Baroness Donaghy
Main Page: Baroness Donaghy (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Donaghy (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath for initiating this debate. Reading the National Health Service long-term plan is like being invited to a party without any food or drink: no money or plan for social care, no budget for training and educating the workforce, no indication of how local authorities will be able to afford their share of responsibility, and no budget announcement for public health. The National Audit Office has said that the crisis in social care, the state of finances in the NHS and the record staff shortages and waiting lists mean that the £20 billion announced by the Government as part of the 10-year plan could be wasted.
I will concentrate on health inequalities. When the Black report on health inequalities was published in 1980, it had a profound effect on me. It was published on the August bank holiday, and the newly elected Conservative Government rejected it. Thanks to Penguin Books, which published it in 1982, it had a wider audience and a huge impact on health inequalities. Yet here we are again. If you are woman living in Kensington and Chelsea or Camden, you are likely to live 7.4 years longer than a woman living in Manchester or Blackpool. A man living in East Dorset is likely to live 9.5 years longer than a man living in Manchester or Blackpool. The Chief Medical Officer’s annual report indicates that,
“a child born in the most deprived areas would have 18 fewer years in good health than one born in the most affluent areas”.
Infant mortality, working poverty and cuts in benefits are on the increase, with the virtual disappearance of local authority support services, including children’s centres and smoking cessation classes. The geographical variation of working-age individuals on incapacity benefit is also stark: a 13% claimant rate in Blackpool; 8% in the south-west of Scotland, south Wales and the north-east of England and Merseyside; and below 4% in most of the south of England. The brutal closure of primary industries in the 1980s made these variations worse.
I would bet that there is an exact correlation between these areas and those who voted to leave the European Union, alienated every bit as much as from Westminster and Whitehall as they are from the EU. Time does not allow me to make comparisons with other countries, but it is not good. To ensure that the long-term plan works, the Government will need to accept the CMO’s recommendations on spending, housing and migration—that, and enormous political will.