Health and Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Cumberlege

Committee stage
Thursday 20th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in the wake of such a hugely powerful group of contributions, mine is very much a supporting role and I will be brief. I can only endorse the contributions to the amendment put by the noble Lord, Lord Low, and what we have heard about why it is so urgent. I will speak to Amendments 112 and 218, to which I have attached my name.

I attached my name to Amendment 112 because, as I was looking through the amendments, it struck me as such a crucial one. It was one that, even at this stage, it was really important to have four signatures on to show broad cross-party support. I am afraid I did not go for Amendment 113 and the rest of the list as well, on the grounds that I thought my name was there enough already, but I think the rest are—if not technically, certainly practically—consequential on Amendment 112.

After I had done that, I received a briefing from the Royal College of General Practitioners, writing also on behalf of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and the Association of Optometrists. I will quote one sentence. The college says:

“We think this is a classic example of where secondary care is at the centre of decision-making, while GPs and primary care are ‘consulted’.”


I think that reflects what the noble Lord, who has a great deal of expertise, said, and this is one amendment that is a total no-brainer.

Moving to Amendment 218, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, outlined the technical background to this and the statistics. The only thing I will add is that many think tanks, including the Health Foundation, the King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust have produced information about how extreme the variation in availability of GP services is and how much effect that has on inequality. As the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said, if the Government have a levelling-up agenda, this also is surely essential.

The reason I was personally attracted to this amendment is that in my days as Green Party leader I travelled around the country a lot and quite often ended up meeting GPs, very often talking about public health issues. I encountered so many desperately hard-working, utterly committed people who were exhausted and felt that they could not retire or cut back their hours. They were wearing themselves to the bone because no one was coming to replace them. I felt that I needed to stand up and speak for those people.

Sometimes people think of this as something that affects rural or remote areas. However, the Norfolk Park health centre in Sheffield nearly closed last year because, after extraordinary efforts, it had been unable to find an extra partner to come in. As the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, knows, this surgery is a fairly modest bus ride from the centre of a major city. It is a purpose-built health centre and only eight years old, but it could not find a GP partner to come in. Eventually, after a great deal of public campaigning, the surgery remained open. That is a demonstration of just how broad this problem is, yet, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said, there are parts of the country—broadly the wealthier parts—that have expansive GP coverage.

Something has to be done, but, like the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, I am not sure that the proposal here is exactly the right way forward. We often say that something needs to be done, but we really need to see something done here. As with so many of the amendments that we discussed this morning, the Bill we have before us is the chance to sort out an urgent problem that must be sorted out.

[Baroness Cumberlege (Con)]

I would like to say a few words and will start by complimenting the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, on all his amendments. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, that these are not contentious. In fact, I do not think it would harm the Government at all to include these amendments in the Bill. They are trying to reinstate the primacy of primary care.

We all know that the glamour is not in primary care but hospitals—you have only to see where politicians like to be photographed; when they produce newsletters, they are always pictured in a hospital with a very sophisticated piece of new machinery that that hospital has bought. It is understandable, because that is so easy to recognise. With a photograph of a GP in a consulting room, you do not know quite where this is, who it is, or what he is doing. One can understand why the media goes for the picture of the hospital, because that is what people recognise.

In this debate and these amendments, we know that the absolute foundation of the NHS is primary care. It is so important and we have to build its primacy. I am a child of primary care; I grew up in it. My father joined the NHS in 1948. He welcomed it and thought it was a marvellous innovation. I had a very happy childhood as Dr Camm’s daughter; I had status in the community. Then I segued into being Mrs Cumberlege and my status plummeted—because I had married a farmer. We celebrated our wedding 61 years ago last week, so have had a diamond wedding. My husband said to me, “Julia, what do you want?”, and I said, “Well, it is a diamond wedding”. He delivered, and I was just delighted.

I will not extol the virtues of my father’s practice, but want to think of the role of the GP in the future and how it has already changed. In our practice, all the GPs are now part-time. They are men and women, and they have other lives to lead. None of them is a full-time GP, and that makes continuity of care quite difficult, because you are never quite sure whether they will be there or not. If you want an urgent appointment, of course you can get one, but it will probably not be with your GP. So that has changed.

There has been another change. My father built a health centre. In fact, it was the county council that built it, but he put all the pressure on to build it, and it was called the “health centre”. Today, it is not called that; it is called the “medical centre”. That is because the doctors are transactional. They just do what is in front of them. Health is not part of their remit, and it is our community that provides the health. It is the church which has the social work and provides a huge amount of the social services for our community. So things really have changed.

A very good paper was produced by the Royal College of General Practitioners, in June of last year, The Power of Relationships: What Is Relationship-based Care and Why Is It Important? It is such a good paper, and I recommend that noble Lords look at it before we have the debate led by noble friend Lady Hodgson on relation- ship care and what it means. The statistics show that people live longer with relationship care. They are happier. We have some really good evidence, but I shall talk about that when we come to that amendment.

I have been working with Sir Cyril Chantler, whom many people in this House will know. We have been talking about community hubs. We think they are a very good way of moving forward and getting together not only doctors but social care, voluntary organisations and all the community facilities to ensure that they are in a hub. We know that, with integrated services and boards and the work that is going on in integrated care, the populations are enormous. We have to break it down a bit to make it more accessible to people. The next time we have a chance to debate this matter, which will be in the context of relationship care, I shall talk about community hubs with populations of about half a million. We are already establishing maternity hubs. I have said to them, “No, not maternity hubs—you’ve got to make them community hubs; you’ve got to bring in all the other resources that are in the community, because they’ve all got something to offer, and we would all benefit.”

I hope that my noble friend the Minister will think seriously and work with his colleagues to try to ensure that these amendments, or very similar ones, are introduced into the Bill, because we need to ensure the primacy of primary care. I am afraid that it is not there now; it is all about hospitals.

Medicines and Medical Devices Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Cumberlege

Report stage & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 14th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Cumberlege (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I warmly thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. His determination is awe-inspiring. I am so pleased that he has not left this issue mouldering on the Committee Floor but has picked it up again.

I understand what the noble Lord said about the Government not being enthusiastic. However, I have known other issues on which the Government have been less than enthusiastic. It is the way in which we put forward persuasive arguments—although setting up this agency will take a lot of work, with a lot of detail to be considered. However, other schemes have been successful. I think about the one in my area—thalidomide. That trust is still running and getting redress for people who need it. So I strongly support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt.

In our review, we tried to achieve a very simple and accessible structure for patients through the proposed redress agency. In an update on our recommendations, the Minister in the House of Commons, Nadine Dorries, said that the Department of Health and Social Care had delivered ex-gratia payments with individual schemes without the need for a redress agency. Indeed it has.

There are four or five schemes for infected blood alone, with eligibility based on whether the patient was a haemophiliac with HIV; a haemophiliac with hepatitis C; a non-haemophiliac with HIV; or a non-haemophiliac with hepatitis C. These different schemes addressed what type of payment should be awarded according to the patient’s need. What we—I am talking about my team and I—were advocating is a single point of contact for avoidably harmed patients. We felt very strongly that they had suffered enough without the necessity of finding out how to access the schemes that are relevant to them. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has said that something is wrong. He is right: it is wrong. This is not the way to help people who have been seriously harmed.

The problem is that, without a redress agency, each ex gratia scheme starts from scratch, which we felt was grossly inefficient. We need a standing administrative structure, funded by contributions from manufacturers and the state—both have a responsibility. At the moment, litigation is the only route, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has said, for injured people to get serious compensation. We know that the process is very damaging to people. They do not like going to court, they do not like having to put forward all the information that is absolutely necessary—and sometimes not so necessary—and they do not like the fact that it is an adversarial system. We felt that the redress agency could remove the need for adversarial litigation that focuses on blaming individual doctors and nurses. The agency would be non-adversarial and would look at the systems failings that led to avoidable harm. This would help develop an open culture in healthcare and facilitate learning—we are not good at that. We know that the same mistakes happen over and again, and we felt that this was another tool to ensure that there would be much less of that.

Gathering information in one place—the agency—would make it so much easier to learn from the data that is collected and would strengthen the ability of the healthcare system to learn from the mistakes made. We have only to look at the cost of litigation of some £83 billion a year—I was very interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said. We know that, often, the majority of those costs go to the law firms, not the individuals who have suffered so grievously. We felt that it would be much better if those huge sums of money, which are much needed by the NHS, should be used with a redress agency, which would have other advantages, as I have just outlined. A stand-alone agency, with a single entry point, would be a much better and more cost-effective way to award redress to those who suffer such avoidable harm—and many of them suffer for decades.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is again my great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. I am pleased to attach my name to Amendment 67 in the name of the noble Lord.

I do not think the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, will mind if I explain why I am coming in on Amendments 67 and 68 in particular. It is because I was in a meeting and asked her what her next priority would be after the broad achievement of the patient safety commissioner. She said that the redress agency was in her mind as the next priority, which is why I have chosen to make it a priority in this Bill, in which I have become considerably more involved than I was originally expecting.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, did, I have to describe the Government’s response to the noble Baroness’s review as very disappointing. Simply very curtly saying:

“The Government and industry have previously established redress schemes without the need for an additional agency”


really does not engage with the arguments put by the noble Baroness in her report or reflect the strong support seen in the British Medical Journal editorial on 20 August, which expressed growing support for the entire review but particularly for the idea of a redress agency.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Cumberlege (Con) [V]]

My Lords, it is interesting that these two amendments reflect each other, but I wanted them to be separate. The debate that we have had on the agency has been really interesting.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has just talked about a further review of the whole system, which probably needs doing, but I am dealing all the time—through emails, letters and phone calls—with people who are suffering now. Rather than wait for a really good scheme, which I hope a redress agency would be, I feel that we should be compassionate and really understand how people are suffering today. They will suffer tomorrow. They have suffered for decades. It is time that they had some redress to help them in the very difficult and complicated lives that they lead, with huge suffering. It is not just the individual: it is the family and it is the children, especially with sodium valproate. One must think of the home. It is therefore important for society that we as a Government understand and are happy to supply some redress now.

I thank my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, who have put their names to this amendment. I look forward very much to hearing what they have to say.

In the two and a half years that we spent travelling the country, listening to tragic stories from women and their families, there was absolutely no doubt in our minds that avoidable harm had been inflicted on those who openly, honestly and with great dignity told us their life stories. I have frequently mentioned what they and their families have told us, but I will spare your Lordships on this occasion because I do not need to reiterate it. Your Lordships know what we found. It is all in our report, First Do No Harm, if you want to dig a bit deeper. Hormone pregnancy tests, sodium valproate and surgical mesh are three interventions that have caused avoidable psychological harm in some patients. It is also clear that surgical mesh has caused significant physical harm and that sodium valproate has caused physical and neurodevelopmental harm.

Having listened to these ruined lives, we believe that the state and manufacturers have an ethical responsibility to provide discretionary payments to those who have experienced avoidable damage in these three interventions. Each of them should have its own scheme and tailored eligibility criteria. When we have, as I hope we will, a redress agency, these schemes can be subsumed into the agency.

I make it clear that these payments are not intended to cover the costs of services that are already available free of charge. I am thinking of healthcare and social security payments, and in some cases education for children. This is rather for other needs, which could include things such as travel to medical appointments—we have heard a lot about the costs of that—respite breaks or emergency payments, when a parent has had to stop working to cover the care needed for that child or members of the family.

Patients have waited far too long for redress, some for decades, and any scheme must be set up promptly, as soon as possible. However, it should be structured so that it can be incorporated into the redress agency in future. Individuals who obtain compensation through litigation or out-of-court settlements—and we have heard of some, particularly from Johnson & Johnson and the Scottish pelvic mesh settlement—will not need recourse to these schemes. It is over and above what is already supplied by the state or is totally inadequate. So we are not setting a precedent: ex gratia payments have made by the Government to those suffering from infected blood, for example, as I mentioned in the last debate, as well as variant CJD and other areas, where treatments have caused avoidable damage.

In responding to the report’s recommendations, the Patient Safety Minister, Nadine Dorries, said that our recommendation that these schemes should be established is still under consideration. I am very heartened by her words, which give me—and, much more importantly, those who are suffering—cause for hope that the Government will do the right thing.

I ask my compassionate and noble friend the Minister if he could give us more information on this. If it has not been ruled out of court, can he tell us what plans are made to ensure that these schemes become a reality, and very soon, because they are much needed? I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I shall be brief, since I am following the powerful case put by the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, for Amendment 68, to which I am pleased to attach my name, along with the noble Lords, Lord O’Shaughnessy and Lord Hunt. This is not a lesser amendment than Amendment 67 but a more limited one. As the noble Baroness said, agreeing Amendment 68 would not stop Amendment 67 from happening in future. The scheme for each individual could be rolled into a broader redress agency. I join her in welcoming the initial response to her report from the Government, which says that proposals such as that in Amendment 68 remain under consideration.

The case has been made—and I am not sure that I am allowed to do this post Brexit, but I note that in France the Government already pay into a fund for valproate damage. There are other cases around the world which reflect what already happens in other instances of medical disasters that have been acknowledged.

I commend the amendment to your Lordships’ House. I do not think that we will be pressing it to a vote tonight, but I hope that the consideration that the Government continue to give will turn into action very soon.

Medicines and Medical Devices Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Cumberlege

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 12th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I will save up some of my time for my next amendment, Amendment 7, so I will be very brief. I will chiefly speak to the non-government amendments in this group. It is encouraging that the Government have taken onboard so many of the contributions from Committee, but that shows what an unbaked condition the Bill came to us in.

To address the somewhat related Amendments 12, 34 and 48, all in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, we are talking about publication of the data, information and assessment of benefits versus risks. We heard powerfully from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and many others in the previous group of amendments how great a concern there is about a lack of scrutiny of this whole procedure in the House. Public scrutiny is surely the best scrutiny of all. I commend all those amendments to the House.

Amendment 5 is very interesting. My innate reflex is to go towards public health as a systems-thinking, sustainable development goal kind of approach to looking at the whole. But to build on the remarks the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, made in introducing the amendment, which is also back by the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, when we talk about the immensely financially powerful and often very opaque pharmaceutical industry, with its very large multinational companies, we have to worry about what lawyers call equality of arms and the degree to which economic and financial arguments might be deployed in potentially damaging ways. I am interested in the Minister’s response to Amendment 5, but I can certainly see the strength of the argument of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton.

[Baroness Cumberlege (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I will speak to government Amendments 11 and 47, and those that follow on from them, Amendments 12 and 48 from the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. The first lot refer to medicines and the second to devices. But first I thank the Minister for his strong emphasis on safety in all the amendments. He certainly has listened to noble Lords. In Committee we stressed the objective of making sure that the Bill is a safety Bill. I believe that safety now permeates throughout the Bill, which is so encouraging, and I thank him and his colleagues for that.

Although I welcome the government amendments, I really do not envy a Secretary of State’s task in weighing up the risks versus the benefits. This will require the wisdom of Solomon. At least once the Bill is enacted we will have the data, which is all-important and has just been referred to. Our review’s report shone the light on our frustration of not knowing what was happening to whom, by whom, when and where. This will, of course, become apparent, which will be very useful once we have these processes in place.

But we are still left with weighing up the benefits versus the risks. Surely this depends on where the threshold is set concerning any medicine or medical device. For instance, if 99 people benefit from one of these products but one dies, what weight do we give to the 99—or, perhaps more importantly, to the one who died? Does the Minister see thresholds as important? If so, does he envisage the application of a threshold for an individual medicine or device, or would there be a threshold to cover a similar range of products, or indeed a more overriding policy? I am not quite sure how this will be tackled.

Medicines and Medical Devices Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Cumberlege

Committee stage & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 19th November 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Cumberlege (Con) [V]]

My Lords, it is hard to follow the very well-researched contribution to this whole issue from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. It was interesting to hear about Sir Liam Donaldson’s report, which got on to the statute book but was not implemented. Is that not a disgrace? It is really dreadful.

Very near to where I live is the centre for Chailey Heritage, now the Chailey Heritage Foundation, for children who suffered through their mothers having taken the drug thalidomide. I chaired its governing body for years. It is interesting that that redress system still continues; it is supported by a trust, which inherited the disaster of the medication, and it has honoured that and receives government support. So we have examples where this is working.

The redress agency that we recommend is really about the future. My amendment is about the present. We know that so many patients and their families have suffered such harm, and we need a system that is more compassionate and a much more certain route for obtaining redress to compensate them. We are talking not about compensation as such, but about redress. You have to go to the courts to achieve compensation, and it is a very miserable experience—we have heard that from patients. It also takes a very long time and, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said, very often the people who benefit most are the lawyers.

We are talking about Primodos, sodium valproate and pelvic mesh—the three interventions through which people have suffered avoidable harm. The suffering they endure now is terrible. All three have caused and are causing avoidable psychological and, of course, physical and neurological harm. These families really need a little help with the conditions they are living with. Indeed, some are looking after some very disabled children. We do not believe that their needs are adequately met by the healthcare, social care or benefits systems. Some of these people are actually very elderly—the parents of the children who took Primodos. It would be a scandal if those people were to live their lives unable to access the redress they need and the outcome they deserve. After all, the harm was caused not by them, but by the state.

In the case of these three interventions, there is a moral and ethical responsibility to provide ex gratia payments in respect of the avoidable damage that occurred. That responsibility falls on the state and the manufacturers of the products in question. The schemes that would be established through this proposed new clause would provide discretionary payments, and each of the three schemes would have tailored eligibility criteria.

The payments the schemes make would not be intended to cover the cost of services that are already available free of charge, such as healthcare and social security payments. They would be for other needs—for example, the cost of travel to medical appointments. We have met and talked to many of those people, and they have said that it is a significant cost burden. The payments might be for respite breaks or emergency payments where a parent has had to stop work to cover care. These redress schemes would not be in place of litigation, nor will they be to deliver compensation. People should retain the right to take legal action if they wish to obtain compensation—of course they should; that is in our law. The schemes I am talking about should be set up in such a way that they can be incorporated into the wider redress agency that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, spoke about, once it is established.

These people have suffered for decades. They have tried to obtain compensation through the courts. That action has failed in the case of valproate and Primodos, although I am aware that a new Primodos action is under way. I have been told by solicitors that, in fact, the report does not in any way affect that action. There have been some awards and settlements in the case of mesh, but legal action takes time, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said. It creates added stress and much more personal cost can be involved.

I believe that a measure of a decent society is how well it looks after those who have suffered harm, especially when that harm was avoidable. From having met many hundreds of people who have suffered and heard from many more, I am clear that help is needed and deserved. People should not be made to wait any longer. I hope my noble friend the Minister will agree with that.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 122 and 123, to which I attached my name. The first is in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and the second in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege. They have both introduced these very clearly, so I will make only three points to add some extra, different perspectives.

The first point I wish to make is that there is what I can describe only as a heart-rending report in the Guardian today about Windrush compensation two years on. The headline talks about

“long waits and ‘abysmal’ payouts”.

The story mentions an agency that talks about five people waiting more than 18 months for compensation. If this—as high-profile a scandal as we can possibly imagine, which attracted far more attention than the issues covered by the report from the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege—is going so badly, surely we have to address this issue, which in many ways is smaller, more limited and perhaps much less complicated, to create a situation via Amendment 123 to deal with these three issues. Amendment 122 would create a situation to deal with all cases, so that we would have a system and framework that, I hope, would do better than the Home Office is doing. I hope that such an agency in the health framework would not suffer from the same hostile environment in the Home Office that the Windrush compensation scheme has to act within.