South-west of England: Levelling up

Lord Jones of Cheltenham Excerpts

Thursday 7th April 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Jones of Cheltenham (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the right reverend Prelate for securing this important debate and for the way he covered many of the issues facing the south-west.

In the Library briefing for this debate, we are told that Cornwall and Devon perform consistently worse on a number of metrics than better-off areas towards Wiltshire and Gloucestershire—but I do not want anyone to run off with the idea that Gloucestershire does not share many of the problems of Devon and Cornwall. We too suffer from healthcare shortages and the problems brought about by the Government’s failure to address the cost of living crisis—and indeed by their insistence on making the problem even worse with their increase in NI contributions.

Local residents in Gloucestershire and visitors to the county have had to put up with the worst state of roads and pavements I can remember. When I was growing up, we were told, “A stitch in time saves nine”. Gloucestershire County Council does not seem to have heard about this. Instead, it lets many roads decay to such an extent that large amounts of hard-earned council tax payers’ money is now having to be spent on patching up some of the worst areas. Many roads still have bone-shaking, suspension-damaging potholes. Yesterday, on the way to a medical appointment, I endured Douro Road, one of the worst in Cheltenham.

Nationwide figures released this week show an alarming rise in the truly appalling number of children growing up in poverty. Gloucestershire is not immune to this. How can children be expected to concentrate on their schoolwork if they arrive at school having had an inadequate breakfast or, in many cases, no breakfast at all? When I was MP for Cheltenham, we had no food banks. Now they are a necessary part of our town’s efforts to feed our citizens. I pay tribute to the dedicated people who give their time to help those in need.

I have tabled Written Questions about the number of dentists who accept NHS patients in the south-west. The number is painfully low in Gloucestershire, while in Devon, Cornwall and the Scillies there are none at all. There are few things worse than agonising toothache, and more dentists need to be trained.

There has been a crisis in Gloucestershire with ambulance waiting times and access to Gloucester Royal Hospital. Part of this problem was caused by Cheltenham General Hospital being deprived for too long of 24-hour accident and emergency services because of a lack of staff, with patients being diverted to Gloucester. On three occasions, my own life was saved only by rapid access to A&E. I am grateful to the medics who saved me. To take another example, an elderly relative of mine was found on the floor of his home at 7 am one morning by his carer. An ambulance was called, but it took more than four hours before paramedics arrived. After stabilising him, they took him to hospital. Sadly, he died there later that week. I am not saying that the delay in the ambulance’s arrival contributed to his death, but I suspect it did not help his condition.

Waiting times for GPs and cancer treatment in the south-west are unacceptably long. All the GPs I know have been working their socks off, beyond full capacity and with long hours, and they are quite rightly angry when the Health Minister criticises them. One resident told me the other day that he suspects the Government are deliberately underfunding the health service to encourage people to complain about the NHS, so that they can continue to privatise the whole service to their rich friends. The Bill we voted on this week shows that that may not be far from the truth.

Finally, another serious concern is that, far too often, rivers and waterways in the south-west are being polluted by having raw sewage pumped into them. In 2020, water companies released raw sewage into rivers more than 400,000 times over a total of 3.1 million hours. In many cases, such discharges are happening routinely, not just in exceptional circumstances such as extreme rain. I voted for a ban on sewage discharges, but this was reversed by the Government with a useless amendment of their own. Why on earth will they not force the water companies to clean up their act? My local water company, Severn Trent, made over £400 million profit last year, around a quarter of its income. Those profits disappear into large bonuses for bosses and dividends for shareholders, instead of funding infrastructure necessary for the clean-up. Why are hard-pressed taxpayers expected to pay for cleaning up this pollution, which is killing our wildlife and endangering those who participate in water sports?

Sadly, the Government’s levelling-up White Paper is short on detail and contains no magic nuggets for the south-west. If the Government think they can take voters for granted in our beautiful part of the country, they have a rude awakening coming their way.