Coronavirus Act 2020: Temporary Provisions
Earl of Erroll Excerpts(4 years, 3 months ago)
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The Earl of Erroll (CB) [V]
My Lords, I want to talk quickly about the problems arising from this great lockdown. It is bankrupting businesses at the moment. People are losing money as they have to cancel with no compensation. The fine versus the average wage is quite enormous, and for ordinary people that must be crippling. Families are being torn apart. A dying 96 year-old who I have been told about cannot see his granddaughter. What a miserable way to die. It is not the hospitality industry that fuels the growth, it is the fact that people have a need to socialise, which will overrule many things. Cromwell cancelled Christmas and ignored Parliament. Do this Government want that to be how they are remembered?
I know this sounds a bit one-sided, but the trouble is that you cannot just deal with diseases by trying to shut everyone away. They will spread. I am interested that Sweden still appears to be on track—with a few blips, but in general it is trending downwards. Perhaps there is something in the fact that the human body can build up immunities to the virus, as with many other diseases, and populations can build up immunities slowly. Sadly, not everyone will be able to, but what is the greater good? The other big problem for people is that no one can plan. It is very unsettling and upsetting, particularly for people with Asperger’s, autism and Down’s syndrome, like one of my daughters. They usually see certainty in their plans and get very upset, which affects their mental health, if they cannot.
As for the problems with the ways around the virus that the Government are looking at, with test and trace you find out four days later and you have been close to hundreds of people. That soon gets unmanageable if you are to lock everyone down the whole time. Mass testing means more false positives. Would people be resistant or would there be more positives? Some people will be resistant with T-cells and immunity. We do not know much about it. Locking everyone away is not necessarily the solution. It is interesting: if you tested all 68 million people in the UK and you got just 1% false positives—that is what people think—you would have 680,000 people locked down unnecessarily, plus their immediate bubbles. It will cripple us.
I was thinking about the effect on climate change. There is very good advice about opening all the windows: get the air moving through. It takes the disease away— quite right. What about EPCs and all the buildings that are hermetically sealed now? I think we may have been building wrong for a while.
I shall run through some figures very quickly. We have 68 million people, as I said, with 23 million tested so far, 435,000 positives, and only 42,000 deaths. New cancer drugs are being delayed in the meantime, and diagnoses are declining drastically. I read that on 21 April the Covid daily death toll was 1,166; yesterday it was 17. Are we not winning the battle to a large extent? Around 450 people a day die of cancer. Is that not a bigger problem? The trouble is that government regulations have, as far as cancer is concerned, halted or drastically delayed drug development. Which should we be worrying about? Why are we destroying the future for what was our population of whatever it was—33 million with 5 million self-employed? This could end up being a pyrrhic victory, and that is what worries me.
Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions on Gatherings) (North of England) Regulations 2020
Earl of Erroll Excerpts(4 years, 3 months ago)
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The Earl of Erroll (CB) [V]
My Lords, like many others, I am very worried about the long-term wider effect of these regulations. I have been talking to friends in Northumberland. All their plans lie in tatters. Money has been spent that is now wasted. Hard-earned income has been destroyed. They are feeling rebellious. We must let our citizens know that they can plan ahead with certainty. People are asking whether Christmas will happen. For many people, quality of life is more important than pure safety, but it is the job of the public service to treat safety as paramount, and this leads to predictions of doom. This is why we must involve politicians who realise that these restrictions must be balanced against the long-term damage that the regulations cause. For instance, in the Times I read in early April said that the Covid daily death toll was 854. At the beginning of this week it said it was 17. On the same day 450 people died of cancer, but government regulations have, for cancer, halted or drastically delayed drug development. Where is the sense of proportion in the priorities? Are the Executive ordering us into a Pyrrhic victory?
Covid-19: Response
Earl of Erroll Excerpts(4 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Bethell
My Lords, we work extremely closely with the devolved Assemblies, the four CMOs and the four nations to have a consistent four-nations approach to Covid. We very much welcome Nicola Sturgeon’s support for this consistent approach.
The Earl of Erroll (CB)
How are vaccines going to work if, as the Government say, the presence of Covid-19 antibodies in a test do not mean that a person is immune? I think that quite a few people are confused.
Lord Bethell
My Lords, the noble Earl is stretching my scientific knowledge with his question. All I can say is that different vaccines work in different ways. Anyone with antibodies who has beaten the disease has the capability of beating the disease, but vaccines ensure that that capability lasts longer, hopefully for life.
Covid-19: Personal Protective Equipment
Earl of Erroll Excerpts(4 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Bethell
The noble Lord makes an entirely reasonable and common-sense request. It is one that I have put to officials myself. The practicalities of PPE are that you have to be prepared to be covered in large amounts of human fluids and for the garments to be waterproof against their impact. Staff are uncomfortable with wearing garments that may have been used in that way previously. In order to maintain levels of hygiene and to rid them of disease, it is very difficult to reuse them. However, we have a committee looking at the potential for reuse, which will be reporting shortly.
The Earl of Erroll (CB)
How does the NHS expect to be able to buy PPE when it insists on paying 30 days after delivery, when everyone else is paying upfront, especially internationally? This applies both when we want to import and to pre-empt export. It might explain the interruption in the Turkish supply chain.
Lord Bethell
My Lords, the question of payment is a relevant one. We have put in place new facilities for different means of payment, but I just alert noble Lords to the very large amount of fraud that exists in this marketplace at the moment. I am aware of several police inquiries into situations where providers have sought early or upfront payment. We have to protect both the patients from failure to deliver and the taxpayer regarding value for money
Tobacco and Related Products Regulations 2016
Earl of Erroll Excerpts(8 years, 7 months ago)
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The Earl of Erroll (CB)
My Lords, I want to say just a couple of words about this. First, I do not really have an interest to declare. I have a wife who is a very heavy chain-smoker, but I do not smoke—I let her go on smoking because it keeps her slightly calmer and liveable-with, and it is probably better than her going on to Valium. Personally, I am a chocoholic, which is a different problem altogether.
I think that we should separate out in our minds the difference between the harm done by the burning of substances which we inhale and the harm, or not, from a particular drug within it—nicotine. If you separate those as two different issues, you realise that this is not the right directive, because this is about tobacco, which at the end of the day is a herbaceous substance which we dry and burn. That is what it is meant to be about; it is not about whether or not nicotine is a beneficial drug.
I do not know much about this because I am not a doctor. I read things in the press which say, for instance, that it can help with Alzheimer’s and dementia, and I read other things which say that that is rubbish. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Snape, that nicotine definitely used to be an appetite suppressant. One thing that I predicted when tobacco was cracked down on was that we would have an obesity crisis. It is one of the few things that I have been right about and it happened very quickly. If we wanted to prevent all the problems with people being overweight, we could perhaps recommend smoking—it is a question of which way you go.
The calming effect is well known for people who are quite nervous and tense; again, I think that is from the nicotine rather than the burning part of it. We also now have signs over the motorways saying, “Tiredness kills—take a break”. In the old days, you had a cigarette when you were driving and felt tired. I know that you should take a break but sometimes it is 30 miles to the next place where you can stop or you have a deadline, so a nicotine hit was a perfectly acceptable way of keeping yourself awake. Maybe vaping would do that, but the point I really want to make is that we should not be confusing the two things.
Standardised Packaging of Tobacco Products Regulations 2015
Earl of Erroll Excerpts(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Tonge (Ind LD)
My Lords, I cannot resist putting in my oar at this stage, very briefly. I have been associated with the anti-smoking campaign for many years, in the Commons and in the Lords. I gave up smoking in 1974, I think—the noble Lord, Lord Walton, will correct me—when the report was published on the links between smoking and lung cancer. I had taken up smoking as a teenager—I say this to support all those people who say that packaging is important in attracting young people to start to smoke—and was taught to smoke by my brothers and their friends in somebody’s back garden because they did not want a sister who choked and did not know how to do it. I do not think that we used the word “cool” in those days, but they wanted me to be cool and be able to smoke. It must have been a very rich friend of my brother, because the cigarettes that he produced to teach me were those wonderful multicoloured ones with gold tips—I think that they were called cocktail cigarettes; I shall not mention the brand. I had never seen anything quite so attractive in my life and, for a while, I was seriously hooked on them until I found out how much they cost. I then investigated something called Black Russian, which were even smarter, if that was possible. I as a teenager then knew perfectly well that it was not just the packaging but the appearance of the cigarettes that was attractive. They were very smart to be able to handle because they were different colours—some noble Lords are smiling; they obviously remember them.
What is important about this measure is that it tackles the appearance of cigarettes, which should be uniform. I wholeheartedly support it. I am glad that I gave up smoking all those years ago. I hope that the majority in this House will support the regulations.
The Earl of Erroll (CB)
My Lords, I do not smoke. I am married to a smoker and I do not like her smoking, but that is not the point. The point about legislation is its effectiveness. What worries me about gesture legislation is that it comes about because something ought to be done about something.
As far as I know, with the current packaging situation, we have about 19% of the country smoking. Without any advertising, packaging or public involvement, we have about 21% of the country using illicit drugs. It does not seem therefore that packaging is necessarily the determining effect. If anything, the more you drive smoking underground, the more attractive it seems to become. We should be slightly careful how we tackle it. Perhaps it should be looked at as part of the overall issue of how we deal with the problem of addiction and drugs instead of trying to target a little bit of advertising, with lots of people having preconceived ideas. I am not a qualified advertising man, but I think that the purpose of packaging is to try to make somebody switch from one brand to another. I do not think that it is what makes people smoke, but I could be wrong. The statistics suggest that we should not drive it underground.
Lord Jopling (Con)
My Lords, I do not want to trump the ace of the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, when she said that she gave up smoking in 1974 but, in 1950, at the end of my first year at university, I became very ill. I spent 12 weeks in hospital with a chest complaint—the doctors thought that it was tuberculosis, but mercifully it was not. At the end of it, the surgeon came to me—he was the professor of thoracic surgery at Newcastle, George Mason; the noble Lord, Lord Walton, will remember him. He said to me, “I think you’re going to be all right but, tell me, do you smoke?”. I said yes. He said, “Well, you shouldn’t”. I said, “Oh, come on. My father’s been talking to you”. He said, “No, I haven’t talked to your father, but one of our students in the University at Newcastle”—it was Dr Strang, who again I think the noble Lord will recall—“has just written a thesis where he has claimed to find a connection between smoking and lung cancer. I’ve scanned it and I haven’t properly been through it, but I found it very compelling. You’ve done the first year of a science degree. You will understand not all of it but most of it, and I’ll give it to you”. The following day there arrived on my bed in the hospital the thesis by this young student. I read it and I was so horrified that I have never smoked a cigarette from that day to this—I was smoking about 25 a day at that time. Ever since then, I have taken a great interest in the connection between smoking and lung cancer. I heard what the noble Lord, Lord Walton, said about the horrors of tobacco, which I thoroughly support. All the time since, I have listened to the arguments one way or another, as we have listened to the arguments here today.
I come back to what the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, said earlier about the publicity of the tobacco industry. I remember so well through the 1960s and 1970s, when I was in the other place, what I can only call the wicked advertisements, publicity and PR of the tobacco industry. I think the connection between smoking and lung cancer became clear in the 1950s, yet in the 1960s and 1970s the tobacco industry still tried to pretend that there was no danger whatever. That really was wicked.
I have not, I confess, examined the arguments about packaging this time but I listened to the arguments tonight. Bearing in mind the negative start I made—I admit it—when looking at the publicity of the tobacco industry, it seems that this is an experiment well worth trying. For that reason, I most strongly support the Government’s line tonight.
Care Bill [HL]
Earl of Erroll Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Brinton
I agree with the last comments of the noble Lords, Lord Lester and Lord Ribeiro. One of the problems that your Lordships’ House has faced with this is the issue of data used for research versus data used for commercial purposes. That becomes a very grey area when some commercial firms are doing pure research. It may be worth your Lordships’ House remembering that even commercial research, whether it is carried out by research departments or within universities and other research bodies, is bound by the strongest ethical codes in which we should all have trust and assurance because they are respected around the world. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm again—I know he has already done so—that commercial data will not be released so that, for example, an insurance company could raise premiums for a particular group of patients. That is the fear that the public have, rather than the issue of using research data, for which we already have many structures and for which the Health Research Authority is properly the correct authority to make sure that the codes are followed absolutely. There is a difficulty in that pseudonymised and anonymised data can sometimes be undone, but that issue already exists in other research areas and there are plenty of mechanisms to hold researchers to account should they use any of that information themselves. I support the point of the noble Lord, Lord Lester, that we should be content with the Government and that if we start to overprescribe, we will end up unravelling some of the complex but effective arrangements that already exist in the research world.
Secondly and very briefly, I have previously raised with the Minister one very specific point on this issue, and I have asked him this question in writing in advance. Has there been any progress on the timetable for inclusion of primary care musculoskeletal data into the care.data programme? I understand that it was an unintentional omission earlier in the process but, given the number of people in this country suffering from musculoskeletal problems, it would be quite extraordinary if they were not included at an early stage.
The Earl of Erroll (CB)
My Lords, I would just like to say a few words about this because I am very involved in the whole world of IT, personal data and identification and the issues around examining the data. One of the things that has become apparent to me is that if care.data is to be effective, public trust must be maintained in it—that is the core problem. It needs to be there so that we can do epidemiological studies, and to do those some information will have to be in the database—such as postcodes, so that you can look for clusters and so on—which will potentially allow people to be identified. Once you compare it and link it across to other databases, if you are looking for someone who is of a certain age, a certain health profile and in a certain area down to 100 yards, it is fairly easy to start working out who they are by cross-linking. However, it may be important to take that risk from time to time, as long as it is done properly. What we do not want if this is to work is for people to feel a need to opt out. You cannot do epidemiological studies if half the population decide they are going to opt out. It is essential that the public trust the database, trust that they will be protected as far as possible and trust that the information will not be misused against them. That is the core to getting this whole thing to work, and if you fail on that you have had it.
The noble Lord, Lord Lester, made a very good point about the human rights stuff being in there and that we have the Data Protection Act and all these things. The Minister also mentioned the Data Protection Act. However, there are some challenges with this. One of them is how you bring a case under the Human Rights Act when a department or the health service is acting incorrectly. It is quite tricky; it does not happen overnight and you would be lucky to stop it. There are wonderful protections in the Data Protection Act but there is a certain amount of vagueness about exactly where the limits are and, worse still, it will all be changed this autumn or winter when the new European Parliament assembles. The proposals nearly got through before the coming elections. Under the digital single market agenda, a new Data Protection Act regulation will almost certainly come out of Europe somewhere towards the end of the year. That will have direct action in this country. We have no control over it as it is a European law that is directly effective in this country, and the Information Commissioner over here will be the person who will enforce it. We will have no say in whether it relaxes things too far or becomes too prescriptive in what it does. We cannot rely on it for certainty in the future
Lord Lester of Herne Hill
The noble Earl may not be aware that nothing that comes from Brussels will be able to offend the European Convention on Human Rights or the charter of rights with regard to EU action.
The Earl of Erroll
I fully agree with the noble Lord. My challenge with it is how easy it will be to raise a human rights case if we find that the regulation does not comply with something on which we have legislated here and there is a conflict. I accept that it is theoretically possible. I would argue that maybe the way proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Owen, is another way of trying to make sure that we do not have to go to that step.
Briefly, there are some commercial issues with this. One of the changes is that the National Health Service may end up giving away data that are all good for research purposes but which would be very useful for pharmaceutical development and stuff like that. Companies will make a lot of money from information that they get from the data, but I would like to see the NHS benefit. I do not have a problem with it selling the correct data if it is properly controlled for the right research purposes. There will also be some businesses and companies that will make a business out of analysing such data and selling the analysis back to the NHS. It would be useful because the NHS does not have the time or the skill to do that work, but the NHS should benefit from the work and effectively charge for the data that it sells.
There are two reasons why I like the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Owen. On the Minister’s interpretation of statistics, if we take the more general wording, “the promotion of health”, and it is possible for the food industry to use it to bolster some of their stuff, we have to look at some of the underlying assumptions of the statistics, which can be dangerous things. We need to see how that is done. Even if we go for the newer wording in Amendment 40C, there could be problems in this area. I do not think that anybody is capable of regulating themselves. We always have our own internal biases towards our own objectives and can be regulated only by someone who is looking at it from another point of view, from outside.
We have had the Caldicott guardians for a while. The system works as they are looking after the public interest. They give the public confidence that things are not being misused in their names. Therefore, why are we throwing away a few years of experience of something that works? It is not tampering with the wording of the Bill or playing around with a mish-mash of words; it is merely re-establishing something that already exists. It is a sensible balance. If you cannot check yourself, checks outside the organisation have to exist. Therefore, I suggest that we support the amendment.
Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve (CB)
My Lords, I hope that the Minister will comment on a fact mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Erroll: namely, that on its imminent coming into force the European data protection regulation will indeed supersede our Data Protection Act, which implements the current European directive. I am sure that the debate in Brussels has been conducted with the highest aims for the protection of privacy but I also believe that it is based on considerable illusions. It aims to introduce reliance on specific and explicit consent for each and every reuse of lawfully held data. This is an illusory standard. In the commercial world it works as we can tick and click as giving consent to terms and conditions, but it does not provide an adequate model for the world of medical research. I fear that when this draft regulation comes through, which it is very likely to do, we will not have secured better standards for the protection of patient privacy in research, and nor will we have secured the future of medical research.
This seems to me to be a very poor moment at which to have to make decisions on protecting the privacy of patient data, because the ground rules are about to change. They will of course be compatible with an interpretation of the European Convention, but they will change a great deal. I declare an interest as chair of the ethics, regulation and public involvement committee of the Medical Research Council, and as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
Health and Social Care Bill
Earl of Erroll Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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The Earl of Erroll
My Lords, the description by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, of the NHS Commissioning Board and its satellites shows that you do not get economies of scale, but complexities of scale. This amendment contains a wonderful concept that bureaucrats should curb their deepest urges and I think that should be in all public sector body reorganisation Bills, but how would you enforce it? What sanctions do we have against a person who does not comply and does not curb their bureaucracy? The challenge is the same as with the previous amendment: how do we motivate people to behave in a correct and ethical way, so that patients’ and the taxpayers’ interests are looked after? I do not think that it can be done by regulation, which is very sad.
Baroness Tonge
My Lords, I cannot resist putting my oar in on this Bill. I do so because, many years ago, I was in middle management in the health service. I had to take part in the many reorganisations that happened. I suppose the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, must have been one of the culprits who added to my misery at work. I tried to concentrate on clinical work but people pestered me about filing cabinets, which office they should work in, who would be their line manager and what exactly would they be managing. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is quite right to point out that as soon as you start on any sort of reorganisation, the people themselves enlarge it. They need PAs, they need offices and so on. Suddenly, they find they have no one to do the bean counting, so they need a bean counter. The Government give the impression that this is all a delightfully simple, wonderful, altruistic idea that GPs, in consultation with their patients, will commission the care for their patients. I have been a GP as well, and I can tell the House that GPs are not going to go home instead of going to the golf club, take out their laptops and do a bit of commissioning in the evening. It will not work like that. There will have to be an office block full of commissioners—just like PCTs—to do the job for them. What is worse, I understand that private medical companies are anxious to do the commissioning for the clinical commissioning groups. That will mean that taxpayers’ money will go directly to private medical companies that will advise GPs on how to commission. I find that absolutely iniquitous and will fight it to the end.
We will see a mushrooming commissioning group with its advisers, whoever they are, in an office block. It will not stop there. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned the number of different organisations that had been set up. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, mentioned the connections between them. It was deliciously simple for him to give us the image of tentacles reaching down from the National Commissioning Board to all parts of the health service. The noble Lord, Lord Rea, and I helped send round some information many weeks ago. There was a wonderful diagram of the interconnections between all the new bodies in the health service. It was like Spaghetti Junction. I am a midlander so I know what that junction is like. There is no way that one can navigate the maze of who provides what, and whether it is done nationally, locally, by local authorities or by clinical commissioning groups. It is overly and unnecessarily complicated. As the noble Lord, Lord Harris, said, we could have adapted the existing system to work much more efficiently, which would have been much cheaper and better. No wonder Professor McKee recently wrote an article in the BMJ asking who understood the Health and Social Care Bill, in which he explained that he did not understand it at all.
I will finish with an image that will delight noble Lords who are fed up with me. I went to the dentist this morning. Just as he got me in the reclining position, with the torture instruments looming, he said: “By the way, I know what I have to ask you: can you explain the Health and Social Care Bill?”. About 10 minutes or so later I noticed that his eyes had glazed over and he was reaching for the drill, so I shut up and gave in.
Food: Regulation and Guidance
Earl of Erroll Excerpts(14 years, 2 months ago)
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The Earl of Erroll
My Lords, I join this debate to say a few words. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, who had a deep experience in Defra, for allowing us to have the debate.
I wanted to look at it from the point of view of whether regulation is effective and whether it is always right. I come from a tradition whereby I do not like being told what to do the whole time. I may well get it wrong, and if I die early as a result of overeating or overindulging in the wrong things, that puts a cost on the health service but will save a fortune in my dementia and old-age care and its provision on a very close though not quite one-to-one basis—
The Earl of Erroll
Well, I keep being told that I am bound to die if I eat too much chocolate and that I am a chocoholic. Is dark chocolate bad or good for you? We could debate that endlessly.
Lord Giddens
You cannot confuse the risk to a single individual with generic risk. That is like people saying, “My granddad smoked 50 cigarettes a day and, look, he lived to be 101”—as if that had anything to do with the risks of smoking, which it does not.
The Earl of Erroll
That almost proves the point. We are all different, and I do not like to live in a world where the Government tell me what to do, because we are all very different people. Those differences are important in society. I am talking about having total central controls; that is why I want to get on to balance. I want to demolish the concept that if you do something silly and you die early, although you may be a cost to the National Health Service in your obesity and the costs of dealing with your diabetes at that point, you have alleviated another budget—the cost of looking after you very expensively in your old age. That is quite expensive, and it is a bigger and bigger problem, as well as all the pension and other costs. I would like to see a true paper done academically on the economic balance between those costs, because I have not seen one. The only one that I ever saw was produced in Holland about the cost of the early deaths of smokers from cancer, and it said that the cost of the cancer care was much lower than the cost of the old-age care, with people living longer. But let us not get side-tracked into that for hours. It is for another day.
I wanted to look at the whole thing from end to end. You have to look at food distribution, diet, disease, and the effects of this on the system and people and everything like that. To take the nutrition bit first, I used to run around mountains and leap around the place energetically and one thing that I was always told was that we need balance. People always believe that advice, because they are told, “You are what you eat”; that is the problem—everyone believes that now. But actually we are individuals, and it depends what you do as to what you can do and cannot do. Sportsmen sweat salt. If you run around hills and take a lot of exercise, you have to take extra salt. I have heard of a chap who is the son of a friend of my wife’s, who nearly died on the Welsh mountains because she had him on a salt-free diet, and he thought that it was poisonous to take extra salt. We have to be careful with these messages, because they are not universal messages. I remember talking some years ago to a nutritionist, who was quite concerned about how we were extrapolating the research on middle-aged men’s diets to children, who have very different dietary needs. They need different minerals in different quantities, because their bodies are growing. I realise that these things change throughout life and that there is no one universal message. I do not really get that from the press. We have to be quite careful about how that is put across. It is quite subtle and noble Lords may be experts, but I am not sure that all the public are, and that concerns me quite considerably.
I am very reassured by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, that I was right to stick to butter throughout my life. I believe that it builds up calcium in my bones, and I should be worried about osteoporosis because men are living longer. I do not really know, because I am not a nutritionist, which is right and which is wrong; all I do know is that whenever I am told that I should not eat something, later on someone says that I should and then they say I should not eat it again. Messages throughout history are confused, and I do not think that there is probably one right or wrong. I had heard about the artificial sweetener thing, and I am hugely reassured, because I have stuck to sugar. I dislike artificial sweeteners and have always felt that they are inherently wrong. I wonder sometimes—although this is straight off the top of my head and I know nothing about it—whether if we reduce the salt content in all foods, that does something about our body’s perception of what we are eating and we eat more bulk as a result. These are such complex things that we do not know. I know that noble Lords think that it is simple—they are shaking their heads—but I am not sure that I am convinced that it is so. I shall have to read up on it.
But I am like an ordinary general member of the public. When I was running around hills, the food I ate was very simple. You had protein to build up the body, some carbohydrates for long-term energy and you finished with some sugars to give you an immediate energy boost to keep you going while the body was digesting, or you hit a sugar low otherwise. Equally so, if you are going to take all the sugar out at the end of meals in schools, I bet you that pupils will fall asleep with inattention in the afternoons. That was the concept of the pudding. If you overdo it and do not get the balance right, they are going to get fat—I agree. But you do not just kill and ban something just because of that. The real problem is that we are now so frightened of children running around the place and doing dangerous things that they are kept sitting down the whole time. When I sit in an office, I drink more cups of tea and eat things on the side, whereas if I am moving around and doing things I am not only burning up more energy—I do not have the time to eat as much. The exercise point is the unintended consequence of us getting parents terrified that there is a paedophile standing on every corner, which is probably also driving obesity. You may think that I am mad about this, but a lot of people would agree. We have stopped children walking to school so much. All right, we are now starting with walking buses, and things like that, and that is good. But we must attack this problem not only from the diet point of view.
I shall give your Lordships one other story about this that is quite interesting. Years ago I was travelling in the south of France. Because I did not know how to cook, I lived on Spanish vegetable omelettes for a month, with no meat. When I hit Italy just after that, I had deep intense cravings for ham and I used to go down the street buying it from every shop: “Etto prosciutto, per favore”. I have never lost my craving for ham; it did something to my body. The unbalanced diet does not work, and we have to be very careful of that.
Leaving that aside, the other thing that I wanted to look at was disease—the excessive cleanliness that can come out of regulation. We are born with an immune system that you need to train early. When my children were young, they used to try to drop things that they did not like on the floor for the dogs to eat, but we would make them eat them. They said, “Oh daddy, we’ll get diseases”. “I said, “Don’t worry, it builds up your natural immunities”. Years later, when my daughter went to Tanzania to help build some loos for a school there, she was the only one who did not go down with severe dysentery. She said, “Daddy, you were right”. One of the problems is that we sometimes transfer the risks of some of these things. If we had slightly less food safety and cleanliness, would we increase people’s capacity later on in life to survive? Are we merely making it safer at one end to make it more dangerous at the other? Those are the sorts of things that I worry about quite a lot.
The other thing that I worry about is the general build-up of regulations. Often, all these individual regulations are very reasonable but in aggregate they just become excessive—they bog the entire system down. To horrify the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, I have a Kit-Kat here. Have I read any of this stuff on it? No, I haven’t got time, but I am sure it is all good, well meaning labelling. I have not got powerful enough glasses for that any longer, anyway. In order to make the text bigger they would have to make the packaging bigger, in which case they would increase the waste, in which case we would have more landfill and other undesirable effects.
That brings us to the problem that some of these regulations are very good for one thing but bad for another. I declare an interest here that I am married to a farmer. We are at the start of the food production chain. People are working further and further back with the regulations. Great. I do not have a problem with that in principle. I do not have a problem with the fact that all the glass light bulbs anywhere near a barn should be covered; we do not want glass falling into raw wheat before it is ground up. It would end up with ground glass in it. So that is very sensible. But when you start looking at all the other bits and pieces, you realise that you need an A-level at a minimum to be a farmer. Farmers were not that sort of person; they were people who loved the soil, the land and producing things. They loved the animals. They did not have to tick boxes the entire time and recognise all sorts of obscure things.
You might decide to take the pressure off and sign up to a thing called the Whole Farm Approach. It is a wonderful thing. You go online and tick the boxes, and it checks whether you have ticked them right. But there can be problems. My wife has a few cows that graze some grass, because it is environmentally correct to do so and it is all done under environmental schemes. They are rare-breed South Devons, a native species, and they are hardy animals that live out all year. They are very happy and they have plenty of shelter out there. When we come to the question, “Have you got cattle housing?”, the answer is no. To the question “Does your cattle housing have proper ventilation?” you can answer only yes or no. So do I say, “Yes, my non-existent cattle housing has adequate ventilation”, or do I say truthfully that there is no ventilation because is there is no cattle housing? The answer is that if you tick “no”, you fail. It tells you so, and it tells you to go and sort out your cattle housing ventilation in your non-existent cattle house.
You get other asininities. Because these cows are not housed, there is no manure to spread. Do not worry, in case any NVZ people are listening in, we are very careful about manure loading on the ground—we do all that stuff with compliance, stocking rates and so on. So no, we do not produce any manure. Do we obey RB209 on the correct calculation for manure loading? We do not, because we do not have to do the calculation, so we have failed. Instead, we have to say that we calculate our non-existent manure loading properly. If people are running these sorts of schemes, could they at least employ someone who has bought a pair of decent practical wellies at some point and spent some time on a farm, not just someone who has done an environmental studies course at university and then gone straight into an office?
Some of these things worry me—there is a lack of common sense throughout. The certification you need for everything means that nowadays everything has to be trained for. Now you have to have a certificate on how to move a cow into the back of a horsebox and move it over a couple of miles or whatever. It is just getting out of control. This worries me because it induces a lack of respect for the system and the sensible regulations, and everyone starts working their way around them. If we are going to have regulations, let them be sensible. At the common sense end, people say, “Yes, that makes sense”. It is not just seen as a load of nonsense everywhere.
We overuse the precautionary principle all the way down the chain. I hear all the messages from the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, and others, and I know that to a large degree they are right, but at an individual level I want to make a decision about whether I am going to eat something because it has the right mouth-feel or the right taste, or to buy a bag of crisps because I know that that will keep me awake better when I am tired. I know I should not be driving tired, but sometimes it just happens; you are between stops, there is not another motorway services for 40 miles and you need to keep going. I happen to know that, for me, crisps are better than chocolate for doing that, even though I am doing the wrong thing.
The other thing that worries me, thinking back to what the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said at the end, is the control of agencies, of which, unfortunately, he has bitter experience. One of the unfortunate things that happened at the end of the previous Conservative Administration was the growth of agencies that were outside ministerial control. That lack of control right up the chain of command—so that there is, in effect, a separation—has always worried me. I am rather pleased that these matters are being taken back in-house so that Parliament can look at them properly and the poor Minister does not have to stand up and say, “Until they have fallen outside their remit, I am not allowed to go in and sort it out. I have to pretend that there is nothing wrong because that is what they are telling me, even if the rest of the world is telling me that they are underachieving”. What happened with the RPA is very unfortunate. I am looking forward to seeing that finally sorted out properly.
Can we please stop the EU redefining field boundaries? I have just redone a digital mapping for the third time.
I suppose my message is very simple. Let us have some common sense. I know it is not common and I do not know whether I have it. Let us watch out for having such strict rules that, on the one hand, we say that we do not want waste but, on the other, we have to package so tightly that waste is created by having rules. I do not mind if my bread is wrapped up or handled. I have enough natural immunity, as others should. That is my message. Human beings survive quite well. If you do not, that is bad luck. It may happen to me. However, we were born with responsive systems, which can manufacture antibodies to protect us from viruses, bacteria and so on. Let us train those up early. Let us have a little less regulation and a little more danger in the system, and not go overboard in trying to control everything.
Lord Giddens
Was the noble Earl suggesting earlier that the more people who die young, the more costs are saved by the health service?
The Earl of Erroll
I do not suggest that for society—not at all. I am saying that we should not go overboard in saying that the sole goal in life is its length, rather than its quality or doing the things that you want to do. We control people out of being able to take risks and do dangerous things themselves. I am not saying that we are trying to kill people off early. If people want to do things their way, they should be allowed to do so.