Economy: The Growth Plan 2022

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I join many others in welcoming the return of my noble friend the Minister to the Front Bench; I thoroughly support her sentiments, which she put very well, about the critical importance of growth. I put on the record that no one in the UK Government has ever talked of trickle-down economics—I checked and it is just not the case.

I want to emphasise the significant contribution that public health improvements can make to the wealth of the nation and to achieving the important 2.5% growth goal referred to by my noble friend the Minister. My noble friend Lord Wolfson said that the growth Statement was slightly short of supply-side suggestions, and I agree with him. I am speaking to persuade noble Lords that investment in public health can not only save millions of lives from preventable disease and epidemics but allows us to live longer, accomplish more and contribute more to the economy. Public health also helps reduce inequalities by ensuring that people are not needlessly prevented from fulfilling their potential or contributing to the economy because of illness, disease or premature death.

However, the public health of the nation is not contributing enough to the wealth of the nation; quite the opposite. There is a great exodus from the workforce due to ill health. In a report published today, the Health Foundation noted that economic inactivity in the UK has increased by 700,000 people since before the pandemic; that includes 300,000 people aged 50 to 69 years who are at greater risk of never returning to work. This increase in poor health and economic inactivity restricts our labour supply and our economic growth. The recent OBR report estimates that this contributes £2.9 billion to welfare bills, and I think it probably undercooks that number.

The country’s poor health is also driving up costs for the NHS. Even though it consumes 40% of public expenditure, it is overwhelmed with demand and its costs are growing. Late-stage acute healthcare is the wrong part of the economy to be growing. We should be investing in prevention, not cure. That is the way to grow the economy. If we do not, we are failing to take advantage of the technological revolution that can use genomics, big data, artificial intelligence, modern vaccines and the latest diagnostics to help assess health risks, identify disease and get people on the road to recovery more quickly than ever before.

It was disappointing that the Chancellor did not refer to health in his plan for growth and a shame that my noble friend the Minister did not do so either. I ask the Minister responding to please reflect on the significant link between health and wealth in his comments. In particular, I urge the Treasury to appoint a commission—armed with an economic slide rule rather than a scientist’s microscope—to look at the nation’s health, much as Nick Stern looked at climate change, as an economic threat rather than a scientific phenomenon, so that we can hammer out a plan to get out of the economic cul-de-sac of an increasingly unhealthy population.

Health and Social Care Levy Bill

Lord Bethell Excerpts

2nd reading & Order of Commitment discharged & 3rd reading
Monday 11th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, in the last two years I have become seasoned in these debates on social care. I am completely and utterly persuaded that there are very strong arguments for the fundamental reform of how social care and our health system are provided for, and how it is operationally delivered. In the last 18 months, I have lived a ministerial life with day-to-day meetings where, at first hand, I have seen the pressures on the NHS and the huge and completely unsustainable amounts of money that have been spent to support the response to the pandemic. I have seen for myself the fragility of our social care system, for both the elderly and the vulnerable, the technology we needed to put in place to try to sustain people during the pandemic, the PPE, the support we gave to staff and the financial fragility of many of the providers. I am under no doubt that these matters need to be addressed very fundamentally.

Many noble Lords have spoken very movingly about their strong suggestions for not just the moral and pastoral cases but the fiscal case for why reform is needed, and how the financial issues need to be addressed. But I still stand here pleased to support the Bill because my biggest concern when I was on the Front Bench was that we would not address these issues at all. I was concerned that they would be lost in a political quagmire because I do not see any form of political consensus about any of these ideas. I say that with huge regret; I wish there was a political project and some form of collaborative enterprise where the voices in this Chamber and elsewhere had somehow come together to create some form of consensus, but I just do not see that happening.

Noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, and my noble friend Lord Forsyth, have made incredibly persuasive arguments about how to rewrite the tax code and completely rethink the financial arrangements around health and social care. I am strongly persuaded by the intellectual arguments they make, but I do not see us being in any shape to fundamentally rewrite the tax code this year.

Therefore, with that degree of pragmatism and in celebration of simplicity, I support this money Bill, because it addresses the sustainable financing of health and social care in the near term. Coming out of the pandemic, with a huge backlog at the NHS and with the financial fragility of many care providers, it is essential that we find some money as quickly as we can to plug those gaps.

The sequencing of this is incredibly frustrating. I wish there was a White Paper that laid out a clear programme for reform at every level, but that does not exist. The Bill provides some breathing space and a degree of confidence about where the money has come from, so that that work can be done, and that is why I support the Bill, but the Minister would help enormously if he could answer a few questions in his closing remarks about where the money is going—particularly the £500 million earmarked for the training of care providers. The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, spoke very movingly and quite rightly about care providers, who did so much in the last 18 months and need so much more in terms of visibility of their career prospects, and therefore an idea of how that money will be spent would be extremely valuable.

Respite support for unpaid carers was clearly one of the most acute needs to emerge from the pandemic, and I was very moved to sit through debates on that. It would be very helpful if the Minister could talk about whether there will be resources to contribute to it.

Lastly, on my own particular interest in technology, we can make social care much more productive through better use of digital records and things such as acoustic monitoring and dementia-focused entertainment, and I ask the Minister to reassure us that NHSX will have the resources to address those issues.