King’s Speech

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 9th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]]

My Lords, there was nothing in the gracious Speech about the most debilitating and underreported health problem which has arisen as a result of the pandemic, known as long Covid. It has become a serious health matter, especially since the Office for National Statistics stopped reporting on long Covid in March this year. Following the outbreak of Covid-19, the NHS committed to providing centralised funding specifically allocated to fund specialised long Covid services across the country. This funding has now been removed, meaning that the services are being absorbed back into local integrated care boards, which are now deciding service by service whether they will continue to fund and run a specialised long Covid service.

Yet it is now that we need to know the extent of the problem, as we know it affects 1.9 million people in the UK, which is 2.9% of the population. This figure comes from research done by the all-party parliamentary group on long Covid. People have been unable to get back to work because of the devastating side-effects they have experienced following a bout of the Covid virus. More will follow, as the latest information on the government website tells us that 6,832 people tested positive for the virus in the week to 28 October. This is almost certainly wildly inaccurate, as there are no free testing kits any more and people are unlikely to go out to buy them, so those reporting that they have Covid are likely to be people with smartphones or tablets who are sufficiently civic-minded to report themselves if they have the disease.

Many people have suffered after contracting the virus and their symptoms are so varied that I wonder what research is being done to support them. Some 1.82 million days were lost by healthcare workers alone suffering from long Covid, from March 2020 to September 2021, across 219 NHS trusts. A survey carried out by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that one-quarter of UK employers cited long Covid as one of the main causes of long-term sickness absence among staff. Clearly, this is an alarming figure.

I wonder if the Minister can tell me what research is going on in this country to try to mitigate the effects of long Covid on our own population? In Canada, for instance, research by the Ontario Covid-19 rapid research fund found that an MRI technique developed by Western University was able to see how tiny branches of air tubes in the lungs were moving oxygen into the red blood cells. They know that this happens in long Covid patients and are now researching to find out why this occurs, as they believe it has an important bearing on why long Covid happens in some people and not in others.

I have been introduced to an interesting programme by the English National Opera called ENO Breathe. It is a breathing and well-being programme developed specifically for people recovering from Covid-19 who are still suffering from breathlessness and associated anxiety. It is delivered in collaboration with Imperial College healthcare teams and is entirely online. It focuses on breathing retraining through singing. Would the Minister undertake to look at this programme and see how this sort of approach could be used more widely in the national health system?

I have a very personal interest in this subject, as one of my grandsons is a sufferer, having been unable to attend school since November 2020, having caught Covid-19 earlier. It is only because of the amazing help and support he had from his school, the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, his headmaster Mr Philip Wayne and some members of his staff, that he has been able to pass his GCSEs and enter the sixth form. Although still capable of doing only a fraction of what he had been able to do pre-Covid, Tate has been very lucky. Not every child will have had the parental and school support he has.

We know that school attendance has been plummeting; we have already heard that. The Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, has stated that one in five children were persistently absent from school, which is equivalent to 1.8 million children regularly missing. Has any research been done to see if long Covid has a part to play in these absences?

Recommendations on long Covid from the APPG include: launching specialised care pathways for children living with the illness; that guidance is issued to schools and educational settings on the management of and support for pupils living with long Covid; and that the UK Government issue urgent guidance to medical practitioners on long Covid in children. May I ask that the Government look urgently and favourably on these recommendations so that our young people, having endured two years of disruption to their studies already, should not have to worry further if they contract this awful virus?

Long Covid

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)]

My Lords, we have a virtual contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond.

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]]

My Lords, my 15 year-old grandson has long Covid and has not been able to go to school since November. His school has been fantastic at trying to assist him, but there is only so much that it can do. What are the Government doing to help schools to support these pupils?

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

The noble Baroness emphasises just how wide, varying and diverse the symptoms of long Covid are. We know that children and young people can develop long Covid, just as adults can. NHS England has therefore not only established specialised paediatric services to provide care for children and young people, but is looking at providing specialist advice and support to general paediatric services as we learn more, as well as co-operating with international partners to learn from their experience.

Health and Care Bill

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 31st January 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Henig) (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, is taking part remotely. I invite the noble Baroness to speak.

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, has explained that Amendment 213A is an important statement of intent, if put in the Bill, by Parliament and the Government that, on behalf of the people of this country, we will take all the steps that we can to prevent procurement of goods made in places where there is evidence of likely genocide and where human rights abuses and modern slavery are thereby inevitable.

My noble friend Lady Brinton has just explained the problem of the sourcing of PPE from China and from companies that may be using Uighurs’ enforced labour. This is extremely worrying. Given that the Government have previously ignored an amendment passed in your Lordships’ House in the Trade Act 2021, despite rising international concerns about genocide against the Uighurs, it is vital that we remember the duty placed on nation states to use a deterrent effect.

In its judgment of 26 February 2007, in Bosnia and Herzegovina v Serbia and Montenegro, concerning the application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the International Court of Justice found at paragraph 431 that the duty to prevent arises

“at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed”,

as the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, stated. The judgment continues:

“From that moment onwards, if the State has available to it means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harbouring specific intent … it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit.”


This amendment echoes that judgment by saying that all endeavours must be made to prevent and deter the procurement of goods from an area where genocide is suspected.

I am also concerned about legislation on slavery, also a scourge of our times, and hope that the Government will not rely on it as a possible alternative. As we have heard, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 merely requires companies with a turnover of £36 million or more to produce a modern slavery statement. The legislation does not prevent companies, or the Government themselves, procuring slave-made goods. The Foreign Prison-Made Goods Act 1897 makes some procurement illegal in certain narrow circumstances, but it is very old legislation and now considered largely defunct. I am grateful to a number of NGOs for their excellent briefings on this subject.

The former Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, said that torture “on an industrial scale” was being carried out in Xinjiang, even though his Government decided not to take action by creating import controls for Xinjiang. This Health and Care Bill offers the opportunity to return to the issue and to improve DHSC procurement policy.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

I, too, have my name to this amendment and support it, as I have previous amendments to other Bills relating to genocide. Health procurement is a very problematic area that warrants the special attention of Parliament. Not to put too fine a point on it, we will probably all have been wearing slave-made masks, even here. But it is a particular concern if great institutions such as our National Health Service are purchasing them in contravention of the standards we would like to set.

According to the Institute for Government, the UK has spent at least £15 billion on PPE since the onset of the pandemic. To put this into context, the normal annual spend on PPE is around £150 million. Perhaps we should have been putting aside more money for it. Anyway, many PPE contracts use products sourced from China. We do not know how much came from the Uyghur region but one news report alone alleged that we had purchased millions of pounds-worth of PPE from a company strongly suspected of using forced Uighur labour. That is just one report and I suspect we will see more investigations and more coming to light.

Even where the PPE is not manufactured in the Uyghur region, it may contain cotton, plastics and some other constituent parts that were. It has always surprised me that we do not have the import control regime that the United States has had for some time. The USA requires importers to document the source of products, not just the town and city but the particular factory, and to make tracking possible. Indeed, DNA tests can locate the source of the cotton, for example—the very region where it has come from.

What do we mean when we talk about serious risk of genocide? These are not just words. They represent the trigger for state responsibility under the genocide convention, as other speakers have mentioned. The International Court of Justice in 2007, in a judgment of a case involving Bosnia and Serbia, was crystal clear that state responsibility to prevent genocide arises

“at the instant that the State learns of, or should … have learned of … a serious risk”

of genocide. We have taken the words from that judgment. By incorporating those words into regulations, we are providing the Government and Parliament with a mechanism to take action to prevent genocide. This is something they lack in their current policy, which makes all actions dependent on a judgment from an international court—which, as we know, bears the Catch-22 that the very countries getting close to genocide or in the process of committing it do not usually want to play by the international rules of law.

Why should a serious risk of genocide be our procurement threshold? There will always be widespread human rights abuses with attendant supply chain risks for businesses where already there is talk of a possible genocide being in play. This should not represent an obstacle to the United Kingdom because since the Modern Slavey Act—which we passed here proudly as leading the world back in 2015—our aspirations have been to ensure that no business can sell slave-made goods into our market. A serious risk of genocide represents a higher threshold than any modern slavery offence, so the bar is set high here. The ban on procurement that a positive finding of serious risk would attract is proportionate. We need take these steps urgently. It is not, as others have said, just about China, but the amendment would, we hope, have an immediate effect in the Uyghur region.

As many noble Lords will know, last autumn the Uyghur Tribunal sat not very far from here, in Church House, led by a sort of jury of persons and the distinguished international lawyer Sir Geoffrey Nice QC. The tribunal concluded that China was, in fact, committing genocide in the Uyghur region and there was a violation of pre-emptory norms in international law that ought to require government action, by us. We are under a duty to act. If a genocide is in train or in progress, we have a duty to try to prevent it. That is what the convention says.

Although the amendment, rightly, does not identify any single country, I would expect it to have some immediate effect in China. The situation is urgent, and we are having this debate because 800,000 Uighurs are working to produce goods against their will. By some estimates, as many as 300,000 children are separated from their parents, which is really part of a process to take them away from the culture, religion and traditions of their people and to deracinate them. At any one time, up to 1 million are in re-education camps. There has also been shocking evidence of forcible sterilisation of Uighur women and many other heinous crimes. There really is an international legal obligation upon us. This House has expressed its views in previous votes and I hope we will eventually be joined by many noble Lords when this comes at some point to a vote.

We are looking at our supply chains and they are being seriously tainted by human rights abuses. We have taken proud steps, leading the world, in seeking to do something about these supply chains, and here is an opportunity to take it even further.

Health and Care Bill

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Wednesday 26th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Lexden) (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, is also taking part remotely and I invite her to speak.

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]]

My Lords, having spoken on just about every police Bill in this House for the past 23 years, I am afraid that I could not let this amendment pass without comment. I refer your Lordships to my policing interests in the register.

As my noble friend Lady Brinton has just said, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which has just gone through this House, had provisions that gave the police and other criminal justice bodies investigating possible serious violence, or plans to produce serious violence, the power to demand the confidential medical data of individuals. As drafted, unspecified police officers —that means any police officer, not just a senior ranking officer—could make requests to a GP’s surgery or a CCG, or their staff, to hand over the data.

What I found chilling was that the police would not be required to explain to the patient’s GP why they wanted the information, or whether the patient concerned was a potential criminal or possible victim—or even someone associated with the investigation, for example a possible witness or family member. After discussions with Peers, the General Medical Council, Ministers and the British Medical Association, the Government made their own amendments, making it clear that the police would not have this universal access to patient data. Instead, they would have to use the current, traditional method of approaching a patient’s GP directly and asking for the data, with the decision being made by the GP under the GMC code of ethics, as my noble friend Lady Brinton explained.

New Section 14Z61 gives the new integrated commissioning boards a duty to hand over personal medical data to a wide range of bodies that request them. However, I will focus on paragraphs (g) and (h), which are about police requests for data when they are undertaking criminal investigations. It is even more extraordinary that a health Bill is proposing to give the police even wider powers than in the recent police Bill. At least that Bill originally limited access to cases of serious violence. I will quote my noble friend from 25 October 2021, in debate on the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill:

“It is quite extraordinary that this Bill proposes that any Home Secretary can, at will, demand that doctors and other healthcare professionals breach patient confidentiality, over and above their responsibilities of confidentiality to their patients and their commitments to their regulatory body.”—[Official Report, 25/10/21; col. 551.]

Covid-19 Vaccinations

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 8th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Henig) (Lab)]

My Lords, there are four remote speakers. I shall now call the second of them, the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond.

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I very much share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. My doctor has recorded my booster jab—at least, I think it is my booster jab; it may be a third primary jab, I do not know—so I just want to know when it is going to appear on the NHS app. Because I was told quite specifically when I was jabbed that it would.

Covid-19 Update

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right that we are concerned about a post-Christmas surge, but the opening of schools is an absolute number one priority. We will do everything we can to keep the schools open, and that includes schools for 11 to 16 year-olds.

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]]

The Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, have already touched on this, but can the Minister tell me how the Government propose to stop people in the different tiers crossing borders? I declare an interest in this because I live in a tourist hot spot, which suffered badly during the first lockdown from people coming from all those neighbouring areas, which are now in tier 3 and surrounding us.

Dental Care

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 20th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

My Lords, I cannot make the commitment that my noble friend seeks at the Dispatch Box, but I promise to convey his thoughts to the discussions taking place between DHSC colleagues and the Treasury.

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD)]

My Lords, a recent poll of around 2,000 dentists and dental professionals found that 97.5% of them supported a vote of no confidence in the leadership of the office of the Chief Dental Officer of England. What is the Government’s assessment of this?

[Lord Bethell]

My Lords, it is not the role of the Department of Health and Social Care to have a view on the popularity of the Chief Dental Officer. All I can say is that the support he has provided for the profession is enormously appreciated, and we have a lot of confidence in his work.