Health: Osteoporosis

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My noble friend is right. The job of the NHS in its public health role is to provide information about healthy lifestyle choices. NHS Direct does this at the moment, and in the future we will be looking to the new national public health service to maintain the provision of high quality and authoritative health advice. Moreover, as my noble friend says, that advice includes information about the value of a diet rich in vitamin D from oily fish, liver, cereals, eggs and so forth, as well as from safe exposure—I emphasise the word “safe”—to natural daylight.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords—

[Baroness Greengross]

My Lords—

Health: NICE

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Wednesday 14th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the noble Baroness will have seen in the White Paper the emphasis placed on research. A number of paragraphs in it will be of interest to her, as they emphasise the key role that research and research funding play in the long-term agenda of the NHS and as regards the interests of patients.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that, if early treatment benefits and enhances the lifestyle of those suffering from dementia, and if the cost of granting such treatment is very low, not only would that enhance the life of the individual, it would give added value to carers, as their caring role and their role in employment and in the exercise of their skills would continue to benefit society and all of us for much longer?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the noble Baroness makes a very important point about dementia. She will be aware that when the Alzheimer’s drugs were appraised by NICE some years ago, there was disquiet that the role played by carers had not received adequate attention in the appraisal process. It is an issue of great importance to many people, but it is very complex. Given the finite, overall health budget, if we give greater weight to one factor, such as carers or getting people back to work, we automatically, by default, give less weight to others, such as people at the end of their lives. We need to look at this, but it is complex. We shall not let it go, but I cannot give the noble Baroness a definitive answer today.

Carers

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, my noble friend makes a critical point. She would like to know, I am sure, that there is already money in the baselines for primary care trusts to ensure that carers can get breaks. The continuation of the area-based grant, of which the carers grant forms a part, will need to be considered in the wider context of future spending reviews but, at the moment, £256 million is allocated in the budget for the current year.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, will the Minister give special consideration to child carers, who may need extra support, both from the social services and from the voluntary sector? I know that some is already given, but there really is extra need for it.

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the noble Baroness draws our attention to an extremely important area. Supporting vulnerable children is a priority for the Government. I would say that many young people are happy to help to care for a family member; it helps them to develop a sense of responsibility. However, inappropriate and excessive levels of caring by young people can put their education, training and health at risk and prevent them from enjoying their childhood. We are therefore very mindful of this area of need.

Queen's Speech

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Thursday 3rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, first, I offer my warm congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Hill, on his ministerial appointment and on his inspiring opening speech. I also congratulate him and the new coalition Government on the extent to which, like their predecessor Government, they recognise the importance of education as the gateway to a better life for the individual and for the country. That is certainly the case for those from deprived backgrounds. I also commend the new Government’s commitment, particularly in the almost impossible financial circumstances that they have inherited, to continue to pursue the previous Government’s goal of ending UK child poverty by 2020 as well as to continue with free nursery education for pre-school children. Against that background, I shall spend my few minutes on the importance and cost-effectiveness of the earliest possible intervention and support for deprived children and children with special needs.

We should all applaud the previous Government’s important and brave initiative, Sure Start. It is brave in the sense that its value cannot be fully assessed until the children who have benefited from it reach adulthood. Its value has already been seen by our new Government, and, I suspect, especially championed by Education Secretary of State Michael Gove. The Government have committed to continuing Sure Start and to taking it back to its original purpose of early intervention, with an increased focus on the neediest families.

What I particularly admired about the early days of Sure Start was the practical development of an equal partnership between the local community and professionals, whereby each different area had slightly different priorities, thus reflecting local needs. This, I hope, is what our new Prime Minister means by his emphasis on the big society, whereby the responsibility for social cohesion is left increasingly to well run local government in partnership with its own communities. Equally, however, we must make sure that sufficient extra resources and leadership, including adequately resourced third-sector leadership, are concentrated in helping to improve lives and expectations in the most deprived communities.

A commitment that should certainly help the aim of early intervention is the plan to provide more than 4,000 extra health visitors. During my 20 years’ chairmanship of a London juvenile court—in the days when magistrates, probation and social services really did work together—it was always the health visitors who had that early knowledge of which families were likely to need extra support if trouble was to be prevented.

The new Government’s plans to academise a vast range of schools and to increase variety and independence from local authorities are inevitably controversial, but will the Government guarantee, and if so how, that the proposed and certainly welcome significant premium for disadvantaged children directly advantages these children? I hope that the noble Earl will tell me when he replies. Today, only 27 per cent of children who are eligible for free school meals currently get five good GCSEs, compared with the national average of 54 per cent—indeed, 40 per cent of the same group currently fail to get a single grade C pass at GCSE—so the Government will need to satisfy us that those who teach such children in future will be of the necessary calibre to bring them to the required standard.

I declare my interest as president of the National Governors’ Association. I note to my surprise and clearly to that of the association that the role of school governors is hardly mentioned in the coalition’s programme for the government of these schools. Yet it is surely the school governors who will be ultimately responsible for whether such changes are made, and for consulting those in the locality who will clearly be most affected by this. The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, made that very point rather well. One concern certainly needs an answer: will academies be required, as is clearly desirable, to have at least a proportion of governors from the local area, including some parents?

I end on my earlier theme. My enthusiasm for extra resources and early support for children from deprived backgrounds is in essence practical. First, such a young person will have a more equal opportunity to develop their skills and abilities fully and to lead a full and satisfying life in their community.

Secondly, since the cost of each prison place is £45,000, if just one juvenile can be deterred from a potential life of crime, we will save the taxpayer the considerable sums involved when such individuals become serial offenders.

Thirdly, we must hope that the cycle of deprivation which Keith Joseph emphasised some 37 years ago will at last have been broken in such families. The appalling facts are that 63 per cent of boys with a convicted parent go on to offend, and children of prisoners are three times more likely to show signs of delinquent behaviour. Of course, not all these attempts will succeed, and of course some violent offenders must be imprisoned, but the Prison Reform Trust statistics starkly remind us that, when Ken Clarke was Home Secretary in 1992-93, the prison population stood at almost 45,000. Today, it is about double that at 85,000. There are surely more productive ways of spending our money.