis and to help those who have been unable to access support due to the pandemic. Everyone with dementia should receive meaningful personalised care, from diagnosis to end of life, to help them to live with the condition and to live the fullest possible life for as long as possible.
It is imperative that we support those—often husbands, wives, partners, sons and daughters—who care for loved ones with dementia. They take on a huge burden of care, both practically and emotionally. Since the Care Act 2014, every carer for someone with dementia should have their needs assessed by their local authority and should then receive the support that they need, whether that is support with caring or respite, time out for themselves or sometimes help with extra costs. That is crucial, not only because carers are so important to the person with dementia they care for, but because they need to have a life alongside caring.
Throughout the past year, we have worked with the Alzheimer’s Society, Age UK, Carers UK, other charities, care providers, local authorities and the NHS to work out how best to support people with dementia and their carers during the pandemic and put that support in place. We have provided more than £500,000 in funding to the Alzheimer’s Society for its Dementia Connect programme, £500,000 to the Carers Trust for its support to unpaid carers, £122,000 to Carers UK to extend its helpline opening hours and £480,000 to the Race Equality Foundation.
We have provided free personal protective equipment for carers where they live separately from the people they care for, in line with clinical advice. We have given carers priority to vaccines in line with Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation prioritisation, considered them time and again in guidance, worked to better identify them and supported local authorities in the restoration of day and respite services, including with nearly £12 million in funding from the infection control fund.
As we come out of the pandemic, we want not only to ensure that we restore and improve early diagnosis and support for people living with dementia and their carers, but to go further: to prevent people from getting dementia in the first place, support research to develop effective treatments and, ultimately, find a cure. The National Institute for Health Research is right now supporting several studies on dementia.
The 2019 Conservative party manifesto committed to doubling funding for dementia research and delivering a moonshot of ambitious goals. The moonshot will expand the UK’s internationally leading research effort to understand the mechanisms underlying the development and progression of dementia, develop new therapies and help to prevent the condition. We are working right now on developing a new dementia strategy to boost dementia awareness, diagnosis, care, support and research in England. As everyone knows, we are committed to wider reform of social care; we will bring forward proposals for that later this year.
We want a society where the public think and feel differently about dementia—where there is less fear, stigma and discrimination, and more understanding. We want to reduce the number of preventable cases of dementia. We are determined to support those who are living with dementia to live the fullest possible life for as long as possible, and to support those who care for them. We will lead the way in dementia research and innovation to find effective treatments and, ultimately, a cure.
The Minister for Care (Helen Whately)
I thank all Members who have spoken in the debate, and spoken so powerfully, time and again drawing on their personal experience of dementia in their family. That is a sign not only of the prevalence of dementia, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) pointed out, of how much the stigma of dementia is being overcome.
My hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Holly Mumby-Croft) spoke about her family experience, but also about the importance of listening to family and the challenges of navigating the system and the administration involved for a family coming to terms with a diagnosis, who have to go through so many processes.
My hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Dr Davies) spoke about the importance of diagnosis with respect to not only the support that people need, but providing a cohort for trials and for research. He drew on his clinical experience, as well as his personal experience, and rightly mentioned the importance of the prevention of dementia and the role of diet and exercise in that.
My hon. Friend the Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie) spoke about how dementia affects the whole family. Very movingly, he spoke of how it affected him when his grandmother lost her power to speak, and of how he used to pray for her to return to being the person she once was.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (Matt Vickers) spoke about how many of those who care for someone with dementia may be frail themselves or may be holding down a job. He also spoke about Teesside Dementia Link Services and the huge difference that makes for those with dementia and their carers.
My hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Jacob Young) spoke about his grandads’ very different experiences with dementia, and about the importance of treating those who suffer with dementia with the dignity that they deserve.
My hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Robbie Moore) spoke about Dementia Friendly Keighley, which so effectively brings people together and provides support for patients with dementia and for carers. He particularly mentioned Barbara Wood, who he said was symbolic of the efforts of the group.
My hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Paul Bristow) spoke about how his grandma suffered from Alzheimer’s and referred to his experience as a result of his father running a care home. He spoke about our opportunity to take the same attitude to curing dementia as to the covid vaccination. He is absolutely right: this is a moment in time. We can look at how we have pulled together as a country and how the public and private sectors, scientists, healthcare specialists and others have come together to develop a vaccination for covid; it was forecast at the outset that that might take five or six years, yet here we are with so many millions of people already vaccinated. He also spoke about the antipsychotic medication of those with dementia during the pandemic. As he said—he has contacted me about this—we are working with the NHS to keep a very close eye on the situation.
My hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) talked about the importance of reform, including the reform of funding so that people do not have to sell their homes to pay for care. As I have said, we are absolutely determined to bring forward the reforms of social care that we have committed to bringing forward this year.
I want to touch on some of the comments by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall). She spoke very movingly in her winding-up speech and made important points about social care reform. She said that it is not just about reform for those who are receiving care right now—our mums and dads, for instance, or our grans and grandads. Many of us will also need care, and so will our children and grandchildren as people live longer. We need a system for ourselves and all those we love that we can be confident provides the care that we want and need.
In her opening speech, when the hon. Lady spoke about the response to the pandemic, she clearly did not hold back in what she said, which may be a sign that she shares my sorrow about the many lives lost to covid. She knows how hard this Government have worked to protect and support people who receive social care, and she knows how hard it has been for care homes in England, but also in Wales, where there is a Labour Government, in Scotland under the SNP Administration, and in many countries around the world.
In a pandemic it is impossible to get everything right, but we have provided unprecedented support to social care and care homes over the past year. Once again, I thank all those who have been involved, including the Department of Health and Social Care team, Public Health England, Skills for Care, the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, the Local Government Association, local authorities, organisations that we have worked with, such as the National Care Forum, the National Care Association, the United Kingdom Homecare Association, Care UK, Age UK and Carers UK—I could go on, because there have been many of them. I also thank the care providers, the care users and the care workers themselves—the care workforce, who have been on the frontline and have done so much to look after those they care for, through such difficult times.
This is a moment in time, not only for social care reform but for dementia. Yes, we must restore the diagnosis rates and go further. We must make sure that the support is there for individuals with dementia and their carers. We must do more on prevention, because it is estimated that a third of dementia cases are preventable. The Government must, and will, follow through on our commitment to research effective treatments for dementia and find—sooner rather than later—a cure.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered Dementia Action Week.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I will suspend the House for a brief moment for the sanitisation of both Dispatch Box covers and the safe exit and arrival of the main players.