Anaesthesia Associates and Physician Associates Order 2024

Debate between Lord Bethell and Baroness Harding of Winscombe

Monday 26th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I support this Motion and, not for the first time in a debate on health, I find myself in almost complete agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the remarks he made earlier in an extremely powerful speech. We are exemplifying the right debate here, in that this is a subtle and important issue.

I do not wish to suggest that I challenge the esteemed clinicians from a number of the different clinical tribes who have spoken this evening. I speak as a non-expert, as a manager of people, and as a patient. Non-experts in healthcare would find it completely baffling that we have 3,000 people working day in, day out in clinical roles who are currently unregulated. It cannot be right, and I have not heard any argument this evening that suggests that anyone in the Chamber thinks it is right. I think we are all united in our agreement that these hard-working, brilliant people need proper professional statutory regulation.

I hope that, therefore, the order, as it stands, passes. But it is worth dwelling on why this has created so much controversy. Fundamentally, it is because change is hard—and people change is hard and scary. There is a real danger that we underestimate how important it is to look after the people who care for us, and that what we are really hearing from a number of the different clinical tribes is fear, frustration and hurt that they are not being looked after. The real tragedy is that, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said, in the process we have made 3,000 more people feel hurt, unloved and uncared for in the awful debate out in the Twittersphere or X-sphere or whatever it is called.

I will not talk for very long. I just want to register that this has been far too long unfixed, that 20 years is too long for people to be practising without regulation, and that other countries around the world are far ahead of us on this. We should be discussing how we properly define the scope of practice and how we then extend that scope of practice, with the appropriate training for prescribing rights and the ability to order X-rays, just as happens in many other countries in the world. We are all in this Chamber rightly proud of the NHS, but we must not stick our heads in the sand and convince ourselves we are brilliant when others fixed this issue 20-plus years ago.

I finish by saying that regulation is clearly not enough. I completely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay: we have to recognise that our health and care workers feel unloved and uncared for. There are far too many stories of people unable to get a hot meal when they are working night shifts or having to cancel their own wedding because they are not rostered to be allowed to take the time off. None of that requires professional regulation; that requires professional management. We need both of those.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that my noble friend the Minister will not mind if I say that I am very grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett, Lady Brinton and Lady Finlay, for the regret amendments and this debate today. Secondary legislation comes through the House and too often we overlook it. Every now and again we need to put a spotlight on some of the important measures that go through.

I regret two things. I deeply regret the way in which the professions of associate physician and associate anaesthetist have been denigrated in the press, in the lobbying material that has been sent around, and, frankly, in aspects of this debate. I agree with my noble friend Lady Harding and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, that the feelings and sentiment of these hard-working contributors to our healthcare system have been overlooked. I was sent a very robust briefing by the BMA. I replied: “Is there nothing positive you can say about these hard-working healthcare professionals?” The reply came back—the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, was copied in on it—that there was not: there was nothing positive it could say about them. I greatly regret that tone, and wish it had not happened.

I am not a clinician and I do not have anything to rival some of the comments made by the clinicians. However, I point out that our hard-working healthcare professionals are incredibly stretched. Take GPs, for instance: 350 million appointments were conducted in primary care last year, 160 million of which were by GPs themselves. That was 50 million more than in 2019, so 44 more appointments per practice. That trend is going up. Britain is getting less healthy, and there is a large amount of immigration. The number of full-time equivalent GPs—although the number of GPs has gone up, a lot of them are working fewer hours—has decreased from 28,000 in September 2015 to 27,000 in October 2023. The complexity of many people turning up to these appointments is very high.

We have to find people from somewhere to do some of these appointments, and there are going to be people who have a lot to contribute who do not necessarily go through the 10 years of qualification to become a GP. We should be embracing them. That is what is happening in every other professional walk of life—it is happening with the astronauts who fly to the moon, the people who fly our planes, and the lawyers who run our courts. The modernisation of workforces is happening everywhere; we should embrace that. My noble friend the Minister alluded to 12,000 AAs and PAs by 2036; that would be just 8% of the number of doctors. That is not a revolution or a threat that the doctors of Britain should be worried about.

If these regulations do not go through—the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, has said that they will—then it would be difficult to enforce standards, there would be years of delay to regulate the professions, there would be a reduction in the number of healthcare professionals to support our healthcare system, and training programmes would be on hold. I support the passage of this legislation, so that we can modernise the workforce, increase primary care capacity, improve the lot of our hard-pressed GPs and make it easier for a wide range of talents to make a difference to the British healthcare system.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Lord Bethell and Baroness Harding of Winscombe

Committee stage
Thursday 27th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak along similar lines to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I will address my noble friend Lord Moylan’s comments. I share his concern that we must not make the perfect the enemy of the good but, like the noble Baroness, I do not think that size is the key issue here, because of how tech businesses grow. Tech businesses are rather like building a skyscraper: if you get the foundations wrong, it is almost impossible to change how safe the building is as it goes up and up. As I said earlier this week, small tech businesses can become big very quickly, and, if you design your small tech business with the risks to children in mind at the very beginning, there is a much greater chance that your skyscraper will not wobble as it gets taller. On the other hand, if your small business begins by not taking children into account at all, it is almost impossible to address the problem once it is huge. I fear that this is the problem we face with today’s social media companies.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, hit the nail on the head, as she so often does, in saying that we need to think about risk, rather than size, as the means of differentiating the proportionate response. In Clause 23, which my noble friend seeks to amend, the important phrase is “use proportionate measures” in subsection (2). Provided that we start with a risk assessment and companies are then under the obligation to make proportionate adjustments, that is how you build safe technology companies—it is just like how you build safe buildings.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I will build on my noble friend’s comments. We have what I call the Andrew Tate problem. That famous pornographer and disreputable character started a business in a shed in Romania with a dozen employees. By most people’s assessment, it would have been considered a small business but, through his content of pornography and the physical assault of women, he extremely quickly built something that served an estimated 3 billion pages, and it has had a huge impact on the children of the English-speaking world. A small business became a big, nasty business very quickly. That anecdote reinforces the point that small does not mean safe, and, although I agree with many of my noble friend’s points, the lens of size is perhaps not the right one to look through.