Long Covid

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Thornton not just for making this debate available to us but for her having demonstrated stamina beyond the normal in the way that she has fronted for this side of the House—indeed, I think she has spoken for Members across the House—during the entire troubles that we have been through with Covid. Covid may have a long form, but those who speak about it and remind us of its importance can also have a long form, and I thank her for that. I also pay tribute to our friends in the Library for their briefing note, which is truly extraordinary and has been mined by many of us in the speeches that have been made.

The noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, has drawn attention to the way that ME played out through chapters of misapprehension and wicked neglect through its course, until we got on to more certain ground. I might add dyslexia as another condition that suffered from not having adequate analysis or forensic understanding, which led to its own misapprehensions.

All that leads me to focus my intervention on the first of my noble friend Lady Thornton’s points: the need for data—the need for an adequate basis from which to draw empirical and helpful conclusions. In pressing the Government, and my noble friend is certainly not the only one who has done this, we must almost insist, if that is within the bounds of the conventions of this House, that the Government really give us an answer on that one: how do we get the evidential basis upon which we can draw reasonable conclusions? I heard from the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, who is not in his place at the moment, a suggestion that concrete ways of responding were available, although they might need to be enriched and all the rest of it. It is urgent that we have that evidential base, for this is something that we must know more about scientifically.

I have a son who went down with all the symptoms that my noble friend Lord Stansgate mentioned, and was laid flat out for months. He has made a good recovery so that is a possibility, but I have to say that his family live with the possibility that it may recur. Again, that emphasises the need to understand this disease better than we do currently. I have to say—and a father would only want to do this—that in my son’s recovery he played a key role in the way that the funeral of the late Queen played out. He works for Westminster City Council, responsible for their street management. He resourced the queues and cleaned the streets once the horses had left their hallmark, and did all the things that were unseen.

However, I have another son who has not had Covid but Covid has had him. He has a small business that collapsed the day that lockdown started, and he is reinventing himself all the time. Long Covid, in an economic and personal way, is not related to the disease in the bloodstream or whatever it is but is playing itself out in as insidious a way, and the economic outcomes have to be borne in mind. Meanwhile the marriage of my daughter—who lives in France—did not manage to survive lockdown. Once again, those things happened as a result of Covid, and there is an ongoing realisation that we have to cope and deal with it as best we can. Long Covid in its clinical phase of operation and understanding, together with its outcomes in personal and economic life, all need to be held together.

One thing is certain in my mind as I draw my remarks to a close. The noble Baroness began by saying that Covid is still with us, and the worry is that it might recur when we thought we had cracked it. On a lighter note, I have to say that I went down with it once. The symptoms were mild but it was on my significant birthday when I could not finish my salmon steak or my glass of wine. So I have a real grudge against Covid, and I hope that will be taken into consideration.

Social Care Funding: Intergenerational Impact

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very happy to follow that intervention. I recognise its accuracy and pointedness, but I cannot feel—yet anyway —that this is an either/or, although certainly the question of poverty runs through our society and needs to be addressed radically. However, “intergenerational” clearly means a lot more to me than it does to the noble Lord who preceded me. It raises a lot of questions that demand to be answered. I am most grateful for the report from the committee, which I found very helpful. I hope that the Minister can reassure all of us that it has been taken into consideration by the Government in reaching their conclusions.

Knowing that experts in this field were speaking in this debate, I decided to do something a little different. I had a little seminar with two young people, aged about 20, who are not far from entering the jobs market and are quite intelligent. They wanted to discuss how they face the future that is being posited by these rises in national insurance to pay for social care. Of course, I was the third participant in that seminar—the baby boomer, locked up three times in a prison cell and enjoying benefits that seem to be unchallengeable.

It was interesting that the two young men, Tim and Oliver, picked on a sentence that said, “We would argue that fully funded free social care through income tax or national insurance contributions in the near future, before a fund to help pay for it has been established, fails to meet the test of intergenerational fairness because the burden for paying for social care would then fall only on the working-age population, while retired people would contribute nothing.” A little later, another sentence they picked up on was: “We would argue that older people should also make a contribution to the cost of social care”—of course, we must all agree with this.

From other sources, they plucked out comments like: the proposals currently before us would lead to

“the breakdown of families and deter companies from hiring new staff and increasing wages”.

That source also quoted another leading figure as saying that the proposals would worsen social care by making private providers pay more national insurance. Finally, there was a newspaper editorial that said:

“Coming after a year of lockdown, with its catastrophic economic and psychological impact, to inflict yet more pain on the public is senseless and intolerable.


It said that the NHS has an intolerable backlog to clear and that

“We were … promised a once-in-a-generation fix of social care, but the sum earmarked … is paltry”.


Before the Minister comes to the conclusion that this is another rant from the Labour Party Benches, I will say that this was in fact from the Tory chair of the Local Government Association. This is the first time in my entire life that I have quoted from an editorial in the Daily Telegraph—from last Sunday. I hope that the Minister will answer these points seriously.

Suicide

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

The noble Lord is entirely right to raise the issue of veterans, who have an incredible and alarmingly high rate of suicide, one that I regret enormously. We are working closely with veterans’ charities to provide the kind of mental health support that veterans need but, all too often, that does not prove enough. His request for greater data from coroners is an idea I will take back to the department, chase down and write to him about.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, these are unpropitious times for ordinary people. Lockdown has increased the incidence of loneliness and we are hearing more tales about domestic abuse. With the furlough scheme ending soon, we have worries about the world of work and joblessness. There are increased referrals for mental health problems, and the National Union of Students tells us about the well-being of students, in these uncertain times, as they face a new university session. These all bring their own worries and pressures. All these factors might create a climate in which we see, tragically, the rate of suicides climbing.

Meanwhile, the Government are beset on all sides by energy-sapping programmes to do with the economy, health and education—and Brexit looms. We heard of the loss of a senior law officer just this morning. We have heard about the ambitious programmes of the Government, as outlined by the Minister. Can he assure us that keeping them running and in proper focus will be manageable, given all the other things the Government are being dragged down by, largely as a result of their own ineptitude?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

Yes, I am glad to provide that assurance.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I express my gratitude to the noble Baroness for the wide-ranging announcements in the speech she just delivered. I rise with some trepidation and no little sense of honour and privilege as I introduce our side of this debate.

We have a new Prime Minister. He has certainly earned the right to sit in the driving seat—we cannot deny that—but our job on these Benches is to remind him to fasten his seatbelt. We are all passengers on board now and must remain vigilant.

So many subjects crop up in this compendium agenda item, but I will limit myself to just three. My noble friends will no doubt pick up on others, and expert interventions from around the House will deal with a great deal. I will concentrate on education, the internet and transport.

I have been a school governor, a trustee and, for the last 10 years—and here I declare an interest; it is all in the register—chairman of the board of the Central Foundation Schools. I want to say that, because I believe it has given me a front-row seat, allowing me to see and be part of the reinvigoration of failing schools that have risen to take their place among the best schools in the country through initiatives such as Teach First, City Challenge and the establishment of academies in their first iteration.

We must also acknowledge the contribution made by the Liberal Democrats through the introduction of the pupil premium in their time in the coalition Government and thank them for this. In London and other cities I know, those initiatives and items have turned schools that were at a loose tether and in measures into front-ranking and high-achieving schools. It has been an honour for me to put in the spadework to achieve those objectives.

In doing so, we have been able to define a model for education that works. We do not have to invent anything de novo. Just as much as a rail system, an airport terminal, broadband accessibility or other things mentioned in the Minister’s speech, I believe that education simply has to be viewed as part of our national infrastructure. It is not just roads and bridges; if you have an infrastructure strategy, it must include education.

From my own personal involvement in education over the decades, I can attest that investing in education yields measurable and immeasurable outcomes of the first order: skills, efficiency, culture, productivity, aspiration, mobility, personal development, well-being and citizenship. All this and more can be directly attributable to a properly focused and functioning education system. Alas, we have lived through 10 years when a lot of the progress looks to be coming towards disintegration. I have heard the measures proposed. The proposal to

“ensure every child has access to a high-quality education”

was clearly stated, with some figures put on it by the Minister. But the promise to

“increase levels of funding per pupil in every school”

while being welcome will leave us by 2022-23 only just at the levels that the Labour Government left as per-pupil expenditure in 2009-10. We have to recognise that what seem like alarming increases are increases of a relative nature.

At the same time, school budgets are having to pick up extra costs such as national insurance and pension increases. Pupil premium inputs have not increased with inflation and changes to the benefit system have diminished the number of people premiums without significantly compensating the families concerned. While we acknowledge the proper demands and expectations of Ofsted—of course we do—schools are telling me that they do not have the financial resources to implement them. Budgets for schools in the maintained sector are set in April, but in September for academies, while changes in teachers’ pay are decided in the summer. A simple thing could bring both budgeting exercises in line with each other, which would be an achievement in its own right. So budgeting becomes very hazardous for maintained schools, which have to take a guess at what the salaries are going to be later in the year.

“Education, education, education” is a mantra that we do not have to attribute to its source, but from an interview in the current number of the New Statesman I can add another sophism:

“Social mobility is something I care passionately about”,


says the subject,

“and the key to social mobility is education.”

All I can say is that that can be attributed to someone who I want to call my noble friend, although he usually sits on the opposite Benches: the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne. We were at school together and know the advantage in mobility that education can provide.

All of us want education to improve. Can the Minister who replies let us know, I wonder, whether he is aware of the factors that have led to the success of London schools? Will he be prepared, instead of levelling things down from an admittedly unequal distribution of resource so that everybody gets the lowest common denominator, to level up to the success levels that we can now quantify and recognise from good practice over the last 10 years?

It was spelled out in the manifesto or the Queen’s Speech that

“We will legislate to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online—protecting children … and … the most vulnerable … and ensuring there is no safe space for terrorists to hide online”.


The duty of care has been well delineated in the online harms White Paper; of course we welcome these commitments and will do our best to support them. But we are not best assured by the turnover of those holding office as Secretary of State for this part of the Government’s work. It seems to be a launching pad for people with aspirations beyond DCMS—but what am I? I do not know anything about politics.

Nor do we feel able to continue the fruitful conversation already begun in this area until we have sight of the results of the consultation which, let us remind ourselves, ended in July last year. I attended seminars and conferences. I have held discussions with various interested parties throughout the period and since. We are told that more detailed discussion between the Government and unnamed “stakeholders” has been going on. This is a matter that demands cross-party, non-partisan collaboration. It is too important an area of our national life for it to become prey to the goings-on of party politics. I do not like being kept out of the loop. I hope that the promised pre-legislative opportunity will materialise before a final shape emerges in the form of a Bill. We need to get this provision right, or as right as we can make it, and it is vital for us not to cut corners as we find our way forward. I must plead with the Minister to give us some timetabling precision on this point.

The Government have pledged

“to bring full fibre and gigabit-capable broadband to every home and business across the UK by 2025”.

I thought that I had a good vocabulary; it has been enriched since people put me in charge of this brief. We ought all of us to gasp with astonishment at this seemingly simple promise for two reasons. First, the Government have brought forward their previous commitment from 2033 to 2025—by eight years. That means that if the target stated is to be reached—while I am not very good at internet gigabit stuff, I got 100% in arithmetic at O-level, so I can do this bit—BT’s current rate of progress, at 80,000 homes per month, will have to be increased fivefold to 400,000 homes per month. Have the Government received the nod from BT Openreach that this is achievable? Has it been costed? Will the £5 billion mentioned in the Conservatives’ manifesto be enough to do the job? There is so much more that needs to be said on these matters that I leave it to other noble Lords who will surely follow on later.

I come finally to transport, and I am not going into the aeroplane side of things. The proposed railway minimum service legislation sets a dangerous precedent on the right to strike. Nobody likes to be inconvenienced by strikes, especially on the railways. I am a regular user of Southern Railway and have been as frustrated as many others in this House by these actions, but this Government’s attempt to restrict the collective bargaining of rail workers, to scapegoat them, is reprehensible. Surely it is time to sort out the mess of underfunding and franchising that has characterised the entire history of our railway system since its privatisation in the early 1990s. Here is another Tory mess, I am afraid to say, that needs to be looked at in the round rather than dealt with by populist measures aimed against the workforce. Can the Government assure the House that we will not see a race to the bottom of deregulation and a slashing of workers’ rights in this and other areas, especially in the post-Brexit era?

The arguments for and against the continuation of the HS2 project have been very much in the news, and I commend the dissentient report made public earlier this week by my noble friend Lord Berkeley. However that project turns out and whatever decision is made—high speed, high cost; that is what it seems like—it should not be at the expense of the vast improvements needed in the commuter and inter-regional networks around our major cities in the Midlands and north of England. This is a time for joined-up thinking to produce joined-up transport systems. There can be no serious regeneration without adequate infrastructure of this kind. The House will welcome some reassurance and commitment on these points.

I look forward to sitting through the next endless number of hours as I listen to other people’s more splintered views, as I have been able to luxuriate in a few extra minutes. With that, I take my leave.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, when I hear the noble Baroness speak like that, I want her contribution to end with the word “Discuss”, that we might form ourselves into a seminar and take the subject further. But I must be disciplined and stick to the subject I have chosen rather than engage with the fruitful ideas we heard a moment ago. It is to do with the whole question of DCMS, the online harms process and pre-legislative scrutiny—we are promised a Bill eventually—and all the issues that we have already begun to discuss here but that are coming forward again in greater detail later.

The metaphor of the cliff edge has been in wide use in recent times. They are down the other end at the moment raising the possibility, or probability, of a cliff edge in the Brexit debate. In a speech over the weekend, a former Governor of the Bank of England said we may be “sleepwalking” towards another cliff edge of a financial nature. The cliff edge to which I will refer is the one that I believe exists in the whole world of developing technology and the use of the internet; we have discussed this at length in various debates. The exponential rate of the expanding reach of social media, the internet and information technology vastly outpaces the capacity of a legislative chamber to promulgate a piece of legislation that deals with something that is already yesterday’s story before we put our thoughts together and make it enactable.

Because, I have to admit, I start from a rather low base, I began this year by reading Martin Moore’s Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age. It was a frightening read—very well researched, empirically based and threatening the very foundations of our democracy. The remarks I have heard about Russia’s readiness to interfere in the American election in 2020 just confirm the feelings I got from reading that book.

I am current reading—the seminar idea is coming to the fore again—Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which it defines as,

“a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for … extraction, prediction, and sales”.

I am about 250 pages in and almost having nightmares from what I read.

I am certain we have to do something, and the online harms process is the first instrument available to us. The noble Baronesses, Lady Howe and Lady Benjamin, and the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord McNally, have spoken passionately and eloquently about the age-verification aspect of what is now to be incorporated in the online harms Bill rather than to flow out of the earlier Act. That is certainly one aspect of it but from the conversations I have had, it seems to me that there are very serious matters for us to consider when we do this work together.

I would love the Government to assure me that the gracious Speech was more than just an election manifesto for a forthcoming electoral exercise by telling me what the timetable will be for producing the material that would lead to these debates. We had a consultation period that finished in July. When will all that material be processed and available to us so that we can put our minds to it, as well as the Government looking at it? What about this pre-legislative scrutiny? When? What is the critical path? As I say, we do not have time on our side. Developments in these fields of endeavour are threatening the very foundations of our society. We must have a sense of urgency about this. I have read enough to know that. I look forward to the contribution later from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, who will say it with much more astute and learned phrases than me.

My contribution to a debate of this kind necessarily has to be broad-brush. Can we sense an urgency in how we address the questions that flow from the very successes of the internet, which carry with them baggage of an altogether more threatening kind? It is quite incumbent upon us to show an ability to do precisely that.

Elderly People: Abuse

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Wednesday 14th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, for giving us this opportunity—albeit at such a late hour—to exchange at least some views on what is an increasingly important subject for us all.

The community where I have responsibilities has a safeguarding policy, but we do not limit it to creating a safe environment for children; we also look at vulnerable adults in the remit of our policy. Perhaps what I predominantly want to say in the short speech that I will make is how important it is to avoid turning a safeguarding policy into a mechanistic exercise. Sometimes one suspects that it safeguards the interests of the institution against potential litigation, rather than creating a safe environment for children or the vulnerable elderly, which ought to be our concern. That is why, in implementing our policy, we try hard to have adequate training across the board and, in various teaching situations, to undergird the requirements of the policy with emotive as well as intellectual consideration.

It is important to create communities of care and for people to encourage each other to look out for each other. As the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, properly said, apart from all the institutional examples of abuse of the elderly, which we know only too well from the media in recent days, people whom we know very well can suddenly show evidence of coming under stress and strain and, when we investigate it, it turns out to be a result of abuse for financial, psychological or other reasons in their domestic scene. We have to attune ourselves to identifying the signals that will allow us to follow through caringly and compassionately on such people when we meet them.

Rather than go into statistical or story-telling mode about this—there is plenty of evidence about it—for me it is simply that, whatever we decide and wherever this debate goes, this issue is not going to go away. It will increase. It is like the environmental debate: all the evidence is there but we do not do much. In the case of the elderly in our community, all the evidence is there but we are very tardy at doing much. I welcome the fact that statutory provision is now available to ensure regulation of certain activities in certain places, but that is very difficult in the domestic scene.

We try to find ways of helping each other to create a culture within which people are alerted to the needs of other people. This Parliament cannot do that. It can do its statutory business but somehow there is a cultural job to do, building an ethos in which people look out for each other and enriching society at a time when we run our affairs with increasing individualism. I simply want to throw that in. I had not expected to be the second speaker in the debate and therefore to be catapulted into making a national statement on all this. However, in all the evidence that is going to come forward, I hope that the undergirding or surrounding of the issue by human qualities of care and sharing is never forgotten or lost from view.

Queen's Speech

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 3rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, it is a privilege to speak in this debate and to follow hot on the heels of three Bishops and three maiden speakers. The three speeches that we heard earlier offered the promise of so much more as the years go by, and I look forward to that very much.

Perhaps I may get on the bandwagon and wish the new Government well in their administration of our public affairs. We have hinted at places where there might be tensions in the future and have argued that those might be creative or destructive. We should all hope that they are creative, and I am sure that we will be responsible in siding with all good proposals for government.

When I came to your Lordships’ House, I was offered the possibility of sitting on the Cross Benches or on these Benches. I did not hesitate, as I am a product of the welfare state. I am viscerally proud to take my place among the ranks here, where the very measures that gave opportunities to people like me were generated. However, when faithfully following my peers through the appropriate Lobby, I felt closest to objecting to the point of view of these Benches when I came under the influence of the siren voices of the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Sharp, who sadly are not in their places right now but who, in their dogged work for a decent educational system, in their advocacy of the insights, for example, of the Tomlinson report and in many other ways, introduced commonsense notions and noble aspirations for the whole field of educational provision in this country. Now that they are no longer on the bridge but travelling steerage under the new arrangements, I hope that their voices will continue to be heard, for they stand for so much from which all of us can learn.

I speak today and declare an interest as vice-chair of the trustees of the Central Foundation Schools of London. We have a secondary school for boys in Islington and one for girls in Tower Hamlets. The Minister recently visited an academy in Hackney which is sandwiched neatly between our schools. Although our schools are not academies, they are “satisfactory”/“making good progress towards outstanding” and certainly need their own kind of attention alongside the now more fashionable academies that we will be speaking about again on Monday. Just one insight from each of those schools will suffice and then on Monday it will be to pastures new. I have already heard quite a list of speakers whom I shall see again on Monday.

With regard to the boy’s school, I was not present to hear the gracious Speech, nor was I able to follow it on television, because I was locked into a conclave with five other governors of the boys’ school as we reached the conclusion of a process that has given us a new headmaster.

I want to speak for governors as we view the prospect of free schools and of greater autonomy for schools and for heads and teachers to form their own curriculums and so on. We had to find seven governors. One had to withdraw because of his business commitments. All were in full-time work. We took a whole day to shortlist the candidates from 22 to seven. We had to spend the whole of Saturday morning being trained by head-hunters in interviewing—God help us!—and then two full days from eight in the morning until 4.30 in the afternoon and from 10.30 in the morning until 6.30 in the evening going through the rest of the process. I simply draw to your Lordships’ attention just how much this demands of governors now. If it demands more of them in the future, then I ask that the point of view of governors and the likely consequences for them be taken seriously into account.

On this occasion, we could not have done our work without two people who sat with us throughout our deliberations. First, we have a foundation and therefore a little resource and, with a couple of schools which are voluntary-aided, we were able to pay for the services of a rather good head-hunter, who kept us on track. Secondly, we invited from the local authority an expert without whose help and wider view we could not have done our work efficiently or properly. Therefore, we must not rubbish local authorities as we find our way forward. Free schools are good in principle and they sound well, but there are lots of people on whom lots more demands will fall. Of course, in better-off areas governors able to provide that quality input will be easier to find. However, in the boroughs that I am talking about they are very difficult to find, and I hope that that figures in the calculations.

At the girls’ school in Tower Hamlets, where a large proportion of our intake comes from the Muslim community—because a girls’ school is very attractive to that community—we want to bring two separate sites together on to one site. A considerable amount of energy, time and money has been committed to finding a way, with the borough of Tower Hamlets, of taking advantage of the Building Better Schools for the Future programme. There have been delays, which have not been of anyone’s particular making but delays there have been, and now everyone is afraid that, with a new Government, the commitments entered into will not be honoured. We are afraid to put more energy, time and money into the scheme if there is a risk that they will not be honoured.

Therefore, perhaps I may ask a very direct question, to which I hope to hear an answer today—and if not today, I shall ask it again on Monday. Will the commitments entered into by the Central Foundation Girls’ School with Tower Hamlets be honoured and will the Building Better Schools for the Future programme come to pass in that borough? It will not do for the Government to say that that is asking for too much too soon because they have only just got into office or that they will set up a commission to look at it or something along those lines. I know that speed is possible. Cuts are happening at once. I know that academies can be formed this September if they meet the necessary criteria. The Department of Health already has on its website a government health warning: “Everything you read here is the previous lot’s. Wait for our lot to come on and then you will see the truth”. I know that speed is possible and so I ask for a speedy response. It will help a lot of people who have real angst. Will arrangements already entered into, where a great amount has already been invested, be honoured or not? I should like to hear the answer to that question.