King’s Speech

Lord Babudu Excerpts

Wednesday 20th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Babudu (Lab)]

My Lords, health is wealth. The last parliamentary Session saw laws enacted that protect some of the most vulnerable in society and give them more opportunities to do well in life: removing the two-child limit, abolishing no-fault evictions and raising pay for the nearly 3 million workers on minimum wage. These may not seem like health measures, but at their heart they are. There is so much to commend in the Government’s agenda set out in the gracious Speech. Improving special educational needs provision, protecting and helping grow our social housing stock and taking the necessary steps to improve our NHS stand out for me as areas that, done right, can make our country healthier and help our economy to grow faster.

I will spend my limited time on what it feels is just beyond, yet within the reach of, the Government’s agenda as currently set out. I will focus on prioritising prevention. As mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, helping people stay in good health, instead of treating them once they are out of it, has to be the way forward, and prevention is rightly at the heart of the Government’s 10-year health plan. But we have known for generations that prevention beats treatment, yet we still have an NHS that is geared and tooled up to be a sickness service.

NHS modernisation is, by all accounts, hard to do well. As others have noted, it often does not change what it is intended to. But one of the greatest opportunities we have with the Government’s proposed changes is to make much more prevention possible. Organisations such as Demos and the Health Foundation have made compelling cases for ring-fencing more preventive spending and adapting relevant accounting standards so that it can be properly appraised and reported against.

While changes at the top of the health service are lamentable for several reasons, a great advantage of having a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury serving as the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is that we can finally crack what is needed for the Treasury to enable preventive spending in departmental budgets in a similar way to how capital expenditure is ring-fenced. By prevention, I do not mean sending more screening letters to people at greater risk of certain conditions, important though that is. I mean tackling our damaging food environments, poor air and often poor housing stock. I mean supporting people to stay in work instead of allowing them to fall out of it due to preventable ill health.

It may sound obvious once I say it, but where and how you live shapes your health. Too much of our population live in places bombarded with junk food advertising, on incomes that make healthier food unaffordable, breathing air that routinely breaches WHO air quality limits, and in cramped, damp and mouldy homes that exacerbate various health conditions.

Crudely speaking—but not too crudely—the poorer you are and the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be at the sharp end of most of these inequalities. I will not run through all the numbers, but the Government’s own estimates are that food-related illness caused by diet costs the UK £74 billion annually, including £11 billion to the NHS. The Royal College of Physicians estimates that poor air quality in the UK is killing 30,000 people a year and costing the UK £50 billion a year. These are outrageous harms at outrageous costs, and they are happening on our watch. If we can deliver on the 10-year health plan, we can roll back some of these harms. This is a packed legislative agenda. We will have to use our next parliamentary Session to bring a clean air Bill, a race and disabilities Bill and, assuming it is needed, legislation to enforce mandatory reporting on the healthiness of food sales, but if we can use this Session to crack the prevention puzzle, we will be well on our way.

Before I close, I would like to speak briefly about putting people’s voices at the heart of issues affecting them. The Health Bill proposes major changes to how we ensure that patients have a say in their health. I know from my experience in south London that many local Healthwatch organisations have been doing important work. In the proposed changes, we have a great opportunity to consolidate a fragmented system and strengthen accountability to patients. But I counsel the Government to ensure that patients’ views are at the heart of shaping the changes, not just heard once patients start experiencing changes that may not work for them.