NHS and Social Care Workers

Lord Bird Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

It is wonderful that we get the chance to discuss this very serious matter. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that it is pity that so few Peers wanted to participate in the debate. I am sure they are all busy because it is Christmas and there are lots of things to do; God bless them all, whatever they are doing.

About five years ago, after I first came into the House, I really cheesed off a number of doctors. I know that because, in response to a Question on the lack of doctors, I made the observation that the problem was not that we did not have enough doctors, but that we had too many patients. My noble friend Lord Crisp, who is a mate of mine now, said that he does not go for those supply-side arguments—I did not even know what he meant, but I could understand that he was cheesed off with me. One of the big problems is that we have a health service—which includes nurses, in particular; a subject I would like to talk about, because I have known loads of them—that is always finding it very difficult to make ends meet.

Before I talk about that, I will address prevention. In fact, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, who sits on the Front Bench as Education Minister, made a very interesting point in an Oral Question on Tuesday: she said that she visited a school where they had taken the kitchen and moved it into the classroom. I thought that that was absolutely brilliant, because most of the young people I know—I have five children, so I have been through this—eat crap. By eating rubbish, they are laying down problems for later life. I have eaten more crap than anybody, but, for some strange reason, I am still here at 76 and everything seems to be working, so I might be the exception that proves the rule.

The idea of moving food, in a revolutionary way, into the classroom so that children can see the science of eating and of making and keeping themselves happy was great to news to me, because I am a preventionist. I came into the House of Lords to get rid of poverty, not to make the poor a little more comfortable. I keep telling people that, some of whom have said that they are irritated by it, but I will keep saying it. Unfortunately, there are too many people in the system who are concerned with keeping the poor more comfortable. I will return to the point: the idea of educating our children so that they know the importance of food and what food does to the body is of incredible importance. I would like the National Health Service to live up to its actual name, rather than becoming a national “I’ll get you back to health” service.

I was around in the early days of the NHS. I remember all the exercises we had to do in the playground, organised by public health bodies, and the capsules and the milk. I also remember that about 20% of the NHS budget in that post-war period was for prevention, because it did not have enough money. So I am very interested in the idea of prevention and will stick with it again and again.

What has happened to the NHS, more than at any other time in its history, since 2010 onwards, when we had to pay off the bankers’ mistakes by buying the banks and passing the cost on to the poorest among us? The NHS has become an even bigger social sponge, soaking up the contradiction thrown up by people in poverty. The BMA admits that 50% of the people who present themselves with cardiac arrest are suffering from food poverty. So what happened during the 2010 to 2016 coalition—sorry about that, mates—was that the nature of the NHS changed, and more and more parts of it were about trying to keep alive people who were eating poor and living poor. If we look at the facts and figures, when we entered the Covid crisis, hospitals were 85% full. That is almost full, because you need 10% to play around with. A lot of that was because more and more poor people were making their way to the hospital and the doctor’s surgery. They were trying to make up for the fact that they had become ill and could not maintain their lifestyle, because they were on the edge of poverty.

There is another big issue, which is the problem with the Treasury. No Treasury since the Second World War has got behind nurses in the way it should have got behind them—and hospital cleaners, porters and all the other people who make a hospital run. The principal reason for that is this myopia in the absolute middle of the Treasury. It divides the world between the public good and the people who contribute, and the contributors are the fintech people in the City of London who put money into the Treasury. Then there are the people who work for the public good and public life, and they are always going to be treated in a cheaper way, because the Government will not stand up and say that there is an enormous value that echoes throughout the whole of society if we pay our nurses, hospital cleaners and workers as well as doctors. We must embrace the idea that public service, whether that is driving a train, climbing up a ladder when there is a fire or working in a hospital—all these people are in public life. They are not takers, they are givers. I find it very difficult when I see the way we divide the world between those who take and those who give. It is not true at all.

We know that one of the big problems with the NHS is that it is too full. What if we had made the investment, if Governments of all political persuasions after the Second World War had said, “We are going to have a war on poverty. We are going to destroy poverty.”? Some 40% of all the money spent by government is spent on trying to get away from the problems thrown up by poverty. Our poor nurses are at the sharp end and are underappreciated; they are unable to pay their own way; they cannot breathe. The Royal College of Nursing said recently that nurses are suffering because their heating and food bills are rising, and they are being hit in the same way as everybody else.

I would like the Government to stop and to look at what works and what does not work. I have been saying this to Governments since I came here. I want them to stop, look and say, “How can we change this?”, rather than giving us a very small amount here and there. I want them to end this situation where the heroines of our hospitals are now being described as antisocial, whereas once they were social.