Unhealthy Housing: Cost to the NHS

Debate between Jim Shannon and Barry Sheerman

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the cost of unhealthy housing to the NHS.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I thank right hon. and hon. Members for attending the debate, particularly the Scottish National party spokesperson, the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day); the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn); and the Minister. I look forward to positive contributions from all those able to participate.

I am grateful to have been allocated the debate. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group for healthy homes and buildings, I am delighted to have the opportunity to raise awareness and concerns about the cost of unhealthy homes to the NHS. I thank the background staff, who are in the Gallery, who have given information to us all, myself in particular, to help us in the debate.

Our APPG was created to shed light on the many problems caused to our nation’s health, wellbeing and economy as a result of people living and working in unhealthy homes and buildings. Given that most of us spend some 90% of our time indoors, it stands to reason that our homes need to contribute positively to our physical and mental health and wellbeing, not diminish it. This debate is so important because it pulls together the critical issues. It is perhaps not a normal Westminster Hall debate, but it pushes very much to the fore the effect of the homes that we live in on our health and, ultimately, on the NHS.

The APPG, following a weight of written and oral evidence received, launched a report, “Building our Future: Laying the Foundations for Healthy Homes and Buildings”, in October last year. It was a well addressed report, to which there were many contributions, and it brought together those with a deep interest in homes and those with a deep interest in health issues. It is good to have the report finished.

I have given the Minister a copy of the report, which contains a series of excellent recommendations that are helpful to the Government and will help us to move forward. I hope the debate will be a turning point, and that those recommendations will lay the foundations for change. The report sets out what needs to be done to ensure that new and existing homes do not cause or exacerbate health problems, because they often do. Many of us here, as elected representatives, will have people coming to us every week to complain about their home and, more often than not, the health problems related to that.

This debate is long overdue. It is time to raise awareness of the extent of the problem, and to recognise the human cost to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of doing nothing. It is clear from the White Paper that unhealthy homes cost the economy and our society each and every year. Living in or occupying unhealthy homes directly and negatively impacts on human health. Unhealthy homes that lack daylight, or are cold, damp, poorly insulated, energy inefficient, overcrowded, noisy, badly designed and generate poor indoor air quality can, in the extreme, lead to unnecessary deaths.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Gentleman is an old friend of mine. I think he knows that those of us who campaign on carbon monoxide poisoning really welcomed his excellent report. I have lost three constituents to carbon monoxide poisoning, which is one symptom of an unhealthy home. I assure him that we will work closely with him to ensure that no more people die of carbon monoxide poisoning.

[Jim Shannon]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. My hon. Friend the Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell), who is sat to my left, also had constituents who passed away a few years ago due to carbon monoxide poisoning. That was in a holiday home, but it was none the less a problem. We in the APPG will take the comments of the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) on board, and we look forward to working with him.

Let me detail some of my concerns arising from the evidence that we heard. The effects of poor housing are estimated to cost the NHS £2.5 billion per annum; that rises when we consider all housing throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The true cost lies in human misery and lives lost. Some of the figures are quite extreme, but they underline the issue. Some 43,900 excess winter deaths occurred in England and Wales in the winter of 2014-15, with cold homes causing one fifth of those. That is more than the number of deaths caused by road accidents, alcohol or drug abuse, which puts into perspective the need to make sure that homes are healthy. Children in cold homes are more than two times more likely to suffer from a respiratory problem. Cold homes increase the incidence of cold and flu, and worsen conditions such as arthritis and rheumatism. Again, we see that every day in our constituencies.

One in four adolescents living in a cold home is at risk of multiple mental health problems, so we are not always talking about physical issues; there can be emotional and mental issues as well. Those in poor-quality homes that lack effective ventilation suffer from indoor air pollution, which has been linked to allergies, asthma, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease and, more recently, dementia.

[Jim Shannon]

If only we had that power! That is not to take away from the importance of the issue of social housing, which I will touch on later. Let us be honest: many people go into the housing that their pockets allow. As a result, they end up in housing that is not particularly in the right category, the right condition or the right shape. The hon. Gentleman is right that the benefit cap also dictates where someone can go. I will give the Minister plenty of time to get her thoughts together on that. However, that is an important point, and I will touch on it later.

Poor indoor air quality has an annual cost to the UK of more than 204,000 healthy life years. It causes thousands of deaths per year, and gives rise to health costs in the order of tens of millions of pounds. One third of people in the United Kingdom suffer from mould in their homes and are at increased risk of respiratory problems, infections, allergies and asthma. Just last week, I saw three constituents with mould growth issues in their houses—mould not caused by condensation, but ingrained in the walls. Sometimes ensuring that the housing associations or housing executive take those issues on board is quite a job.

There are more than half a million overcrowded households. The issue affects one in 10 children—something we cannot ignore. Overcrowding is linked to health and development issues, including meningitis, respiratory conditions, slow growth rates, accidents in the home, stress, anxiety, depression and poor adult health. Occupants of poor-quality housing are more likely to suffer from restricted daylight and noise pollution.

We cannot ignore noise pollution. In the news this morning someone put forward the idea of building houses and flats over railway lines. I am not sure if any hon. Member saw that. The first thing that came to my mind was the noise of the trains continually going underneath. How could those homes be adapted to mitigate that? We need to address noise pollution. Natural light helps to improve the recovery times of long-stay patients and reduces anxiety and the need for medication. Noise pollution can cause long-term health issues and increase stress and the risk of cardiovascular effects.

It is clear that there is a lack of public awareness of these problems, and limited knowledge of the facts. Too often, the homes we live in are, in so many ways, causing or aggravating health problems.

[Mr Sheerman]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very good speech, and I am nervous about intervening again, but will he accept this point? He talks about the noise pollution from living over a railway, and we know that private rented accommodation is a real problem. On the other side of the equation, very modern and expensive housing that is totally hermetically sealed could be as dangerous, because it traps all the gases and pollutants within the home—not only carbon monoxide, but many other emissions.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jim Shannon and Barry Sheerman

Thursday 22nd March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

rose—

Marine Environment

Debate between Jim Shannon and Barry Sheerman

Tuesday 14th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the UK’s role in the degradation of the marine environment.

It is a pleasure to be given the opportunity to lead a debate on this issue. I do not think that I have secured a Westminster Hall debate for two or three months. It is a great pleasure to secure one on this particular subject. I do not know whether anyone in Westminster Hall today thinks I am a latecomer to the subject, but when I was a very young lecturer at Swansea University I had the privilege of listening to a distinguished professor, Ernst Schumacher, just after he published a book called “Small is Beautiful”, and being introduced—as a traditionally trained LSE economist—to the notion of sustainable development and sustainable economies rooted in small, local communities. That started me on a lifetime of social enterprise and a lot of enterprises that were about the environment and sustainability.

Therefore, I am not a latecomer. I have not just read The Times 2 section, which, rather serendipitously, today is all about the plastic found in our marine environment, or just been influenced by that wonderful—what do we call him?—“saint of the environment”, David Attenborough; I saw “Blue Planet II” last night. He has become very much associated not only with such wonderful research but with wise advice, based on the research and good evidence about the dangers to the planet in general and to the marine environment in particular.

So I am not a Johnny-come-lately. Indeed, I was a founding member of Friends of the Earth in the United Kingdom. Many years ago, I started a group called the Socialist Environment and Resources Association, or SERA, a left-wing environmental organisation. On environmental urban mines, we believed that, instead of digging holes in the Earth’s crust and taking out virgin material, we should recycle and reuse material, including the waste that flows from towns and cities. I say that just to prove that I have some interest in and a record over the years of involvement in these subjects, and the desire, as a social entrepreneur, to do something about those issues in communities, both national and local.

The fact is that our marine environment is at risk, in a way that we have not previously thought it was at risk. I woke up to the issue a couple of years ago. I suppose I always knew how bad the marine environment was becoming. We had all heard of these vast islands of floating, semi-submerged plastic, which nobody knew how to deal with or tackle and which were getting bigger. The Environmental Audit Committee has done excellent work recently on microbeads. So I was conscious of the impact of that. I was also interested in recycling, what we did with waste and where waste ended up, as well as sustainability. All that came together, I suppose, when I reread an old favourite of mine by the man who created the term “the dismal science” for economics. Thomas Malthus predicted that, eventually, the population would outgrow the food supply and that we would all perish, unless two wonderful things happened—war or pestilence. That was Malthus’s way of suggesting that there would be a natural ability of the economy and society to renew themselves as we ran out of food.

The old counter-argument to Malthus was that human beings were clever, innovative and creative. They would discover new forms of science, applied science and engineering. Agriculture would become highly sophisticated in how it treated the land and grew crops, and we would become so much more productive.

The critics of Malthus were absolutely right, but the fact is that, although humans are creative, clever and innovative, they are also greedy, careless and exploitative. That is the truth. I said to one of my staff yesterday, “It’s not the sort of thing you run round your constituency saying to your constituents”. I do not pick on the British people particularly, but humans are clever, careless and exploitative, and they are in danger—one species—of destroying this planet through climate change and global warming and what we are doing to the oceans of the world, let alone what we have done to the poor species that we have shot, eaten, killed and driven into extinction.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way; I had asked him before the debate if he would take an intervention. Does he agree that it is not only essential that we preserve and protect our marine environment but that fishermen are not prevented from sustainable fishing in areas that they know? Does he agree that science has proven to be fully capable of handling sensible fishing, as was done through the common fisheries policy? Does he realise that there are many who can sustain a business and that fishing is one of them, and that the environment will not be harmed by it?

[Mr Sheerman]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to bring up the issue of fishing. With your permission, Mr Owen, I will come back to fishing a little later, including that specific point. Of course there are better ways and worse ways of fishing. When we have Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs questions, if anyone mentions bottom-scraping, everyone giggles, but the fact is that there are ships that do scrape the bottom of the ocean, taking everything. That is a savage and unacceptable form of fishing.

[Mr Sheerman]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right; I agree with every word he says. I will also put that issue on the backburner for a moment, because I want to talk about how we move forward. Anyone who saw the last David Attenborough film knows that it offered one little chink of light. Viewers get to the stage where they are feeling quite suicidal about the future of the marine environment, and then suddenly David Attenborough mentions that, actually, there is some possibility of the oceans renewing themselves in some areas, although not as well as we might hope.

Let me talk about the purpose of this debate. There has been a slow awakening to the peril the marine environment is in, but now is the time that we must act. David Attenborough says that we have 50 years to save ourselves, but I think that he is being generous. I think that we have to act much more quickly and decisively, and have the right kind of organisations. I am afraid that the only political things that I will be saying today are about what I believe to be the real strengths of the European Union over a number of years in helping us to co-operate across nations to tackle some of the great problems of the environment.

I remember meeting Surfers Against Sewage in my early days in the House. Mr Owen, you will remember what the seas around Swansea were like a few years ago. They were full of sewage—dreadful conditions. So many of our coastal towns used to pump sewage, in a pipe, out into the sea and, of course, back it would come. There has been a remarkable change because of European regulation on discharge to the sea. We rapidly cleaned up our seas and beaches, and also those right across Europe, so that when holidaying there we would know how clean the environment was; there is a standard and a system of flags.

I also remember the tiny amount of recycling that was done in our country in my early days in the House. Local authorities were at 14% recycling. The rates across the country have since zoomed up. Why? Because we took on board European regulations that meant the payment of a levy on any waste that was put in a hole in the ground. What a society we used to be, not long ago, putting all our waste product in holes in the ground. It is still there—a great treachery, a misspent youth. For 150 years, going back to the Victorians, we threw everything we had finished with into holes in the ground. That was a disgrace, and it was only European regulation and landfill tax that turned it around. We now have a much better—but not perfect—situation. Funnily enough, only recently I asked how much each local authority in Britain pays in landfill tax. I have not yet had a reply; the Government are very reluctant to give me the information, saying, “It is so difficult to collect. Inland Revenue cannot provide it”. It is, however, a very good indicator of how effective the authorities are in their recycling.

[Jim Shannon]

The hon. Gentleman is very gracious in giving way a second time. It is the new generation of young people who are very much into recycling; the older generation must learn to get into it. Does he agree that, when it comes to educating and thinking ahead, it needs to be at primary and secondary school levels, so that the next generation coming through can continue what has been and even do it better?

[Mr Sheerman]

I hope we are not going to agree on everything here, but again, the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. He will know that I was the Chairman of what is now the Education Committee for years and I am chairman of the John Clare Trust, which, in the name of our great English poet, who lived between 1793 and 1864—probably our greatest poet of the environment, in my opinion—has a centre where we specialise in getting young people to come to the countryside to learn about the rural environment, and so to love it. If young people in our towns and cities do not visit the countryside, we will not get them to love it at all.

We have expanded that work into my constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) will know that we have a charity called Greenstreams, through which we try to clean up the rivers and streams in our part of Yorkshire. In the industrial revolution, the rivers were terribly polluted and the fish were killed; the colours of the dyestuffs would flow into the rivers and make them red, blue, whatever—very patriotic—killing everything. Now the water is clean again and we take children down there to show them that if they lift a stone they will see wiggly things that the trout eat, which are then eaten by the kingfishers—the cycle of life. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) is very much on the ball. We must start in schools, and the earlier the better.

I want to cover four things: plastics, overfishing, oil and petrol, and then come back to the big picture of climate change. We are sometimes too polite, aren’t we? If we look back over 400 years, we in Britain, as the earliest industrialised nation, with the greatest sea power, have not been good at keeping the global environment clean. I think we chopped down most of our trees to build warships. The biggest problem today is that as China is the most polluted country, followed by India, and then the United States, if we do not work with those large countries, everything we do in the United Kingdom will be of much less value. We need international co-operation, but not in a colonial way, pitching up in any country—even in Russia, which is a great polluter—and saying, “You should do what we do”. They would point to us and say, “Well you don’t have a very good record. You’re a late convert”. We are late converts, but we know a great deal now about how to change the environment in which we live and make it more sustainable.

Let us quickly look at one of the inspirations of recent years: the United Nations sustainable development goals. Goal 14 is about conserving oceans and protecting them from the adverse impacts of climate change, overfishing, acidification, pollution and eutrophication. At United Nations level, it is very important that every country sign up to the goals and make them happen.

My other interest as a Back Bencher is transport safety. Many years ago I introduced seatbelt legislation and my first private Member’s Bill was on children in cars. I have just recently been elected chairman of the Global Network for Road Safety Legislators. That relates to a different United Nations sustainable development goal, but that package of measures, globally driven by the United Nations, is, at the end of the day, what we must look to—international co-operation.

I was on a ship recently, and its environmental officer explained to me just how tight the fleet’s regulations were, and how stringent its rules were, on recycling, including dropping off metal at one port and plastic at another. Her fiancé, however, worked for a commercial firm in Alaska, where they basically threw everything overboard—no rules, no regulation and, it seems, no conscience.

Foreign Direct Investment 2016-17

Debate between Jim Shannon and Barry Sheerman

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson) on delivering such an excellent and comprehensive speech. Like he, I am a glass-half-full person, who looks optimistically towards the future, and the facts, as I hope to illustrate, will indicate that things are very bright. If we try to be positive and look forward we can find solutions and see the good things. It is not always good to dwell upon the negative things; it is good to be aware of them but not to dwell on them.

Northern Ireland, as such a small country, is somewhat reliant on foreign investment and it is clear that we have the expertise and knowledge to attract investment from all over the world. I want to give a Northern Ireland perspective, because the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole referred to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I say that often; I have said it every day since I came into this House back in 2010, to emphasise that we are very much part of the United Kingdom and that we are all together—Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England.

Northern Ireland secured 33 foreign direct investment projects during 2015-16—as the Minister knows, we have some good stories—which created more than 2,000 jobs. Despite the usual Brexit warnings that scream that FDI will be affected by our leaving the EU zone, I read a piece by an economist that states:

“From a Northern Ireland perspective, the type of inward investment we have been winning has been back office functions, which may not need the access to the single market, if its function is to serve a parent company. Investor motives for investing here would back that up, with a strong majority of investors citing the skilled workforce as the main reason for investing here.”

Backing that up, figures in yesterday’s press indicate that the region of the United Kingdom with the strongest growth rate is Northern Ireland. So there is an indication that we are growing and that Northern Ireland is, for once, leading the way.

[Mr Sheerman]

Before the hon. Gentleman gets carried away with all these good feelings about the future, he would surely agree that our productivity is absolutely awful, looking carefully at UK performance. Many people who would like to invest in this country are worried about low productivity rates. Productivity is much higher in Yorkshire, which has a much bigger population than Northern Ireland and some of the places he has mentioned. We are doing very well and manufacturing is still alive and well. People would be much better off investing in manufacturing in Yorkshire than coming to Northern Ireland.

[Jim Shannon]

I am always happy to receive an intervention from the hon. Gentleman. He is definitely an optimist as he is a Huddersfield Town supporter, and that is an indication of optimism at its highest. I wish him well, although on Saturday I hope Leicester beat them. I digress slightly, but there are ways of doing better and we need to address productivity.