Windrush

Lord Adebowale Excerpts

Thursday 29th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adebowale (CB)]

My Lords, it is quite hard to contribute to this debate following the contributions of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, for whom respect is required, the noble Lords, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, Lord Davies and Lord Woolley—we are good friends—and the noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull.

My humble contribution is in honour of the people sitting in the Gallery, because they are dignity incarnate. I am pretty certain that the Windrush generation will not be known as a result of this scandal. It will not be their legacy. But the Home Office will be known. The Home Office’s culture, standards, values and purpose will be known as a result of this scandal.

This is outrageous. We all know it—not just those sitting in this Chamber but those outside. We all knew it when those lorries were driving around London talking about a hostile environment. We all knew that it did not just mean illegal migrants. On my journeys through London, the looks and comments I received—it was permission. It was the lowering of the standards of tolerance, grace, acceptance and dignity that this country is known for throughout the world. It was underlined by the Windrush scandal.

The Home Office’s culture is simply not fit for purpose if it cannot protect or administer for all citizens of this country equally. It should be of deep concern to this House that British citizens were abandoned by the Home Office, which as taxpayers they actually contributed to paying for. The apology was woefully inadequate then and, frankly, is woefully inadequate now.

The compensation process can be described only as cruel. It is almost designed to avoid the recognition of the continued trauma of the loss of income and pensions, already mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin. Why has it taken so long for this outrage to be resolved in favour of British citizens who have been so badly treated and wronged? One has to wonder why these victims of injustice have had to wait so long.

It is true that Age UK should be thanked for maintaining the spotlight on this outrage, but we should also pay tribute to my good friend Patrick Vernon, Amelia Gentleman and Colin McFarlane, whose film must be required watching and listening for anyone who takes seriously their role as a legislator in this country. Their tireless campaigning has kept this disgrace on the books.

In the context of the Post Office scandal, where the pace was immediate and the response instant, the Windrush scandal is glacial by comparison. What are we waiting for? What is the Home Office waiting for? What are the Government waiting for? I have to tell the House that, as the son of a nurse and the chair of the NHS Confederation, I note that many of the victims of this scandal have given loyal service to the NHS for many years.

The reason why the Windrush scandal is so important and goes beyond the incalculable pain and anguish of the victims is that it sends a signal not just to the Windrush generation but to all those people who look like them, speak like them, admire them or are younger than them. It sends a signal to people in this country who live with the Windrush generation about how much we care. The fact is that five Home Secretaries, given the responsibility of resolving this matter, did not even meet them. What greater signal could that send? We all know that what the chief executive does, what the chair does, sends a signal throughout the organisation. This is the Home Secretary we are talking about; it was unacceptable, incompetent and uncaring. Saying sorry just is not enough.

Seeing this outrage as urgent is the Home Office’s primary duty—a duty that it has ignored to date. The noble Baroness, Lady Burt, commented on “We don’t mean you”; I am sorry, but you do—you mean me, my family and all those people who care. In support of my noble friend Lord Woolley’s excellent recommendations, I say that it is critical that a specialist unit be set up to expedite the Windrush claims now. There is no excuse for the Home Office to continue the abuse of these good people. A second apology is due not only to the victims of the Windrush scandal but to the Windrush generation as a whole. I do not want to see parties; I want to see apologies. It is a generational scandal.

The noble Lord, Lord Bourne, asked a pertinent question about why. Why under Suella Braverman was an anchor placed on the progress and procedures that had been put in place to reverse this outrage? I would like an answer. We need to send a different signal not just to the Windrush generation but to the country as a whole. That signal needs to be a message of gratitude, dignity and apology to that generation who helped build the NHS and fought in two world wars, often going unrecognised, and who have built, with many others, this great country.

Policing and Crime Bill

Lord Adebowale Excerpts

Wednesday 14th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, I am reluctant to say anything that could be interpreted in any way as negative about the initiative of my right honourable friend the Member for North Norfolk with regard to the mental health crisis care concordat. It is a very important—I was going to say “document”, but it is far more than a document. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, will not disagree that we should be mainstreaming mental health care in everything and should not have to refer to it specifically. I dare say we will come back to the concordat when we deal with the detention of people who are mentally ill, which we will do later in the Bill.

My only hesitation—and perhaps I should have waited to hear from the Minister, but I am afraid I could not resist jumping in to claim credit for my party and its part in the creation of the concordat—is about whether it is appropriate to refer in legislation to something which I read as being a living arrangement, something that is developing, drawing more and more parties into it and finding more and more ways of achieving its essential objective. The issue is important. It may be a matter of how it is dealt with legislatively.

[Lord Adebowale (CB)]

I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser. I have some experience of the police and their responses to mental health as chair of the commission on the Met’s response to mental health policing in London which—I hesitate to claim credit—led to the concordat mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee and the noble Lord, Lord Rosser. It is important that mental health is included in reference to collaboration because those people are at the sharp end of the inverse care law when it is not. I am concerned and would like to know more about the Government’s intentions in this regard. I support the amendment.

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, for explaining the rationale for this amendment. I feel sure he would agree with me that we are already seeing how much of a difference the concordat is making in developing and improving the response to people who experience a mental health crisis. This includes improving the accessibility of local preventive mental health services and reducing the number of times a police cell is used as a place of safety for a person detained under the Mental Health Act. As the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, stated, we shall have an opportunity to debate that issue further when we reach Chapter 4 of Part 4 of the Bill.

These are important developments that should be supported and encouraged, and I recognise the noble Lord’s intentions in proposing such a requirement. However, we must also recognise that the strength of the concordat is the flexibility that comes from it being—here is the nub—a local voluntary agreement. This means that all local partners who can make a difference can be involved, which will vary from area to area, and enables every local concordat partnership to agree actions that make sense in its area.

I will give some examples of how it is working. In Greater Manchester, local concordat partners have worked with the charity Self Help to create three places of calm where people with mental health concerns can go at unsociable hours and receive the support that will hopefully avert a crisis. In Sussex, which sees the emergency services respond to a particularly high volume of crisis incidents, the partners are working directly together in street triage schemes in most of the main towns. The triage approach has saved lives, notably at Beachy Head, where, as we know, a lot of suicides have been recorded. In the West Midlands, the police, ambulance and mental health trust share details of people who frequently call them in distress and jointly review the care being offered to them. In many cases these people are now following a constructive care plan instead of phoning in at least four times a day.

As the concordat is a voluntary agreement and does not, as such, impose specific duties on its signatories, we believe that this amendment is misconceived in suggesting otherwise. I would also question the appropriateness of singling out mental health crisis care in the Bill to the exclusion of other areas where collaboration agreements could lead to improved efficiency and effectiveness in the delivery of front-line services.

Our local emergency services are acutely aware of the need to appropriately and compassionately respond to those in mental health crisis. I have already pointed to a number of excellent examples of collaboration between emergency services. The provisions in the Bill will encourage and support further such collaboration, and although the noble Lord is right to flag this as an important area where local agencies need to work better together, I am not persuaded that adding this amendment to the Bill helps to secure such an outcome.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

I cannot answer that. We have to give these agreements time to work; a lot of them are quite newly put together, and it may well be that it has not been worked out where they need specific people to deal with the problems that are happening. On the whole, where they are working, they are working well. They have led to collaboration between the police and all the emergency services, such as the health service, to come together to find where they need extra help in the areas where they have problems.

[Lord Adebowale]

I understand the point that the Minister is making but I wonder whether she might comment on this question: in areas where such concordats do not exist, are the Government willing to accept that those with mental health challenges will receive a poorer service? Do they accept that if you happen to live in an area where the voluntary agreements have not come together, you get a poor service? If the concordat is doing as well as she states, why should it not be in the Bill so that everyone can benefit?

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

I am not suggesting that where there is no concordat, people are not receiving good help. The whole point is that you do not have to have a concordat; it is voluntary. That is the strength of it. It is not always necessary to intervene in everything. People should be allowed the flexibility to organise their arrangements as they feel fit for their area.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Adebowale Excerpts

Tuesday 15th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adebowale]

My Lords, I rise to add my two-pennorth to this veritable cornucopia of subjects this afternoon. We have moved from tennis to defamation, to children in care, the criminal justice Bill and weights and measures. It is a fascinating encyclopaedia of issues, which shows the expertise available in this House. I shall refer to the draft social care Bill. I thought hard about whether I should contribute to this ritual of debates on the Queen’s Speech, mainly because it does seem such a ritual. However, a friend of mine who has had her welfare services cut asked me, “You are a Member of the House of Lords. What are you going to do about it?”. I struggled to give a response. This individual is quite wise. She actually watches House of Lords debates, which says something; but then she can because she has the time. I said, “I do not know really. It is a bit of a struggle”. So she said, “You spent all day talking about House of Lords reform, and less people are interested in that than whether they will be able to afford any health and social care. Get up there”. So here I am. I am getting up here because there is a problem. I am all for House of Lords reform, but more people care about whether they are going to get any care.

The Government made a promising start in tackling the huge amount of work needed to reform the social care system. Before I go on, I should declare an interest as the chief executive of Turning Point, which is a social enterprise in the health and social care sector. The Dilnot commission marked a good start in that it understood the,

“urgency of reforming the system of social care”,

a phrase that was in the coalition agreement published in May 2010. Setting up the Commission on Funding of Care and Support showed that the Government accepted that tackling the funding crisis was to be an imperative part of their work. Andrew Dilnot’s work was praised by many, and his report and recommendations were published almost a year ago. However, the Government are yet to publicly outline their response. They have remained quiet on funding. A White Paper on social care and a progress report on funding are therefore still eagerly awaited and anticipated by those who work in social care.

But the wait is most acute for those who are suffering in the current system. The draft care and support Bill, no doubt a fascinating read for many before a roaring fire, is a positive move towards reform, but it has been met with a lot of disappointment because it fails to mention or use the F-word—funding. Proposals on funding will be brought forward separately from the White Paper, and it is now even possible that a new funding system will not be fully in place until as late as 2025. The Treasury may be unhappy about the £1.7 billion per year that the Dilnot proposals would cost, but these changes are critical to the lives of those in need of care, as they are to their relatives, who still face uncertainty over timeframes and funding issues. The system is creaking as demand increases, so the question of funding needs to be addressed urgently for the short, medium and long term.

I was one of 78 signatories to an open letter sent to the Prime Minister earlier this month organised by the Care and Support Alliance. It warns that the system is chronically underfunded and that, without reform, too many old and disabled people will be left in desperate circumstances, struggling on alone and living in misery and fear. The need for a clear consensus on a new funding settlement is also the number one priority set out in another letter to the Prime Minister that I signed in March—I have been signing a lot of letters to the Prime Minister of late—as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on People with Complex Needs and Dual Diagnosis. Other signatories were the chairs of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Ageing and Older People and those groups with an interest in carers, dementia, disability, Down’s syndrome, housing and care for older people, learning disability, ME, MS, Parkinson’s and social care.

Everyone knows that reform will be expensive, but I agree with the Local Government Association and insist that it is worth paying for. There will be those who argue that we cannot afford it, but the reality is that we cannot afford not to. Local authorities are starting to feel the weight of extra responsibilities from social care to public health, while simultaneously their budgets are growing smaller. Now is not the time to stall progress. The LGA has also recently warned that the need to plug the current gap in care funding would be at the cost of other public services for vulnerable people. It is clear that this extra money is needed as the social care system is already in crisis.

While a large proportion of spending goes to support older people, it is important to remember that many others are in need of a comprehensive and well funded social care system. Indeed, at Turning Point we support many people with complex needs that range from alcohol dependency to mental health, learning disabilities and so on. Strongly linked to the need for social care funding is the need for integration and personalisation. My work in looking at the benefits realisation of integrating services shows that when they are integrated, for every £1 spent, a saving of £2.65 is made on delivery. The Department of Health-funded Partnerships for Older People Projects focused on health, well-being and independence promotion and prevention. They saw a 47% reduction in overnight hospital stays and a 29% reduction in A&E visits. There were also reductions in physiotherapy, occupational therapy and out-patient appointments, resulting in a cost reduction of £2,166 per person. The clues to the model for the funding of social care are in place. According to London Councils, better integrated services that support people with long-term conditions could also result in savings of £2.7 billion annually.

The current system is out of date and can fail on quality, varying widely across the country—not just in the case of children’s services, as has been mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. We need an integrated and personalised system allowing older and disabled people and their families to participate and live with dignity and independence. The eligibility and assessment system needs improving as part of this process.

I know there is sympathy and desire on the part of the Government, but it has become increasingly difficult to believe that they understand the necessity of reform as a matter of urgency, two years on from the Dilnot commission. The same level of determination and the same amount of time as have been devoted to House of Lords reform need to be focused on the lives of thousands and millions of people who will need health and social care, and the same level of urgency is required in the area of health and social care finance that was put into the efforts to push through the Health and Social Care Act.