Queen's Speech

Lord Colwyn Excerpts

Thursday 3rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Colwyn]

My Lords, I am delighted to be able to congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford on his warm-up from my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford and for his interesting and informative maiden speech. I welcome him to the Bishops’ Benches, despite the lack of space. Many of us here will welcome his publicly declared belief that this House should be preserved as a revision Chamber for legislation and that serious thought should be given to our constitution, electoral system and your Lordships’ House. He has recently celebrated 40 years as a priest and was secretary for ecumenical affairs at Lambeth Palace for the late Lord Runcie from 1981 to 1989 before being appointed a canon of St Paul's. He became Bishop of Guildford in 2004. He is a supporter of the ordination of women and is in favour of women bishops. He has been highly critical of the EU and its remoteness from ordinary people. I have a feeling that the right reverend Prelate will enjoy himself in this House. His intervention in today's debate on the Queen's speech is particularly appropriate, as he is known to Her Majesty as Clerk to the Closet. It is his task to present newly appointed bishops to Her Majesty the Queen. We shall look forward to hearing from the right reverend Prelate in the future.

I intend to speak briefly to support both my dental and my musical colleagues. Dentistry is at another crossroads. The decisions made in this Parliament to transform the delivery of NHS dentistry will be extremely important. We have been left with an unfinished reform following the 2009 Steele review. We must grasp this opportunity if we are to improve the oral health of the nation. However, the challenge of reforming dentistry—to deliver a better system both for patients and dentists—comes at a time when tough financial decisions are to be made across all Whitehall departments.

The previous Government started to clear up the mess of dentistry, much of it self-inflicted, but there remains much for the new Government to do. I take this opportunity publicly to welcome the coalition Government's commitment in their programme for government. The agreement states that,

“we will introduce a new dentistry contract that will focus on achieving good dental health and increasing access to NHS dentistry, with additional focus on the oral health of schoolchildren”.

The acknowledgement of dentistry in this document is very positive and much needed. Despite an overall improvement in the oral health of the nation over the past 30 years, problems persist. As I have mentioned before in this Chamber, by the age of five, more than 30 per cent of British children suffer missing, filled or decayed teeth. In some parts of the country, as many as three-quarters of children are affected. Oral cancers, one of the conditions that dentists play a crucial role in detecting, are becoming increasingly common. There has been a 41 per cent rise in the number of cases of mouth cancer in the past decade and, in the last year for which the figures are available, 1,851 people died as a result of the disease.

Alongside the challenges of oral health promotion and NHS dentistry, general dental practitioners face mounting challenges in the management of their practices. The creation of the Care Quality Commission, with which both NHS and private dental practices must be registered by the end of March next year, foists a further layer of regulation on dental practices. Although registration is due to open in October, the registration fee is still not announced.

Requirements for decontamination are also changing, in the form of the Health Technical Memorandum 01-05: Decontamination in primary care dental practices. The profession is seeking clarification of the evidence base for these changes and has called for a review by NICE. The question is whether the changes offer the genuine reassurance to patients that make investing in them worth while.

Pressing challenges remain, but I believe that we have the opportunity to complete the unfinished reform and change the way in which NHS dentistry is delivered in England so it is more preventive, increases access and delivers good oral health. The challenges are threefold. First, the Government must complete the unfinished reforms, learning from the mistakes of the much criticised 2006 contract—in particular, avoiding the failure properly to pilot change. The contract was so disastrous that it initially saw access fall dramatically. Only in the past six months has access climbed back to the level it was at in 2006. I am delighted that the Government have committed to pilot any changes. Secondly, we must pursue consistently high-quality commissioning of primary dental care. Some PCTs perform well, but many have room for improvement. They must be properly supported in their work, particularly by ensuring that they employ or have access to dental practice advisers and dental public health expertise. Thirdly, there must be a commitment to tackling oral health inequalities to close the unacceptable chasm which exists between those with good and poor oral health as highlighted in the British Dental Association's general election manifesto, Smiles all round. I therefore welcome the announcement in the Queen's Speech that the voice of patients will be strengthened to improve public health alongside actions being taken to reduce health inequalities. The coalition has made it clear that dentistry is a priority. The task now is to work out the detail with the profession, to deliver real change for patients and dentists.

I have a few words to say about music. I hope that the coalition will be able to make a clear statement on the situation over the Live Music Bill, which was widely supported but failed to survive the last few days of the previous Administration. A widely criticised recent DCMS live music report claimed that overall live music is “thriving”, but acknowledged that this was not the case for smaller venues. However, the “thriving” conclusion was not based on any direct measure of performances, but relied instead on indirect evidence—an 11 per cent increase in live music licence applications, an apparent 20 per cent increase in the number of professional musicians, and a modest increase in self-reported gig attendance and Arts Council participation data. The last time that the DCMS surveyed actual performances in venues like bars and restaurants was in 2007. This showed a 5 per cent fall in performances after the Licensing Act came into effect in April 2005, measured against the benchmark of the 2004 pre-Act MORI survey which found that the majority of premises had had no music at all in the previous 12 months. This did not stop DCMS from calling it a flourishing live music scene.

The Live Music Bill, which would give licensing exemption to gigs for fewer than 200 people, reintroduce the “two in a bar” rule that allows one or two musicians to play with either minimal or no amplification and exempt hospitals, schools and colleges from requiring licences for events where alcohol is not being sold, should be reintroduced to Parliament as soon as possible. I believe that the Home Secretary, Theresa May, will be reviewing the 2003 Licensing Act and I urge her to consider separating entertainment licensing with an exemption for small gigs from alcohol licensing.

Grouping those two licensable activities together may have seemed a neat administrative solution, but it has seriously harmed live music in different ways, first by significantly reducing the number of places where musicians can work and radically increasing bureaucracy and, secondly, by creating the wholly misleading impression that live music is first and foremost a danger to society—as dangerous as alcohol. That is not only offensive to those who care for live music; it suggests that, as a nation, we have surrendered to petty officialdom.