Respiratory Syncytial Virus: Immunisation Programme

Debate between Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top and Lord Evans of Rainow

Thursday 19th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

I am not aware of what the noble Baroness is saying, but I refer back to my earlier answer. This has to be done in an appropriate manner. All due diligence has to be followed, which is why the vaccine is not available for this winter, but we are hopeful that it will be available for winter 2024.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, the Covid pandemic demonstrated clearly that there were differential impacts on different ethnic communities. We know now that black and ethnic-minority communities in this country suffered much more and that there are particular long-term conditions that ethnic-minority community people suffer more acutely from than the white population do. One issue is that insufficient numbers of black and ethnic-minority people are involved in the trialling and testing of vaccines, so the vaccines are frequently not effective in certain of those populations. What are the Government going to do about this?

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness. She makes a very good point, and I will feed that specific question back to the department. One thing that we were aware of was that certain communities were not as keen as others to take up the immunisation programme, and a lot of work has been done on that.

Vulnerable Teenagers

Debate between Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top and Lord Evans of Rainow

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry, the noble Baroness was not here at the beginning of the debate, so it is not appropriate for her to intervene. She can certainly write to the Minister, who will respond in writing. Thank you.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to thank everyone for their contribution today. I am sort of feeling guilty, because I somehow manage to get a slot each time at the end of the business of the week, and people are not able to get back to where they want to get back to—so I apologise for that. I think it has been a really interesting debate. My noble friend Lord McConnell reminded us that this has been going on a long time. I was working with adolescents well over 50 years ago, and working professionally with them for a significant amount of time, too. But we are in different times, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, acknowledged. There are specific things going on now which I never had to deal with when I was doing detached youth work, or even before then working as a social worker.

This commission was set up at the end of Covid. We know that many children had been very lonely and stuck in their rooms on social media, which was corrosive and damaging, and through which predators were able to reach out to them. Some of them did not have any opportunity to engage in things such as the sports the noble Lord, Lord Addington, talked about. For those nobody had noticed as a potential problem, they and their families were suddenly facing problems they had never imagined. We still do not know what has happened to thousands of the children who went missing because they were not in school or accounted for anywhere. When I was working, in those days, we did not have to worry about what they were seeing and what was being organised on social media.

Yes, there are problems that adolescents have always faced. My social work tutor used to say to me that the problem was that I had a very peaceful and happy adolescence, and maybe it would have been better if I had had a few more of the problems of the young people I was trying to work with. I was always quite grateful that I had not. We know that young people have always faced problems, but at the moment there are problems we really do not know how properly to tackle. Not being at school and not getting the resilience support and training—which, for me, is how we end up with real losses in terms of mental health—they do not know where to go or who to get it from. When I was starting, there were lots of people around who could be their youth worker, their mentor or their friend, but that has been hollowed out.

I know that this Minister thinks about and works on these things very carefully. The reality is that we all need to do that across the board and look for ways we can identify what is going on in our communities. We never thought there would be this sort of problem in many communities, and there is. As the report says, very often these young people are hidden in plain sight, and these problems are there. We have a responsibility not to give up on these kids and to make sure they have a future, and that their future family have a future in which the care and the relationship is there for as long as it takes.