Health: Cancer

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

Pancreatic cancer is an extremely difficult cancer to diagnose. As the noble Lord knows, when it is picked up it is often very advanced and survival rates are very poor indeed. The Government are well aware of the problems here. My honourable friend Paul Burstow in the other place is meeting Pancreatic Cancer UK shortly. I hope that the noble Lord will feed into that. If he has an association with that organisation, can he put his questions to it so that they can be fed to Paul Burstow, or alternatively to me?

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

My Lords, is it not a fact that the great improvement in cancer treatment is due to early detection? It is important to keep people trained in that, particularly for the rare cancers that I am always talking about. Do the Government not feel that we owe a great deal to the cancer and research charities that are continuing to do very useful work in alerting people to the need for early detection?

[Baroness Northover]

My noble friend is absolutely right. We owe a huge amount to the organisations in the United Kingdom, not least Cancer Research UK, which is a major player internationally. She is also right about early diagnosis. That is how you start to bring deaths down; you make sure that you diagnose early enough so that you can intervene in a way that is going to be much more effective. Noble Lords might like to know that there will be a first ever national cancer campaign on bowel cancer to flag up the symptoms to people in the hope that they seek diagnosis at a much earlier stage, because if it is caught early it is completely curable.

Health and Social Care Bill

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

My Lords, when I saw that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, was moving that this clause not stand part, I could not believe it—I thought that someone from Birmingham could not possibly be anti-fluoride. Having listened to him, I now understand what he is on about and that is a slightly different angle.

I am strongly in favour of water fluoridation. The noble Earl, Lord Baldwin, tells us that he has been tabling questions for 15 years, but the issue has been before this House for much longer than that. We had probably the bitterest debate I have ever seen in my life in the House in about 1983, following the Strathclyde judgment. Strathclyde is a place in Scotland—given the current Leader of the House, I suppose I hardly need say that—where the council introduced water fluoridation. Suddenly, decay in children’s teeth decreased by 40 per cent. Then local people got very upset and said, “We don’t want this; it’s poison and it’s terrible”. The fluoride was taken out of the water, and immediately dental decay went right back up again. A court case was brought—I have not read the decision because it is 400 pages long—and the court ruled that fluoride was not a poison in the water, and after that other authorities put it in. As I say, though, the debate here was very bitter, and I am pleased that those who have spoken against fluoridation today have not shown the same bitterness that we had at that time, when people almost got up off their death-beds to come in and oppose it.

There are a number of other points that I feel I must take up. The noble Earl, Lord Baldwin, was talking about the Australian comparison. I had an interesting visitor from Australia, the shadow Minister for federal health, or the federal Minister for shadow health—I think I have got that muddled up, but anyhow he is the opposition man on health. He was telling me that in Australia it has become very fashionable to drink bottled water, and they have found that people who are drinking that water are all getting dental decay back again, which again proves how effective fluoride is. I have a nephew who is a dentist in Sydney, and he tells me that he can tell if a boy has come from the country where all you would have to drink would be rainwater or water from a river—they come in with terrible teeth and you can spot them immediately.

The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, asked whether this is medication, and what about pure water? At one stage I was very involved with the water supply for London. Thames Water explained to me that every drop of water that we consume has been used eight or 10 times before—it may be more now. So there is nothing pure about it. It is not straight out of the river or anything; it has already been treated again and again. None of us stops to think about the chlorine in the water. Where I live in Oxfordshire, you have to fill the kettle the night before because otherwise the smell of chlorine in the water coming out of the tap is too strong. Chlorine is also a great thing for swimming pools. The answer to the noble Earl, Lord Baldwin, the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and others who really do not want to consume fluoride is that it does not matter whether the water in your bath has fluoride in it; you can go back to bottled water and have the Australian experience, and see what happens to your teeth then.

I also have been asking questions for a very long time. One question that is highly relevant is: what is the difference between the decayed/missing/filled rate—that is the dental classification—between Birmingham, which has the best teeth, and Manchester, which has probably the worst? The difference is vast. When I have asked the further important question, “What’s the difference in their health? Is there a difference in the pattern of what people die from or what illnesses they contract in Birmingham?”, the answer is that there is no difference. There is exactly the same health pattern in both these areas, but the difference is that one has better teeth than the other.

I still have a few questions to ask the noble Baroness. For example, we keep using the words “operable” and “efficient” everywhere, and asking whether something is or is not operable and efficient. Who will decide whether it is operable and efficient and what sort of criteria will be used?

I also notice that, in Clause 32(9), new Section (3A) refers to the Secretary of State wanting to make the fluoride proportion lower than the general target concentration. The target concentration is one part per million, and when water is being reused it is often required to reduce it to one part per million. However, that is not what this clause says. The clause says that the Secretary of State might want to reduce it to below the optimal point, which puzzles me. I should like to know in what sort of circumstances the Minister envisages wanting fluoride in the water but also wanting to reduce it. I could understand it if the time came when it was proved that there was some problem. That could then be the case but, if it were, surely new and urgent legislation would be needed immediately. People complain that there is too long or too short a time in which to test something, but you could not really say that the period since 1964 is too short. It really has been tested for a very long time without ill effects on people’s health.

It is very important that these clauses are kept in. I hope that the money will be found, and I am not really worried about where it is found from. There are small children in Manchester, often from ethnic communities, whose first presentation to the dentist means that they have to go to hospital to have all their baby teeth taken out under general anaesthetic. That is just not good enough and could be prevented if fluoride was in the water there.

Poverty in the Developing World

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

My Lords, it is wonderful that we are having a debate on this subject, and I have great admiration for those who are going to take that active part. I am one of the more lazy Members of the House who will, like many others, be willing to support the project but not to live on £1 a day, which sounds a real effort. I am waiting to see how it goes.

My only real experience with poverty came about because I was asked, quite by accident, to become chairman of Plan UK, an international body which helps the poorest of the poor. Baroness Blatch was to have become the chairman but, as she became a Minister, she persuaded me to agree to do it. I was fortunate to be its chairman for 12 years. When I took over we were raising £2.5 million a year in the UK and by the time I left it was £26 million. I also have the current figures: £41 million in the UK and over £400 million worldwide. So it produces quite a lot of help for people. We also know how many other charities and NGOs work very hard. Many of these schemes are operated with one another, so that various NGOs work together.

The thing is, though, that unless you supervise the work that is done in these countries, it can often be wasted effort. I visited one country where we were helping to put in a new water supply that brought water from the top of a hill down to the bottom. The people themselves were building the channels to do this. Previously, when their own local government had built the channels, everyone had dug holes in the sides and taken the water out as it came down, so the people at the bottom got nothing. However, when the people built it themselves, and it was their project and their ownership, they were determined to see that it continued to work.

Giving people the opportunity to do things, and often giving them the technical help that is needed, is a good thing. I saw in an African country a flat-pack school building that had been sent by some European country. No one had ever opened the pack or known what to do with it. It was nothing to do with the plan. It was just unused, because no one had provided an engineer to tell them how to put it together and advise them on what to do. Children were still sitting and having their lessons outside where they loved the distraction of everything around them.

All these things come as quite a shock to you when you see them. In Ecuador I visited a swamp where the houses were built on stilts. When we asked these people, particularly the women, “Why have you come and settled here in the middle of this dreadful swamp?”, they said, “For a better life”. It makes you realise just how bad their lives must have been.

In Tanzania a child was sitting by a hole in the ground with a bucket and a little thing like a yoghurt cup. Every few minutes, there would be one little cup of water to put into the bucket. We helped them to put in a pump. Now even a small child can, with their own ability, pump enough water to have a bucketful in no time. These are the things that are so important.

It is also important to give people the opportunity to help themselves. If you give a woman two chickens, as we did in many countries, they turn that into a poultry business. Those women sold their eggs and bred more chickens—they were in business. In South America, particularly in Bolivia, where people were rebuilding shattered homes, I saw people there enter into microfinance in such a way that there was a rotating fund; the woman who got the first amount of money started up her little business, perhaps then a market stall, and she was then able to move that money back into the system by repaying her loan and another woman got the money.

It has been mentioned that women are terribly important. Someone asked, “How do you choose between women and health?”, but it is not a choice—both go together. If you educate the women, they are capable of ensuring better health standards for their children. In the Philippines I saw women whose homes had been burnt down, and we were helping them. They used to go and pay off a little bit of mortgage every day, because every day they earned a small amount of money and could afford to take a few pence out of that to meet their debts. Women have a marvellous record of meeting their debts and of helping others on the way to improving things. In all the shanty towns that you see, it is the women who have brought their children and families to the outskirts of the big cities—I have seen this particularly in Latin America—because that is how they can get a job, and they can gradually see their family rise and have opportunities.

There are so many things that I could go on and on about. A basic hut in Vietnam was blown down, and we helped the woman build a new one. She was a widow with seven children, and she was so grateful for what we would consider a garden shed—except that we had put in a concrete floor. She explained that that floor meant that she would now have one-third more food for her children than she had before. When she had an earth floor, insects used to come up out of the earth and take away one-third of her stored grain.

The only thing on which I did not agree with the noble Lord when he opened the debate was the cycle of despair. I understand, and I thought that the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, made this point very clear, that statelessness must cause this sort of situation—I am sure that crises, particularly conflicts, can do it—but I have been amazed by how unbelievably cheerful these people were, living in poverty at a level that you could hardly imagine. They were grateful for any help, but they were optimists. They were all looking to improve life if they could. It makes you feel rather ashamed that you have so much and they have so little.

The noble Lord also mentioned tax measures and tax avoidance. I think that you will never get rid of tax avoidance, but gift aid is enormously valuable. He mentioned that there is now an internationally agreed standard. One of the essentials is to be sure that the money really goes to the people you want it to go to. The element of corruption still exists and can take money away from people. I remember a woman from Tanzania, speaking at a women’s meeting at the United Nations, who said, “Don’t give us money; if you give us money, we never see it. Give us soap and we’ll be able to wash our children”. This is what we have to realise: unless we can supervise what is happening, unless we have a monitoring system of some sort to see that the help really goes where it is needed, it will be very difficult.

There is hope for people. They are uncomplaining, they are optimists and they manage with so little in life that it makes us feel humble to be aware of this. I know that we all want to do whatever we can to help.

Women: Economic Policies

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, in responding to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, I pointed out that the Government take seriously the fact that the impact will fall predominantly on the lowest paid workers. That is why the Government have decided it is much better to ensure that flexible working is available to far more people. It means that women who often work in jobs below their potential are able to work at times better suited to them and their families, and that fathers are able to take more responsibility for caring at home.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

My Lords, will the Minister confirm that the present Government aim to have more women on the boards of major companies? Does she think it is important to have women at that level coming through? If such board representation existed, it might have a filter-down effect that helps women all the way down the scale.

[Baroness Verma]

My noble friend raises an absolutely crucial point, and it is why we have asked the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Abersoch, to look at how government and business can work together to make sure that the boardrooms of public and private bodies are better represented. It is unacceptable that measurements taken in 2009 show that only 12.5 per cent of the board members of the FTSE 100 companies were women. We need to ensure that we are able to do this by having better arrangements for flexible working and through a culture change within those organisations.

Violence Against Women

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, we have committed to providing more than £28 million directly to those specialist services that the noble Lord has raised. This will cover the spending review period, so that MARACs, IDVAs, ISVAs and SARCs will be fully funded. Because the issue is so huge, we recognise that there is so much more to be done, but we need to do it via voluntary groups as well as ensuring that funding is in place.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

Will the Minister tell me whether she is aware that today is also the 25th anniversary of the first meeting in the Grand Committee room of the 300 Group to get more women into Parliament? Does she think that more women in Parliament might help to do more on this issue of violence against women, which I did a bit on in the United Nations?

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, my noble friend is right. I congratulate her on the work that she did 25 years ago, on which we need to build. Of course, better representation in public life, whether it is in national politics, local politics or public bodies, is crucial to ensure that the voice of women and their policies are addressed fully and properly. I look forward to her support as we ensure that through the Equality Act many of these issues will be addressed.

Women: Public Bodies and Listed Companies

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, it is all about engaging with business and business organisations. We will engage with all relevant partners in developing our programme to fulfil the commitment in the coalition agreement. Head-hunters and recruitment companies will be aware of the stronger provision in the revised UK Corporate Governance Code, published on 28 May this year, on the importance of boardroom diversity. On the noble Baroness’s second question, we are working very hard to encourage people to work with us, rather than enforce an extra regulatory burden.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that almost 30 years ago, when I first came into this House, there was an all-party group whose aim was to get more women onto public bodies? This has been quite successful, although the situation relating to major companies is rather different. Is there not a bit of a parallel with the Equal Pay Act 1970 here, in that it takes years to change cultural attitudes, even though the law has changed?

[Baroness Verma]

I thank my noble friend for that question and agree with her completely. Unfortunately, this issue requires a lead by all contributors, and I just hope that the Act that commences in October will be the start of that process.