Point of Order

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Sarah Wollaston

Wednesday 24th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Ind)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is very rare for this House to find a named individual in contempt of Parliament, and to agree unanimously to admonish them. It would surely be a disgrace for Dominic Cummings to be rewarded, despite being found in contempt, with a post as senior adviser to the incoming Prime Minister. In opening the debate on the motion to admonish on 2 April, the Government stated that they had

“full respect for the privileges of the House of Commons and will continue to uphold them. They are crucial to the independence of Parliament and the strength of our democracy.”—[Official Report, 2 April 2019; Vol. 657, c. 942.]

Together with the Chair of the Committee of Privileges, the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), who unfortunately had to leave for another engagement, I seek your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker, on whether the appointment of Mr Cummings would undermine that commitment to respect the House.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I thank the hon. Lady for her point of order, and for her courtesy in giving me notice of it. She will know very well that the appointment of persons to official positions at Downing Street or elsewhere is not a matter that can be addressed by the Chair, but resolutions of this House are a matter of concern to the Chair. I can confirm that the House passed a resolution on 2 April that said, in terms, that Mr Cummings

“committed a contempt both by his refusal to obey”

a

“Committee’s order to attend it and by his subsequent refusal to obey the House’s Order of 7 June 2018”—[Official Report, 2 April 2019; Vol. 657, c. 941.]

and the House therefore formally admonished him for his conduct.

The hon. Lady has drawn this important matter to the attention of the House and, indeed, the Government, and although I can give her no further help at this moment, I am quite sure that she will find a way of pursuing her concerns. Not least, the matter is in her own hands when she chairs the Liaison Committee. I am quite sure that she will find a way of taking this matter forward, which would be quite proper.

Data Protection Bill [Lords]

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Sarah Wollaston

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 9th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. We have only 40 minutes left to debate this group and around 10 Members wish to speak. If everybody speaks for four to five minutes, everybody will get in; if not, some people will not get to speak at all.

[Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)]

I rise to speak to new clause 12, which was tabled in my name, that of my colleague, the hon. Member for Stockton South (Dr Williams), and those of other members of the Health and Social Care Committee and Members from all parties.

I wish to speak about the importance of medical confidentiality, because it lies at the heart of the trust between clinicians and their patients, and we mess with that at our peril. If people do not have that trust, they are less likely to come forward and seek the care that they need. There were many unintended consequences as a result of the decision enshrined in a memorandum of understanding between the Home Office, the Department of Health and NHS Digital, which allowed the sharing of addresses at a much lower crime threshold than serious crime. That was permitted under the terms of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, but patients were always protected, in effect, because the terms of the NHS constitution, the guidance from the General Medical Council and a raft of guidance from across the NHS and voluntary agencies protected the sharing of data in practice.

This shift was therefore particularly worrying. There were many unintended consequences for the individuals concerned. The Health and Social Care Committee was also deeply concerned about the wider implications that this might represent a shift to data sharing much more widely across Government Departments. There was a risk, for example, that the Department for Work and Pensions might take an interest in patients’ addresses to see whether people were co-habiting for the purpose of investigating benefit fraud. There was a really serious risk of that.

I am afraid that the letter that we received from the Department of Health and Social Care and the Home Office declining to withdraw from the memorandum of understanding made the risk quite explicit. I would just like to quote from the letter, because it is very important. I also seek further clarification from the Minister on this. The letter states that

“it is also important to consider the expectations of anybody using the NHS—a state provided national resource. We do not consider that a person using the NHS can have a reasonable expectation when using this taxpayer-funded service that their non-medical data, which lies at the lower end of the privacy spectrum, will not be shared securely between other officers within government in the exercise of their lawful powers in cases such as these.”

I profoundly object to that statement. There was no such contract in the founding principles of the NHS. As I have said, it is vital that we preserve that fundamental principle of confidentiality, including for address data. I was delighted to hear the Minister’s words at the Dispatch Box, but can she just confirm for me absolutely that that statement has now been superseded?

NHS Pay

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Sarah Wollaston

Wednesday 13th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr Wollaston]

I welcome that and I look forward to working with the right hon. Gentleman over the coming months to try to encourage colleagues on both sides of the House, including the Front Benches, to agree to the idea. Next year is the 70th anniversary of the NHS, and I cannot think of anything more constructive we could do than to work across political parties in order to deliver sustainable long-term funding for health and social care.

I will bring my remarks to a close because I know that many hon. Members wish to speak. I look forward to hearing suggestions from colleagues in the House and outside this place about the points they would like the Health Committee’s inquiry into the nursing workforce to cover.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

It will be obvious to the House that a great many people wish to speak this afternoon. We have a limited time for this debate, which will probably finish at around 4.30 pm. Therefore, after the next speaker, I will impose an initial time limit of five minutes, which might be reduced further depending on how many people still wish to speak. There will, however, be no time limit on the next speaker as I call Mr Stephen Morgan to make his maiden speech.

Health and Social Care

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Sarah Wollaston

Monday 27th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr Wollaston]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is important that the evidence is available not just to us, but to the local communities. There should also be a sense that consultations are a genuine process. As I have said, it is about the co-design of new services. Time and again, we have reports from the NHS that demonstrate that co-producing new services results in a much better service in the long run, so I thank her for her point.

We are talking about the cuts not only to the trusts, but to the clinical commissioning groups. What we are seeing now is that CCGs are being asked to hold back £800 million of their budgets to offset deficits in trusts. Again, this is about patient care that is being cut back. Alongside that, we have seen cuts to Public Health England and to Health Education England. The idea that we have an NHS that is on a sustainable footing is, I am afraid, simply not the case. I ask Ministers to be realistic about the current position, and I ask our Chancellor, in his forthcoming Budget, to address this matter by urgently giving a lifeline to social care, because that will benefit not just social care, but the NHS. In addition to announcing that lifeline, which I hope he can do by bringing forward the better care fund with new money rather than a transfer from the NHS, I hope that he will promise a genuine review of sustainable future funding covering both health and social care. I call on Members from across the House to agree that, rather than our having the usual confrontational debates, we should see this as a generational challenge that will face whichever party is in power over the coming years. We should all work together, for the benefit of our constituents, to produce a sustainable future for the NHS and social care.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

I call the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, Meg Hillier.

Mitochondrial Replacement (Public Safety)

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Sarah Wollaston

Monday 1st September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)]

I rise to urge the Minister not to delay bringing forward the regulations, and I urge the House not to lose sight of the children and their families who are devastated by mitochondrial diseases. Of course it is absolutely right that the House debates the ethics, as so many Members have pointed out, but at times the language used has clouded those arguments. We have heard terms such as “eugenics”, “three-parent babies”, “designer babies”. This is not about wanting to create a child who is more beautiful or more intelligent. This is about wanting to spare families and children from a lifetime of devastating medical problems. We have the potential to do that. I fully respect those who oppose this on ethical grounds—they are entirely consistent in their view—but I am concerned that there has been selective misquoting from the scientific evidence. The House is not really qualified to examine the evidence in detail, and that is why we have expert panels, and bodies such as the HFEA, to advise and regulate this, and they do so with a great deal of thoughtfulness and expertise.

We have to be clear that the third scientific review, the expert panel, which I regret has been selectively misquoted, has looked at that evidence and has concluded that it does not show that the technique is unsafe. We will not know whether the technique is effective until we allow trials in a human context—it may be that there are complications; we have to be honest about that, and we have to be honest that this is not the same as a blood transfusion—but we do know absolutely for certain that families and children are suffering now from these diseases. That is why, on the balance of the safety issues and the advice from the expert panels, we should not reject this on safety grounds.

The point made by the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) about the child sitting in front of him in his surgery whose parents would not change that child was particularly powerful. No one is asking to change a child. What we are asking is for future generations of children to be spared that part of them that creates the suffering, but to keep within them all the personality and everything else in their genetic make-up that makes them who they are.

I am also concerned to point out that if I were to donate my mitochondrial—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is it in order to ask whether Professor Lord Winston was consulted before his name was added to the motion on the Order Paper?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

It is in order to ask the question. I cannot give the hon. Lady an answer, but I have heard what she said, and I am sure that those who were involved in that have heard what she said. If the noble Gentleman was not consulted, I would consider that to be most discourteous.