Health Bill

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th November 2026 Lords Chamber

Once NHSE is gone, how do we know whether trusts and foundations understand their individual level of exposure to climate risks? We know these are going to happen. If the Government think the existing arrangements are okay, I hope the Minister will explain how they are going to secure that result for each trust. Patients and staff should not have to wait for the next heatwave to find out whether their hospital is ready; I can assure noble Lords that the climate is not waiting for that moment.

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have put my name to both amendments, and to have heard them argued for so powerfully and cogently by my noble friends Lady Hayman and Lady Boycott. I want to emphasise one or two points, and add one slightly new point, because so much has been covered very quickly.

It seem odd that, in this year of all years, we decide to get rid of a power that used to be there, to reduce the emphasis on climate change and not to make it clear that the duties of NHS England need to be transferred in their detail. This was the point that my noble friend Lady Hayman was making. It is not just the general point that the Secretary of State has a responsibility as part of government policy to ensure that climate change is tackled; the detail of it needs to be there. Requiring NHS institutions to create and publish detailed resilience plans—the sort of plans that you can recognise in practical detail—would not only be useful for them but, frankly, give the public confidence, because there is a public confidence issue here.

I will not emphasise the Wellcome report on climate change. I hope that noble Lords and the Minister have had a chance to look at a report that is specifically focused on climate change and health. As I recall—sorry, this sounds like an advert—it has nine chapters that detail the impact from the latest research that is available globally. It is a powerful report; I declare an interest.

The NHS is interesting in this regard, because the NHS is both affected by climate change and a cause of it, and between them these two amendments deal with that. When I was chief executive of the NHS, there was some extraordinary figure that something like 3% or 5% of traffic in London was caused by the NHS and by people going back and forth to appointments. There is a lot on that side in terms of the impact on the climate from what the NHS does. A lot has been done in the last 20 years, but there is more to do.

The second amendment, proposed by my noble friend Lady Boycott, is about helping the NHS to be resilient. This is the big point that I want to emphasise. It was in my noble friend’s speech, but I would like to make it even clearer: many people in your Lordships’ Chamber have been involved with the NHS, and I guess we all know that everything in the NHS is a priority to someone. That is why it is so difficult to deal with, and one has to think of it in that way—but there are some overarching priorities. Frankly, this is an overarching priority. It is not about a discrete issue; it is about something that is going to affect all the services we have talked about earlier today, and other services as well. I hope that the Government are going to give this a high priority in their future thinking. I suspect that the public expect them to do so, and one can only imagine the consequences if the NHS does not get this right. I hope the Minister will accept these amendments. As my noble friend Lady Boycott said, the case is compelling and we are looking for an affirmative.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part on this group and to utterly applaud the three speeches we have already heard. I have not signed any of these amendments, because I wanted to leave space for others. Speaking as an old newspaper editor, “Green signs amendment about climate and environment” is a bit like “Dog bites man”, so I wanted to ensure that we had the maximum impact from other signatures. We have already heard the case made powerfully for this, but I want to make a couple of additional points and to follow on from what the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, said about priorities.

I have encountered many individuals in the NHS who are doing spectacular work in reducing the NHS’s carbon emissions. The Minister is not currently in her place, but I will say to another Minister that I encourage her to visit County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust, where tremendous work is being done, particularly on reducing the impact of acute care. Sometimes with acute care there is a feeling that we have to do the emergency stuff and we cannot do anything here. Actually, what we have seen is that in looking at where the use of intravenous drugs can be reduced and tablets used instead, clinical outcomes are improved and the amount of plastic use is significantly reduced. When you really start to look at what you are doing and how you can do it better, you can improve both clinical and environmental outcomes. That is just one example that I happen to know about.

It is important that the people who are doing this know that they have support from the centre and that this is an NHS priority, because they are putting time, energy and attention into this. Unless we see support from the centre by saying that this is a priority, it is hard for them to get the resources and support they need to make change happen. We know that any large organisation has a large sense of inertia, and delivering change needs support right through the organisation. As the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, said, the climate emergency is a health emergency as well, and there are so many ways in which these two factors interact.

On the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, looking at resilience to climate and environmental degradation risks, I want to cross-reference it to the joint intelligence chiefs’ report on the impact of environmental degradation on our food security. Are we thinking about the food security of the NHS? We have to be able to feed the patients, but there is also a great deal of feeding of staff that has to happen in the NHS. How much have NHS institutions looked at how secure their food supply is? That is something that the joint intelligence chiefs, not known as radical green activists, have said is really an issue. I note in passing that we still have not seen the publication of that full report, which is very disappointing.

There is another issue that I think everyone is very aware of after this summer. I note that my honourable friend in the other place, Hannah Spencer, has a Private Member’s Bill about working conditions and having a maximum working temperature, which, whatever that might be, has been exceeded in many of our NHS institutions over the past summer. We have seen staff collapsing as a result of the heat in their workspace. That has to be considered unacceptable, but what is it doing to patients if staff are collapsing from heat?