Mental Health Services

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

I recognise the insight of my noble friend Lady Newlove, who speaks from experience of these matters. I reassure her that the funding in place from the long-term plan for mental health has been substantial and will support a dramatic change in mental health services. We will be supporting mental health workers who, as my noble friend says, have delivered under difficult circumstances. Their creativity is demonstrated by the introduction of video and other technical facilities to keep mental health services going during the lockdown. I pay tribute to their inventiveness and creativity at this time.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, is data on mental health support, A&E presentations, referrals to community mental health services, crisis resolution callouts and detentions under the Mental Health Act being collected during this period—yes or no?

[Lord Bethell]

My Lords, I understand that it is a firm “yes”, but I will check that answer and revert to the noble Baroness if there is any different information.

Draft Human Tissue (Permitted Material: Exceptions) (England) Regulations 2020

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, the United Kingdom has been a world leader in transplant research and reconstructive surgery since the 1940s, and we continue to be the home to world-leading developments in bioscience. Moreover, we have been the outstanding leader in the ethical regulation of cutting-edge medicine and medical technology, due in no small part to the work of your Lordships’ House and the work of Baroness Warnock.

What we have today is a public policy settlement under which research scientists and medical practitioners develop pioneering research. That takes place within a framework of legal principles which is subject to parliamentary scrutiny and is regularly updated as the science advances. I pay tribute to the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, for setting up the Organ Donation Taskforce, which in 2008 published the Organs for Transplants report. The report provided a series of recommendations to help us to increase our organ donor rate by 2013. That 2008 strategy did indeed manage to increase the rate of donations by 50% from deceased donors and by 30% from living donors. However, that is still not enough; we need more organs, because people are dying. In 2013, NHS Blood and Transplant published its report, Taking Organ Transplantation to 2020, which set out a more detailed plan.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and others who worked very hard to secure the Organ Donation (Deemed Consent) Act 2019, which amended the practice of the 2004 Act but not its principles by moving to an opt-out principle for routine donations. That was necessary, because many of the most suitable organ donors are people who have been involved in accidents or who have sudden life-threatening illnesses and have not given prior consent. At the point of such an emergency, they and their families are unable to give the consent that they may have wanted to do.

These are decisions that ideally are taken in advance after long and detailed consideration, but which often arise in an emergency medicine setting. I suggest to noble Lords that they go back and look at the contribution made in another debate by the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, who comes from a family of medics. All her family members had discussed the matter and decided that they were all in favour of organ donation. However, when her daughter died in a very tragic accident, not only did nobody raise the matter with them, but they did not think about it either. That has always been a matter of regret to her.

The policy intent has always been to exclude novel and rare transplants, including situations in which cells are retrieved from organs that could be used to create an advanced therapeutic medicinal product, as other noble Lords have said. Although some people who wish to do so can leave their bodies to medical research, that research is regulated separately by the Human Tissue Authority, so there really should be no confusion between medical research and transplantation. However, the Minister stated that if a transplant that is currently considered to be rare or novel were to become common, the process of amending the law would be the one that we are following now: discussion, consultation and proposals brought forward by law. My question is this: what would be the trigger for proposing such a change in the law? As other noble Lords have said, looking back over the past 17 years, should we not be looking at a periodic review of transplant law—say, every five to seven years?

I have spoken about black and minority-ethnic communities in your Lordships’ House before. In 2003 my friends Joe and Grace Desa lost their 13 year-old only child Daryl to a brain haemorrhage. Grace and Joe showed remarkable dignity during that unimaginable tragedy. One of the things that comforted them was that many people benefited from organs and tissues donated by Daryl. In 2018, when we looked at the figures again, we saw that people from black and minority communities were still waiting longer than others and that there was comparatively low organ donation from people from the same ethnic groups. It is really important that we make these groups the focus of particular awareness campaigns. I know that my friends Joe and Grace took part in them to try to increase donations from people from south Asian communities.

I welcome the emphasis in this new code of practice on taking into account family and religious beliefs, but I go back to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. Is the intention of the code of practice to ensure that a family’s religious belief can take precedence, but not where an individual who has mental capacity has made a deliberate decision that they wish to be a donor? Can the Minister clarify that point? What good practice guides will be given to make sure that specialist nurses who work in organ donation work to clear guidance?

I too hope that the Government set up an independent inquiry into the effects of Covid on black and minority-ethnic populations. I hope that it will not just be about the emergency process that we have been under for the last two months but will look over the longer term at what Covid has done to affect health inequalities in Britain, including transplants.

My final point has not been mentioned by other speakers in this debate. The Human Tissue Authority operates under the EU organ donation directive and the EU tissues and cells directive. If there is no deal, the EU organ donation and tissues and cells directives would no longer apply in the UK. The Government have previously said that in the event of no deal, organisations and authorities in the United Kingdom will continue to work to the high practice standards they do now, but if we are no longer under those same directives as the rest of Europe, people in this country who need organ donations will no longer be treated on the same basis as those in other European countries. The UK would be treated as a third country. Will the Government confirm that if there is a no-deal Brexit, people requiring tissues and transplants of organs from other countries will be at a disadvantage? Will they issue updated guidance on this? The guidance they produced back in 2018 no longer stands.

We all want better and quicker availability of life-saving transplants for people who need them. We broadly support these regulations, and I hope the Government will make sure that in these difficult times there are the resources to make them happen in practice.

Covid-19: Testing

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

The noble Lord is entirely right. Speed is essential and the South Korea example is a good one. More than half of our tests are turned around within 24 hours. I pay tribute to the track and trace team, who handled an extremely complex and difficult laboratory failure last weekend and used innovation to turn around 50,000 tests, the results of which were reliably given to people. However, we will continue to work on shortening the result times and getting the information back speedily so that isolation can happen in a thorough way.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

What is the average time between a swab being taken and a patient getting the result, and what is the average time for that test result to show up in national tracking data?

[Lord Bethell]

The average times are not at my disposal, but I reassure the noble Baroness that more than half the results are turned around within 24 hours. Our target time is currently 48 hours and the vast majority of tests are done within that time. As the noble Lord, Lord Wood, rightly said, speed is of the essence, and we are working hard to compress those times.

Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Tuesday 12th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, in the Covid emergency legislation and these regulations, the Government have taken unto themselves enormous powers which remove from citizens many basic legal rights. Having done so, the Government should be under an obligation to subject their decision-making to scrutiny which is reasonable and timely. The fact that we are discussing today regulations already implemented in March is yet more evidence that the decisions made unilaterally by the House authorities to restrict House business and the ability of Members to take part are hugely damaging to democracy and preventing transparency.

The Minister, Jo Churchill, introducing the regulations in another place on 9 March, said:

“Tackling covid-19 requires a robust, integrated and proportionate response”.—[Official Report, Commons Delegated Legislation Committee, 9/3/20; col. 1.]


Today it is our duty to test whether the Government have done that so far.

What we have a today is a set of regulations based on assumptions that the greatest threat to public health would arise from individual people ignoring advice to observe lockdown and defying advice on physical distancing. With some exceptions, the public have observed the public health advice pretty well. Where groups of people have not followed advice, local government, particularly mayors, has stepped in to restore compliance.

Ironically, we have seen instead that the biggest threat to life since the pandemic began has been in care homes, where it is said that there have been more than 10,000 deaths. That is not the fault of local government or local resilience hubs, which know and understand the needs of care providers and vulnerable groups in their area; it is a direct consequence of central government’s failure to prioritise testing in care homes and testing of people being discharged from hospitals into care homes. Seven weeks in, local government and care providers are still being sent detailed guidance which is constantly changing, and they have to grapple with three different systems for ordering PPE, none of which works properly. Unsurprisingly, the death rate among staff in care homes is much greater than that in hospitals.

In this morning’s Question about care homes, the Minister said:

“I reassure the House that deaths in care homes have always been part of the official figures.”


I ask him to write to me setting out the exact basis for his statement, because the Government’s advice of 28 February on Covid in care homes stated that it was very unlikely that people receiving care in a care home or a care setting would become infected. Can he explain why in daily press conferences in March and April Ministers specifically used the number of deaths from Covid in hospitals? Has he listened to the BBC Radio 4 programme, “More or Less” which has cited frequent use of different statistics at different times by Ministers and government spokespeople in response to questions on these issues?

Since the beginning of the pandemic, decision-making has been based on two assumptions: first, that the main and lasting impact of the virus would be on the NHS and, secondly, that central government, and not local government, are always best placed to lead every initiative. As some of us have been saying since March, those assumptions may have been temporarily correct for the initial medical emergency, but they are the wrong basis on which to prevent further major outbreaks. The key to managing the virus while a vaccine is developed is to work in partnership with regional and local government, businesses and charities to design, implement and monitor effective public health systems.

The regulations that we are discussing today have been overtaken by events. However, as the country prepares to exit lockdown, it is more necessary than ever that we have regulations which make clear the legal basis on which government decisions and actions have been taken, and which make a distinction between the law and good practice.

Yesterday, the Government released what they called Our Plan to Rebuild, the Covid recovery strategy. It is not a plan; it is a set of assertions and aspirations not particularly well communicated. Page 33 announces 14 supporting programmes. On closer inspection, there are at most 10 programmes, all of them centrally determined. Other Governments within the UK and local government are simply the recipients of more responsibilities. Some of those are extremely complex, such as rebuilding a social care system which is broken, but there is little detail about how it will be funded. What we have is yet another example of central government issuing demands and announcing initiatives, such as the GoodSAM app, when they have not thought through how they will work in practice. It is more like a plan for central government to get the glory while local government gets the blame.

The Government’s mantra is that they are following the science, but the job of government is more than that. It is the job of government to listen to scientific advice, consult relevant authorities and develop clearly understood legislation that will work. The public want to know what they can do safely to expedite the end of lockdown.

Will the Minister assure the House that no new criminal offence for individual citizens will be created as a result of this plan until the law and regulations have been voted upon by both Houses? There is an urgent need for clear legislation regarding key elements of yesterday’s announcements so that public health officials, local authorities, the police, schools, workers, employers and businesses understand their legal obligations and rights. Will the Minister undertake to bring the regulations, with the accompanying evidence base, to the House at the earliest opportunity? Will the Government allow sufficient time and information for Members of the House to understand how those regulations will be implemented?

When the emergency Covid legislation was passed, Ministers stressed that the government powers in that legislation would be turned on and off as necessary rather than being permanent. At that time, we asked for an updated table of measures in force at any one time so that people having to implement the laws knew under which legislation their actions would be authorised. Can the Minister say when that will happen? It is becoming a matter of urgency.

The Government have had unprecedented support from opposition parties and the population of the United Kingdom. For that to continue, they have to provide timely and accurate information that is trusted by those who hear it. I am afraid that this week, that has not been the case. By not doing so the Government have damaged their ability to take the swift action they have said they needed to take all along. The more the Government move into issuing statements based on soundbites rather than scientific evidence, the more difficult it becomes for politicians on all sides to support them in what they do. I hope that the Minister will take lessons from these regulations and that when the Government bring forward the next lot, they will have listened to the powerful messages given to them from right across the House this afternoon.

Covid-19: Personal Protective Equipment

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

I completely agree. I utterly reject the suggestion that British manufacturers are incapable in this area. I share with my noble friend, though, that this is a low-margin, high-volume game, and those low-margin, high-volume manufacturers are largely found in countries such as China, Turkey and Myanmar. That does not mean that we cannot do local manufacture. We have had 25,000 offers of support from businesses as of yesterday. We are processing those responses, and 175 are through to an advanced round. We have already had three companies deliver PPE goods to the NHS to help our hard-working NHS and care workers.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

Has the Department of Health and Social Care raised with the Treasury the issue of care homes having to pay VAT on PPE, which the NHS does not?

[Lord Bethell]

The noble Baroness raises a good point. I do not know the precise answer and would be glad to write to her with a clear answer.

Covid-19: Social Care Services

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wheeler, for this opportunity to hold the Government to account. I return to a point I made during the emergency legislation debate on 26 March on the difference between the NHS and local government. The NHS is a top-down, centrally driven organisation which, remarkably, was able almost overnight to change everything it did and to focus on the medical emergency caused by the pandemic. Local government is much more complicated and fragmented, is dealing with a care system that was already broken, and is having to keep other vital public services going at the same time. Therefore the Government need to treat it differently.

The Government are issuing detailed guidance for social care, but it changes nearly every day. Local government and care providers need clear messages, delivered in good time, and quick responses when things do not work. For example, the testing sites are just not working in the way envisaged. The Government should now start to work with local authorities and local resilience forums to plan and roll out a series of accessible testing sites, so that people can get to them and we can get the testing numbers up.

Some 750,000 people applied to volunteer for the NHS, which has never managed volunteers terribly well. Most of them are not being used. People who signed up to GoodSAM need a clear message that they can and should volunteer via local resilience forums and local authorities. The NHS needs to start telling local authorities how many people in their area are signed up to GoodSAM and who they are, so that they can get on to the job of supporting vulnerable people in the community.

On 18 April, the Secretary of State announced a further £1.6 billion of funding for local government and described the people working in it as the unsung heroes at the forefront of the national effort to beat the virus, but £3.2 billion will not cover the costs which local authorities will have incurred during these four months, nor their loss of income. The pandemic will have a much longer tail for local government than it has done for the NHS. Will the Government now start to plan the transfer of funds and other resources from acute health services to local authorities and communities, which will struggle to deal with the effects of this virus long after the NHS has completed the majority of its work?

Covid-19: Care Home Deaths

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

I echo the noble Baroness’s timely comments on the role of BAME workers, many of whom have provided an amazing service and put themselves in harm’s way to care for those who are vulnerable. The idea that they are being disproportionately hit by this disease is extremely distressing. The numbers are not to hand so I cannot share precise numbers at the moment, but we are looking into this at speed and trying to understand the causes and the impact of this awful phenomenon. I commit to bring those numbers to the House as soon as they are available.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

I have heard about a care home which lost one-third of the residents in one weekend. It is that bad. I am told that the Clipper system for ordering PPE is not working and consequently homes are having to try to source PPE by their own independent means and, unlike the NHS, they have to pay VAT on those expensive items. That will push some organisations that were already fairly vulnerable over the edge and they are going to close, so what are the Government going to do to stop that?

[Lord Bethell]

The noble Baroness is entirely right to raise the question of PPE. Looking into the medium and long term, there is undoubtedly going to be a massive demand for PPE in hospitals, care homes and the wider workplace. That has put a dramatic pressure on global supplies. Britain, like every other country, is queuing for supplies of PPE. The Government are throwing enormous resources at increasing supplies. The Clipper system is one of the essential components of getting supplies into the workplace and I believe that is beginning to kick in and is working well.

Coronavirus Bill

Baroness Barker Excerpts

3rd reading & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 25th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, on behalf of these Benches, I thank the Minister for the way he has conducted the Bill. It has been a perfect exercise in consultation and work across the House. I thank not just the parties but other noble Lords who have taken part in this Bill for co-operating and working together in a way that has allowed us to scrutinise it as best we possibly could. I think we raised every issue that we could during its passage. It is important to have those things on the record because, as we move forward, we will need to know that we have asked those questions, and the Government will need to address them.

I thank my team, particularly my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer, who got drawn into this about a week ago, and my noble friend Lady Wheeler. I also thank the people in the office, who of course do all the work. In our case, that is Rhian Copple, who has done a brilliant job in keeping us informed and on the go.

I thank all my noble friends and noble Lords who are not here, but who gave us their views and have been patient. I know that they would have wanted to be here.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, from these Benches I too thank the Minister, the Bill team and all the civil servants who have worked with them for the collaborative and inclusive way that they have conducted the Bill through this House. I thank Members on other Benches for their immense understanding and patience as at times we have had to rattle through some very difficult issues that normally, in other circumstances, we would not have dealt with in that way.

Coronavirus Bill

Baroness Barker Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard - continued) & 2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 24th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, pay tribute not just to the staff of the NHS, who are doing a truly wonderful job, but to the army of cleaners, drivers and shop assistants who are playing an incredible role in the most difficult of circumstances.

I start by echoing what my noble friend Lord Newby —and, to a certain extent, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton—said about the need for scrutiny and for this House in particular to scrutinise legislation. Speaker after speaker has said that at any other time, this legislation would simply not pass.

It is extremely important that when the Government have to take extreme measures—and they do—they do so in an open way and that there is detailed discussion involving people who themselves have the relevant experience and information, or who have access to outside expertise, as do we in this House. That way, we will go beyond the level of a television interview. We need to deal with matters in great detail and be part of the information and education programme that will be necessary throughout all this, to ensure public support for and recognition of the need for extreme legislation.

Secondly, we must recognise that the Bill comes before us at a moment when we do not have large-scale testing programmes or vaccination, and that that has a direct effect on everything in it. If we have both in a few months—as I very much hope we will—life will be very different, and it will be important then to revisit some of the assumptions built into the Bill.

I want to make a point that may seem obvious, but nobody has yet said it today. When we talk about the NHS and local government, we are talking about completely different systems. The NHS is a centralised system which is largely run on a not particularly democratic basis; it is run more on the basis of expertise. It is a command-and-control system that enjoys a political standing in this country which practically no other body does. Local government is different. It is based on an open democratic procedure, with elected officials, and it does not, by and large, enjoy the same standing. Therefore, local government is, quite naturally, often very defensive and cautious, and for good reason—it gets taken to town by the Daily Mail quite frequently. We are suddenly expecting those two systems to function together in the same way. I go back to the point that my noble friend Lord Scriven made earlier, which may seem terribly technical but is in fact very important. There needs to be a general power of direction for local government, so that it can take the decisions that will have a bearing on the health and social care outcomes of its local population.

It is really interesting to see what, even in an emergency situation, government considers to be important and not important. Three things in the Bill are problematic. The first is the removal of the duty on local authorities to provide adult social care. Everybody understands that local government will go through the most massive transformation; it will never be the same again. It will probably have to reorientate everything towards this for years to come, and certainly for a year. However, to remove that duty completely is wrong, because from it flows not just the way in which vulnerable people are dealt with now, during the emergency, but the recovery process for local services and so on. It would be preferable if local government retained its relevant social care duties, but that their application was amended so that it was required to implement them only so far as is reasonably practical. As the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, said, domiciliary care is under immense strain. If local authorities do not make those investments now because they think they will not have the money, the impact on the NHS in a few months’ time will be even greater.

When I talk to local government colleagues, as I am sure we all do, they say that one of the big issues worrying them is indemnity for volunteering. The Bill refers to volunteering for a local authority only in relation to health and social care. It may well be that, just to fulfil the health and social care duties, local authorities will have to rely on volunteers to do all manner of other things, such as carrying out some of their environmental responsibilities. They are really bothered, because local authorities have traditionally spent an awful lot of staff time doing DBS checks because of the nature of what they do. We need not only a fast-track system—for example, not allowing somebody who has ever been barred to be checked—but a much faster system. We should also have an indemnity for a local authority that has to reconfigure very quickly a number of its central functions.

The other point that it is important to make at this stage is that, more so than the NHS, local authorities have had whole ranks of staff taken out. They have a few central managers, and front-line staff. They do not have very much; in fact, unlike in the NHS, most of their services are not provided in-house, so they do not have the ability to command or summon up capacity in the same way the NHS does.

We are expecting that charities will step into that breach, but that sector, as people heard during the debate on the Question answered by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, this afternoon, is on a cliff edge. Charities do not run with great margins or large amounts of reserves, and they cannot quickly scale up on nothing. You cannot have an entirely voluntary workforce; volunteers need to be managed, which is a skill in itself. Can the Minister talk about the need for there to be grant funds—some via the NHS, some via local authorities, and some direct to charities—in order to build up that capacity?

The Government have taken drastic action in respect of the Mental Health Act. Mental health tribunals are now to be a single judge on a phone—if we are talking in that way, we ought to require them at least to be videophones—and the three-month treatment rule will be changed. I, along with organisations like Mind and Rethink Mental Illness, accept that in a time of great stress on the NHS we cannot run the system as we do now. However, there are misgivings about people being sectioned under Sections 2 and 3 of the Mental Health Act. Having taken away some very fundamental safeguards with regard to people being deprived of liberty and incarcerated, will the Government reconsider the length of time before which somebody can have their case reviewed and make it much quicker, so that anybody who has been detained by one doctor instead of two will automatically go to the front of the queue for a swift review?

Having said that, one thing that has caused much remark in the social care sector is that there is no mention at all here of the mental capacity legislation. There are two problems with that. First, in emergency medicine there is still a requirement to establish that somebody has mental capacity and to ascertain their wishes. I understand that, at a time like this, an A&E department will not be able to go through such a comparatively bureaucratic process, and that it is possible to do a simplified version of that just for these purposes.

The other, bigger, problem is that we will have lots and lots of very vulnerable people in care homes without access to any sort of representation, or even assessment. So I say to the Minister, and this is a very difficult admission, that the Government may wish to take out some of the bureaucracy and form-filling that was in the Mental Capacity (Amendment) Act, which some of your Lordships worked on. We should be requiring people who run homes to enable relatives at the very least to have some kind of contact—remote contact, telephone contact, or something like that—if it is not possible to go in and visit. To ignore this completely sends out a really bad message to people.

I fully understand the Government seeing the need to free up medical resources by going down to only one doctor. I imagine that across the NHS people are looking at ways to free up time for medical staff, cut down visits and make sure that people are not going on public transport unnecessarily. As the Minister knows, I am concerned about women’s access to early medical abortions. We already have an agreement in England, Wales and Scotland that women can take at home the second of the two pills that they need, provided that they have ongoing support and access by phone to a medical practitioner. I ask the Minister to consider whether women can have a telemedecine interview with the staff of a clinic. They could then very quickly get the medicines that they need and take them safely at home. I am not asking for any other change to the grounds on which that might be done. It is simply an administrative procedure, but it would make an enormous difference to the ability of women, most of them young, to receive that healthcare.

On the next point, I declare an interest: my brother is shortly to retire as a police officer—this week, I think—having served in the Greater Manchester Police for over 30 years. All the provisions in the Bill are about health and social care workers, particularly health workers, returning. All the issues about their pensions apply to other people in public service. I rather suspect that there may come a time when we need police officers who are not long retired to come back, not least because they are first responders, they have some medical training, and all of that. I do not think anyone else has mentioned this issue. It is not a personal plea on behalf of my family in any way at all; it is a genuine point.

On the provisions to review this legislation, it seems wrong that the Government are going to say that the Bill cannot be amended in future. That is a mistake, a point that was made by David Davis in the Commons. As I said, the Bill has been made now on existing knowledge, but the position may well be very different in three or six months’ time. Inevitably, some of the proposals that the Government have put in the Bill will turn out to have been necessary, but some will not. It would be in the Government’s best interests to retain the flexibility for this Bill to be amended in the light of experience. I hope I have demonstrated, as other noble Lords have, that we say this in the spirit of seeking to be helpful to the Government, not to attack them or to try to achieve any kind of political advantage, and I hope the Minister and his colleagues will reconsider.

The Government have said that there are various powers in the Bill and they will be switched on and off as necessary. That is potentially very confusing. Have the Government thought about having a website, a place to which anyone who has to refer to the Bill can go, with a rolling update on which provisions of the Bill were active and which were not? I can see a number of people who will have to try to make this legislation work having problems doing so.

That said, sadly the Bill is very necessary. We will work hard, and although we will, I hope, be back here, we will work smart and in different ways to provide ongoing scrutiny and to help the Government, and indeed the country, to get through these extraordinarily difficult times.

Covid-19: Critical Care Capacity

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Monday 23rd March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

My Lords, the decision by Northwick Park was entirely welcome, because we welcome the realism and practicality on the part of the management in seeking help when it is needed. We are moving at pace to address the issues around PPE, and I can confirm that there is a massive amount going into the system as we speak. We currently have 3,700 critical care beds; total usage is currently 2,428, of which 237 are Covid-19 related; and our ambition is to increase this dramatically to perhaps 30,000 in time for the crisis arriving in full.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, to increase the number of freelance locums working in the health system, will the Government make specific changes to the NHS Pension Scheme, in particular the death in service benefits, so that we can increase the number of qualified staff? Can the Minister also confirm that the Government are making sure that all GPs and pharmacists have sufficient stocks of asthma and COPD medicines to keep people out of hospital?

[Lord Bethell]

My Lords, we are greatly relying on an influx of staff such as freelance locums in order to increase the numbers at the front line in dealing with Covid-19. Arrangements for the pension scheme are included in the Bill that we will bring to the House tomorrow. On supplies to GPs and pharmacies, a huge procurement programme is going on at the moment, and we are taking stocks out of our no-deal preparations in order to ensure that both GPs and pharmacies are well stocked.