Health

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, on his exemplary and cogent speech, not least because, having served together in another place, we share many common interests and experiences, not least that we were part of that exclusive group of former Chief Whips.

The noble Lord was born in Lancashire, in Preston, worked as a science teacher in Kent, and was an elected member of Avon County Council, on which he became his group’s leader. Elected to the House of Commons in 1992, he was fortunate enough to represent the beautiful world heritage city of Bath until standing down earlier this year. A diligent, respected and hard-working Member of the House of Commons, at various times the noble Lord served as his party’s spokesman on education, environment, work and pensions, transport, and culture, media and sport. Like many members of the noble Lord’s party, responsibilities came thick and fast for him. As we heard, in the coalition Government he served as a Minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government. Today, the whole House will want to welcome him. Judging by the quality of his excellent maiden speech, we have a rising star in the making again. We have good reason to look forward to hearing the noble Lord on many occasions in the future.

It was a Liverpool physician, Dr Benjamin Moore, who, in 1910, in The Dawn of the Health Age, is credited as probably the first to use the words “National Health Service”. When it was founded in 1948, Aneurin Bevan declared that it would,

“last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it”.

Bevan saw the NHS as a bulwark against fear. Although we all still have the faith to fight for it, the world in which it functions is fundamentally different, with dramatically changed demographics of population and disease. The backdrop against which today’s debate is being held is a sobering one, from overspending to strikes and demoralised health workers. A consultant recently told me, “Currently, more and more is being asked of us, but we are being given less and less resources to achieve it. There is increasing exhaustion as every bit of spare capacity in every respect is stretched”. That is leading to demoralisation and disaffection. A health-creating society must value its health workers.

It may be a National Health Service but there are endless disparities and inequalities within its system, and modern England is simply too diverse for a model that insists one size should fit all. This is true of our attitude to lifestyle as well as to care itself. For example, smoking rates during pregnancy range from 2% in west London to 28% in Blackpool. Malnutrition has reappeared in some places but not others, with 193 episodes of malnutrition at Salford over a 12-month period, while even the day on which you are admitted to a hospital can affect your chances of survival, with Imperial College publishing research that babies born at weekends in hospitals in England have a greater chance of dying than those born on weekdays. End-of-life care and hospice provision are brilliant in some parts of the country and patchy at best in others. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, reminded us of our equally patchy approach to mental health, a point that was also touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, in his maiden speech.

A few weeks ago the Minister gave me a Written Answer about prescriptions for antidepressants and confirmed that since 1991 more than 660 million antidepressants—at a cost of nearly £6 billion—have been prescribed by the NHS, with year-on-year figures increasing exponentially. If the overuse of antibiotics is creating cause for concern—and it is—should we not also be exercised by the overuse of antidepressants and our failure to address toxic loneliness and isolation? For instance, it is said that around 1 million elderly people do not see a friend or a neighbour during an average week. This has an inevitable detrimental effect on health. Like operations for obesity, this is another disturbing example of putting a poultice on a problem rather than attacking the root causes.

In the search for a healthy society, my bottom line would be that healthy relationships create a healthy society. It is especially important for the vulnerable to know that they are valued, as the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, reminded us earlier. It is no good if our attitude or treatment say otherwise. With around 700,000 people in Britain with degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and predictions that there will be 1 million dementia sufferers by 2026, we cannot value this by cost alone. It has to be how we see people themselves.

If we started from a different place, putting much greater emphasis on our responsibilities to society and to one another, rather than slogans about choice and autonomy, we would create a much healthier, happier and more resilient society. We can smoke, drink, neglect our health or use lethal injections to get rid of the unwanted because we assume that medicine will fix everything and take care of us. But that is simply not so, which is why my noble friend was so right to initiate today’s debate.