Smoking

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, many Members of your Lordships’ House have received lobbying from tobacco companies over the years. Is the Minister aware that the Daily Telegraph reported last week that Philip Morris had threatened legal action against the Government over the consultation to which he referred in his first Answer. Can the Minister give an assurance that, if this lobbying is undertaken by tobacco companies, the Government will ignore it and go ahead with their very sensible and welcome plans?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

Yes, I am aware of the moves, and I am sure there will be many more. I was advised that it was a fairly unusual legal challenge on consultation, which I believe was withdrawn quite quickly. Yes, there will be opposition, but we are determined, because of the importance of what we are trying to do.

Tobacco Control Plan

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

To ask His Majesty’s Government when they intend to publish their Tobacco Control Plan; and whether it is still their intention that England shall be smoke-free by 2030.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Markham) (Con)]

Following the publication of the Khan review into smoke-free policies, we are taking stock of whether a fresh tobacco control plan is the best way to respond to its independent recommendations. The Government remain fully committed to the ambition of a smoke-free England by 2030, and we will provide an update on our plans to meet that target in due course.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I think this is the first time the Minister has answered a Question about tobacco control; I welcome him to this debate. He will know that this House has led the way in putting forward and implementing measures that have led to a significant drop in smoking levels, certainly since 2002. There is cross-party consensus that we should go on in this way.

The Minister’s predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Kamall —I am pleased to see him in his place—is on the record in both March and April as saying not only that the Government are committed to a smoke-free 2030, as confirmed by the Minister this afternoon, but that the new tobacco plan will be published this year. Does the Minister accept that, to achieve the smoke-free target and reduce the appalling inequalities in life expectancy caused by smoking, it will be necessary to implement the recommendations in Javed Khan’s independent review, particularly those based on the “polluter pays” principle?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

First, I thank the noble Lord for all his work to reduce smoking; I am grateful for it every time I walk into a smoke-free environment in the evening. As he said, a cross-party approach has achieved many great things. As the noble Lord knows, there are some quite radical things in the Khan review, such as increasing the smoking age every year, which would in effect ban smoking altogether. There are many pros and cons to the prohibition argument, but it is something we take very seriously and we will publish our response. I assure noble Lords that we are going to tackle this issue.

Down Syndrome Bill

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, I thank Mencap, Learning Disability England, the Down’s Syndrome Association and the National Down Syndrome Policy Group, among others, for their engagement with me in discussion about this Bill, including many who identify as having Down’s syndrome, their families and friends. I welcome those who have come in person to listen today, including the right honourable Member, Dr Liam Fox MP, who drafted the Bill so skilfully and steered it through the other place.

Like Dr Fox, I began my medical career as a GP, but I then went on to become a psychiatrist. I declare an interest: my adult son has a learning disability and he has many friends who have Down’s syndrome. I remind the House that most of my medical career as a psychiatrist involved my working directly with people with learning disabilities, including people of all ages with Down’s syndrome. I sometimes say that the most important thing I have ever done is to keep asking the question, “What about people with learning disabilities?” The thing is, unless you know somebody with a learning disability, it probably would not occur to you to ask that question. It is so hard to keep this community of people in mind. We saw it during the pandemic on our TV screens and in debate in Parliament. Care was synonymous with care homes for older people. The protection of people with a learning disability living in the community and of people with Down’s syndrome, who were eventually shown to be in very highest risk category for Covid-19, were largely overlooked.

A few questions and challenges have been raised about the Down Syndrome Bill, and it is important that they are aired. However, I also want to instil a spirit of hope in our debate today. My mentor, Professor Joan Bicknell, who sadly died a few years ago, taught me the art of holding in mind where we want to get to. I will respond to some of the concerns that have been brought to my attention and will consider them in the context of how children and adults with Down’s syndrome, and other people with learning disabilities, are currently living.

The Down Syndrome Bill has passed all its stages in the other place and I am very pleased that I was asked to help steer it through this House. It will require the Government to publish guidance on the specific needs of people with Down’s syndrome and how to meet them, and indeed to lay the guidance before Parliament. The relevant public authorities providing health, education and social care would then have to give due regard to this guidance in carrying out their functions under existing legislation, including the Care Act 2014 and Equality Act 2010. The Bill focuses on those with Down’s syndrome as one of the most diagnosed chromosomal disorders associated with a learning disability in England. There are over 40,000 people living with Down’s syndrome, most if not all of whom have some degree of learning disability.

Some are concerned that naming a Bill after a chromosomal condition is taking things back a few decades to a time when the medical model predominated, and that a diagnosis of Down’s syndrome on its own does not tell us anything about the extent of a person’s learning disability or other associated conditions that an individual might experience. A diagnosis is important to parents, who want to know why this child is different from the one they were expecting—and, for different reasons, a diagnosis is important to health and care professionals. Of course, it is important that any diagnosis does not define the person.

Implementation of the guidance must focus on the people behind the diagnosis, but a diagnosis does provide a framework to understand the common health needs associated with a specific disorder. It is important for health and care professionals supporting people to know and recognise the co-morbid health problems that are either specifically associated with or occur more frequently in people with Down’s syndrome. These include cataracts, hearing loss, obstructive sleep apnoea, low thyroid function, increased risk of leukaemia, congenital heart defects and early Alzheimer’s disease. When I was a young doctor, I remember children with congenital heart defects who were not treated because they had Down’s syndrome; a failure to intervene reduced their life expectancy and, often, their quality of life. A friend of my son had a heart attack and died before Christmas aged just 41—such a loss.

When there is a recognisable characteristic, such as the facial features that make Down’s syndrome recognisable, two problems may occur. The first is that any behavioural changes or health complaints may simply be attributed to the already identified condition. There is the tummy ache caused by a peptic ulcer that is blamed on Down’s syndrome rather than being investigated—this is called “diagnostic overshadowing”. The second is that people with Down’s syndrome are stereotyped as being always happy, docile, eternal children and so on. As Caroline Boudet put it in the Huffington Post in 2017:

“When you have Down syndrome, the first disability you have to face is the way people look at you. It’s based on received wisdom, society conveys misleading information about this extra chromosome and what it is supposed to cause. Each of us has prejudice in mind, this shows no ill-will but just a lack of knowledge”.


The majority of people with learning disabilities do not have a known cause; they and their families do not know the answer to the question “Why?”, just as in my son’s case. Their diagnosis is learning disability of unknown aetiology. Some people have a different genetic cause from Down’s syndrome, and some acquire a learning disability in the perinatal period. Their learning disability may not be recognised as quickly as that of people with Down’s syndrome; it may be their speech or behaviour that, as it were, gives them away, however hard they try to mask the differences to be accepted for who they are.

Let us look at another challenge: that a Bill named after a condition that can be diagnosed prenatally and which could be eliminated, as it reportedly has been in Iceland, means that the Bill is not needed, and may present a challenge to women’s reproductive rights. But whatever noble Lords think about abortion, some of the 40,000 people currently diagnosed with Down’s syndrome will be around for 70 or more years. Life expectancy is getting longer. Even if no more babies were born with Down’s syndrome, every one of those 40,000 deserves a better deal than they are getting now. The Bill is simply about helping those born with Down’s syndrome to have their lives valued the same as those born without it, and to have their strengths acknowledged and their difficulties supported through an improved understanding of how Down’s syndrome can affect people and families.

The timing of this Bill complements proposals in other pieces of legislation currently being debated within Parliament. I welcome the acceptance by the Minister during debate in the other place of having a named person within each integrated care board to be accountable for the implementation of the guidance on the Down Syndrome Act. Her Majesty’s Government had already pledged in both the NHS Long Term Plan and the autism strategy that all integrated care boards will focus on autism and learning disabilities at the highest level; for example, by having a named executive lead for autism and learning disability. Just this week, the Minister in your Lordships’ House, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, reconfirmed this commitment by saying,

“I confirm our intention that all integrated care boards should have a named learning disability and autism lead and that NHS England proposes to issue statutory guidance on this matter to assist integrated care boards. The Government are supportive of this approach and believe that learning disability and autism leads on every ICB would act as a voice for those with a learning disability and autism in commissioning decisions.”—[Official Report, 16/3/22; col. 396.]

The Minister also accepted my amendment to the Health and Care Bill, which puts mandatory training about learning disability and autism on the statute book. It is all happening this month. I believe that the passage of the Down Syndrome Bill through the other place last month and Her Majesty’s Government’s support for the Bill has assisted in getting both of these through.

I would like this Bill to go further and to include all people with learning disabilities. However, previous attempts to introduce Private Members’ Bills on learning disability have been unsuccessful, including the LB Bill and my own Learning Disabilities (Review of Services) Bill, which aimed to make provision for the Secretary of State to undertake a public consultation on the provision of comprehensive and integrated services for adults with learning disabilities. In his speech in Committee in the Commons on 26 January, Dr Liam Fox highlighted that, given the logistical difficulties in passing a Private Member’s Bill, a clear focus on one condition was needed to improve the chance of this legislation being passed. Supporting the Down Syndrome Bill is a step in the right direction and something that we can build on. In my view, it is an imperfect but pragmatic way forward and a good model for a PMB, and I believe that, if the Bill is welcomed in this House, it will indeed pass.

The Bill’s supporters expect it to set a precedent that will ultimately benefit the healthcare and support of everyone with a learning disability, not only those with Down’s syndrome. Dr Fox sees it as a bridgehead to open the door to better care and support for the whole community, but some in the wider learning disability community are worried that people with Down’s syndrome will get preferential treatment and that people with other diagnoses, despite having similar health and care needs, will be left even further behind. I ask for the noble Lord’s assurance that there will be transparency in the Bill’s implementation, specifically to ensure that resources allocated to support those with Down’s syndrome are not taken away from those currently supporting other people with learning disabilities.

We all know the financial pressures being experienced within adult social care. Many parents say the stress they experience is not about having somebody with a learning disability or with Down’s syndrome in the family; it is the constant battle with the authorities, whether over EHCPs, respite or something else. My current battle for my son is the cost of sleep-ins to sustain his independence.

It seems that it may be time for a new learning disability strategy, like the Valuing People White Paper I contributed to, with so many others, in 2001: something to tie together all the various pieces of ongoing work, including the soon-to-be-published Building the Right Support action plan, and in the light of the new integrated care systems, as well as the anticipated social care and Mental Health Act reforms. A new, overarching strategy could build on the provisions and benefits of the Bill for the wider learning disability community. I hope the Minister will be open to further discussions about the development of such a unifying strategy. Clarifying these concerns will ensure that the Bill is successful in its goal of improving the quality of life and health of people with Down’s syndrome, to raise awareness and foster inclusivity. There is such enthusiasm to get started on developing the guidance—it feels like the time is right.

In a spirit of hope, I agree with Dr Fox, who said,

“it is entirely possible that, when guidance is given and there is a named person on the integrated care board, the Bill’s provisions and the measures required to apply it would reasonably be applied to”—[Official Report, Commons, Down Syndrome Bill Committee, 26/1/22; col. 5.]

people with similar needs. As awareness of the care and support that people need increases, I hope more resources will be allocated. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

I call the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell.

Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Self-Isolation etc.) (Revocation) (England) Regulations 2022

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Kamall) (Con)]

My Lords, I understand that there is an amendment to the Motion. Given that, I think it would only be appropriate to allow the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to speak first so that I can respond at the end. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is participating remotely.

Amendment to the Motion

Moved by

Health and Care Bill

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Thursday 13th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, Amendments 68 and 95 are in my name. I declare my role as president of the Rural Coalition. I support the broad drift of these amendments, which engage with the important issue of reducing inequalities.

Rural health and social care has often presented challenges in terms of proximity to services, the types of services available within a local area and the demographics of rural areas. It is complicated. Rural areas have a higher proportion of older residents, which is always a greater burden on healthcare services compared with areas with younger populations.

Furthermore, a variety of issues that feed into rural health and social care are beyond the remit of the Bill. In March 2017, Defra produced its Rural Proofing practical guidance to help policymakers assess the impact of policies on rural areas. At the time, this was a welcome initiative to ensure that rural interests were being adequately considered and, to quote the report, that

“these areas receive fair and equitable policy outcomes.”

Unfortunately, concerns have since grown among rural groups that this guidance has become a sort of bureaucratic box-ticking exercise in Whitehall that does not take into account the complexities of rural life.

Funding allocations are often the result of specific metrics or formulas, many of which disadvantage rural communities. For example, a 2021 report by the Rural Services Network, Towards the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, highlighted how many of the post-Brexit levelling-up funds disadvantaged poor rural areas due to way in which they measured poverty. The Department for Transport’s own 2017 statistics showed that, on average, travel from rural areas to either a GP or hospital was 40% longer by car and 94% longer via public transport when compared with travel in urban locations.

Further, 2017 figures from Rural England highlighted the higher rates of delayed transfer of care from hospitals in rural areas: 19.2 cases per 100,000 compared with 13 per 100,000 in urban locations. Analysis by the RSN has shown that, when compared with predominately urban areas, rural local authorities received significantly less grant funding per head to pay for services such as social care and public health responsibilities, in spite of the fact that they generally deal with older populations. Other problems include limited intensive care capacity in rural areas, the loss of local services through amalgamations, the relatively few specialist medical staff in rural areas, and the general staff shortage and retention issues facing rurality.

It is commendable that the Government have legislated in this Bill to introduce a duty on integrated care boards to reduce inequalities between patients with respect to their ability to access health services. My amendments would extend this principle and reduce those health inequalities with respect to where someone lives, whether it is an urban or rural area, and place a duty on ICBs to co-operate with each other for the purpose of reducing healthcare access inequalities. In effect, this is a statutory rural-proofing requirement.

This duty to consider rural access when reducing inequalities extends to co-operation between ICBs because rural areas often exist on the periphery of a large geographical region where patients in one area may reside closer to crucial services in a neighbouring board. Naturally, rural areas lack the economies of scale of urban areas, and greater cross-ICB co-operation will be required to utilise joint resources most effectively when delivering different services to rural areas that fall within border zones of ICBs.

One area where a collaborative approach between ICBs will be crucial for rural areas in the near future is the current reorganisation of non-emergency patient transport by NHS England, which will shift to ICBs shortly. Although rural areas undoubtedly are being considered as part of this re-organisation, patient transport is already a rural inequality that needs addressing. Putting rural proofing with respect to health care on a statutory footing presents a more concrete way to implement the existing rural-proofing guidance. The need for co-operation between administrative areas and for overall plans to be rural proofed will become more essential, particularly for secondary health services, if teams of specialist clinicians become increasingly consolidated in ever fewer locations.

Can the Minister outline how the Government intend to reduce the inequalities in healthcare access and funding that many rural areas face, and how they will effectively ensure that ICBs adequately rural proof their plans in line with the Government’s own guidance?

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow all noble Lords in supporting all the amendments in this group. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Thornton on the way in which she introduced the debate when moving Amendment 11. I will speak briefly to Amendment 66, which was tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and signed by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and me.

It was enjoyable listening to the noble Lord, Lord Young, taking a voyage down memory lane to more than 40 years ago, when he was a Health Minister. He could perhaps have added that we would have become a smoke-free country rather earlier, had his advice and proposals for tobacco control been accepted at the time, and had he not been removed from health on the instruction of Sir Denis Thatcher and given another role in government. He is and remains a pioneer, and I am delighted to be behind him with his amendments; we shall come to other smoking amendments later.

Amendment 66 would require integrated care boards to address the leading preventable causes of sickness and death, particularly smoking. The Bill as drafted fails to get to the root causes of health inequalities and will have only a limited effect. Our amendment would correct this oversight as far as smoking is concerned. In 2019, there were 5.7 million smokers in England, one in seven of the adult population. As the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said, in England smoking is the leading cause of premature death, killing over 70,000 people a year and leaving 30 times as many suffering from serious smoking-related disease and disability.

NHS: Fracture Liaison Services

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 8th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

The Government recognise the importance of FLS, as does the NHS. That is one of the reasons why they are looking to roll out these community diagnostic centres, to make sure that the technology and the scanning is as close to the patients as possible. Just this morning, I had a meeting with one supplier who is talking about a partnership with a number of integrated care systems to make sure that they roll out the systems as close to patients as possible.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, the time allowed for this Question has now elapsed. That concludes Oral Questions for today.

Covid-19: Plan B

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for making that valuable point. When one looks at the broken-down data, one sees that there are some demographics that have not taken up the vaccine as much as they should have, including a number who have not received the booster. We want to make sure that as many people as possible are vaccinated so that we do not have to move to plan B and can continue with plan A. Plan A includes provisions for ensuring that we increase the number of people vaccinated.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, the time allowed for this Private Notice Question has now elapsed.

Covid-19

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I absolutely reassure the noble Baroness that teachers will not be involved in the vaccination programme. I pay tribute to the work that teachers have done in organising pupils and, on occasion, administering the swabs themselves. It has been an impactful programme and we are enormously grateful. There is an established vaccination programme that, as I mentioned, makes use of professional nurses. That is the route we will take in this instance.

When it comes to the MQS programme, the bottom line is that hotel quarantine is extremely effective. It really does stop the spread of the disease as it comes into the country. That is absolutely relevant when we have the threat of variants of concern. We keep the question of tagging in sight. It is a very intrusive measure and we are not convinced that it will necessarily be, in current terms, as effective as hotels, but I take the point the noble Baroness made and will continue to look into it further.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, there is a great deal in the Minister’s answers and the initial Statements with which I totally agree, particularly his statement about the threats to leading medical figures and leaders of the vaccine movement. Anti-vaxxers are a vile section of our community and I hope everything can be done to stop their activities. I also strongly welcome, as the grandfather of a teenage girl, the decision to vaccinate schoolchildren. She is delighted by that. It means she can go on holiday properly with her parents. It will make a great deal of difference to her and I know she will support it.

However, the aspect of the Minister’s answer with which I was not happy—he will know what I am going to say because I have raised this before, although not for a while in the Chamber—is the wearing of face coverings. The message is confused and the advice being given to the public is not clear. It is not made easier by photographs appearing in the press of the Cabinet sitting around a table close together with not a single face covering in sight, and pictures of at least half the Chamber in the House of Commons where virtually all the Members are unmasked. It is not the same in this House: face coverings are being worn by the great majority on all sides of the Chamber when we are not speaking. We do this not just for our own benefit and that of our immediate neighbours but for the benefit of the staff who work here. That perhaps deserves rather higher consideration in the House of Commons.

The advice being given to travellers is very difficult. Again, I would have liked earlier, much stronger advice. At present, it is mandatory if you are travelling on a Transport for London conveyance—a Tube, tram or bus—to wear a mask, but on other forms of transport, it is advisory. There is great confusion, and it gives rise to resentment among people following what they think is government advice to wear a face covering. Can we have from the Government a bit more clarity on when they believe face coverings should be worn, because I think the public are not clear about it at all?

NHS Update

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Bethell) (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I join the noble Baronesses, Lady Thornton and Lady Brinton, in thanking my noble friend Lady Penn for her hard work over the last 18 months and wishing her well in her pregnancy. She looked absolutely fantastic as she left, and our hopes and good wishes are with her.

I also thank the usual channels, the House of Lords staff and the Speaker’s office for all their contributions to the virtual House and for keeping the business of the House going during this awful pandemic. There has been an enormous amount of traffic from the Department of Health—more than 50 Statements, 2 Acts and hundreds of regulations. I thank all noble Lords for their challenge, their scrutiny and their patience during this difficult time.

The pay review body has given us its recommendations, and we have accepted them. I thank it for its work and insight. I reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, that the Office of Manpower Economics will publish its analysis online shortly. We are extremely pleased that we can follow the guidance of the pay review body. Junior doctors have their own separate framework, worth 8.2% over four years. They are working from that framework today.

On the funding of the pay review, as noble Lords know, we gave the NHS a historic £33.9 billion settlement in 2018 and have provided £92 billion to support front-line health services throughout the pandemic. The pay uplift will be funded from within that budget, but we are very clear that this will not impact funding already earmarked for the NHS front line. We will continue to make sure that the NHS has everything it needs to continue to support its staff and provide excellent care, throughout the pandemic and beyond. That is why we accepted the PRB’s recommendations in full and provided NHS workers in scope with the pay rise.

On the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on safeguards in September, I cannot make any guarantees but I definitely hope not. We very much hope that we are in the final stages of this pandemic, as the impact of the vaccine is being felt, bringing down the R number and saving those who are infected from hospitalisation, severe disease and worse.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, talked about filtration for schools, and I noted her question on this yesterday. I said that we had been looking at it. I am not aware that the results of that analysis have come through yet. To be honest, I am wary of investing too much in unproven technologies. The two things that have been proven to work are isolation and vaccination; we are backing those two measures most of all. However, I accept her point about the importance of ventilation and will continue to look at it.

Likewise, the JCVI is looking very carefully at vaccination for children. We are working with international partners to get to the bottom of it. At the moment, we have a clear read-out—we will move—but our priority is providing either third shots or variant booster shots in the autumn to the most vulnerable. That is where our priorities are at the moment.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, asked about social care. I note the Government’s statement on that; we will bring reform recommendations in the autumn. On her point about the autism strategy, I also pay tribute to the contribution of Cheryl Gillan, who worked so hard in this area and whose impact is still being felt.

I think the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, overlooks some of the really good work in this strategy. There is £74 million of funding for a number of high-priority projects, which have been designed in collaboration with stakeholders from the community. I guide her to the implementation plan that accompanies the strategy, which has detailed recommendations on a six-point implementation matrix that has grit and traction. I would be very grateful for her feedback on that.

I pay tribute to parent supporters; the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is entirely right that they often bear the brunt of care and are often best placed to care for and support those with autism. I remind her that we have provided £31 million through the mental health and well-being recovery action plan specifically for the parents of those with autism, recognising how the pandemic was hitting that group in particular.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, we now come to the 20 minutes allocated for Back-Bench questions. I ask that questions and answers be brief so that I can call the maximum number of speakers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bethell (Con) [V]]

My noble friend gives me an opportunity to raise one of my main ambitions for the health service, which is clearly outlined in the life sciences vision. She is right: we catch too much cancer at stage 3 or 4, when there is sometimes not much that we can do, and anything that we do will be very expensive and make only marginal differences. That is not the same in all countries and it is not good enough in this country. That is why we need to invest in diagnostics and preventive medicine. We need to reweight our health system away from clinical interventions on lumps and bumps at a very late stage. We need to interact with patients at a much earlier stage of their disease. Only in that way will we be able to afford the healthcare system that this country deserves and to give people longer, better lives.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

My Lords, as we have reached 2 pm there is no need to adjourn the House, but I will arrange a short pause to allow the relevant people to be in their places for the next item.

Medical Devices (Coronavirus Test Device Approvals) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 12th July 2021 Grand Committee

Motion agreed.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

The Grand Committee stands adjourned until 4.35 pm. I remind Members to sanitise their desks and chairs before leaving the Room.