Women in Society

Lord Black of Brentwood Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Black of Brentwood]

My Lords, I am honoured to deliver my maiden speech in this important debate. This House is as rich in its extraordinary history as it is in the wisdom and knowledge of its Members, and to be able to take part in its proceedings is a privilege without equal. At this point I will, as other maiden speakers have, mention the great kindness shown to those who are new both by fellow Peers and by our formidable staff. It has been overwhelming and I am profoundly grateful.

I must admit to a few nerves this evening—not perhaps for the obvious reasons, but because I realised sitting here last week quite how many of my ex-bosses are on these Benches. There is my noble friend Lord Wakeham, one of my supporters, for whom I worked not just once but twice. Then there is my noble friend Lord Tebbit, who was my first boss in politics, who is joined by my noble friends Lord Brooke, Lord Bell and Lord Saatchi and, since yesterday, my noble friend Lord Howard. So this feels almost like a job interview.

I have worked for over 20 years in roles dealing with the media, for all those noble friends. As a passionate supporter of press freedom, not just here but throughout the Commonwealth, I hope to be able to contribute to our discussions on the future of the newspaper industry and the wider creative industries. As a trustee of the Imperial War Museum, and a member of the council of the Royal College of Music, our cultural heritage is also of great importance to me. However, today is for another subject. My noble friend Lady Verma is in so many ways the embodiment of the crucial issues we are discussing. She brings such substantial experience to the work of this House, and it is a privilege to take part in the debate in her name.

I was born and brought up in Brentwood in Essex. I went to its fine school, where I learned to play four musical instruments simply in order to dodge sports lessons, and fell in love there—with Virgil and Plato, and our islands' history. I played the organ at Sunday services. I cut my political teeth and became a councillor. It is a great place for a young man to learn. Looking back on my time there I have an overpowering memory—that in all the vital parts of our community's civic fabric, the bedrock of our local civil society was the older women of our town. They ran the local charities, and organised the volunteering. They were crucial in local politics. They kept the churches open and beautiful. They raised money for local hospital services, and our remarkable hospice. They were the often undervalued treasure trove of our town's existence. It is as true now as it was then.

Across the country, older women whose children have left home, or who have recently retired, play a pivotal role in our society. A citizenship survey from the Department for Communities and Local Government published at the end of last year showed how women from 65 to 74 were the most likely to participate in formal volunteering. Another survey, from the Institute for Volunteering Research, found nearly half of all volunteers to be in their 60s, with women playing by far the biggest role in education, social welfare and heritage. It is of real importance that we recognise that today. If, as I believe we can, we are to build the big society, they will help us power it.

It is therefore right that as part of this debate we also consider ways in which we can make sure that this huge potential is fulfilled and cherished, and that means looking very carefully at the special health needs of older women. It is not lack of willingness that makes many of them less active—to the detriment of our society—but the burden of premature ill health and frailty. The citizenship survey that I mentioned identified disability and long-term illness as the major bar to volunteering.

There are many such health issues, whether it be asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or depression, from which twice as many older women suffer as men. However, I want to highlight just one, which is eminently avoidable—the blight of osteoporosis. I have seen at first hand how that dread illness—responsible, if undiagnosed early, for so many debilitating fractures—is often to blame for the lives of those working in the service of others being curtailed. As it progresses, it stops too many older women doing much of what they want to do for our society, as mobility falters, pain increases and their world shrinks. In the case of my own mother—one such lady whose kindly spirit was the catalyst for a great deal in our town’s life—osteoporosis was diagnosed too late. Complicated years later by the appalling condition of polymyalgia, which we still know too little about and which also affects far more older women than men, her potential was, to her great sadness, thwarted too early. This is true of far too many other sufferers. One in two women over the age of 50 will suffer a fracture at some point because of poor bone health. That is one in two lives lived less fully than it could be, with our civil society—the great society—diminished as a result.

It does not have to be like that. So much could be done to deal with this problem simply by ensuring the widespread operation of fracture liaison services at hospitals and groups of GP surgeries. Such services could spot this condition much earlier and allow sufferers to continue doing more for us for longer. I hope that, as part of the Government’s plans for NHS reform, osteoporosis and bone health will now be recognised as a major public health issue and that indicators on fracture prevention will be included in the Quality and Outcomes Framework of the GP contract. Such moves are long overdue.

For so many reasons, I believe that older women should, in Belloc’s phrase, be preserved as our “chiefest treasure”. It has been an honour today to have the opportunity to speak briefly about their role in our civic life and to highlight some of the things that could be done to make sure that they achieve their full potential for longer. It is a subject very dear to my heart and I hope that in future debates we shall be able to track real progress on this issue.