Lord Mandelson Humble Address

Lord Kamall Excerpts

Tuesday 9th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, I am not sure that anyone would expect me to have the details of anyone’s employment contract or their departure at hand, but noble Lords will be aware of Civil Service contracts, because they are available to Members of your Lordships’ House, and in fact this one was published as part of the first humble Address.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, following up on the question from my noble friend, the Minister said that deciding which messages to release was official led, if I completely understood that correctly. Is she able to tell the House what criteria or guidance were given to officials so that they could decide which messages to release?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, the methodology of what was published and why, and what was withheld and what was redacted, was published in every volume of the disclosure last week, which noble Lords will remember I had next to me when we did the Statement. That methodology was agreed by the Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office. A KC was then brought in to quality assure that process. Materials were passed to the ISC that related to national security and international relations, which the committee then redacted. Additional material was then seen by the honourable Simon Hoare MP in his role as chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. He was then invited in on Monday last week to look at the third-party redactions to make sure that he was comfortable with them on behalf of Parliament, and he believed them to be sensible.

Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society

Lord Kamall Excerpts

Friday 5th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the most reverend Primate for securing this important debate. While the speech outlined some of the more existential questions, I will try to build on the most reverend Primate’s comments on healthcare. It is also a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, and I want to build on some of the comments she made about judgment.

In considering the demographic challenge of an ageing population, the increased demand on health and social care and the pressure on the public purse, the recently departed Secretary of State for Health and Social Care suggested that, instead of just spending more money and recruiting more people, the health system should use more AI. When we speak about AI, much of what we call AI today is really machine learning, trained on huge amounts of data to reveal hidden patterns, make predictions and learn over time.

We have the wonderful situation where, when a patient has an ocular scan, not only can the optometrist check the condition of the eye but, thanks to machine learning trained on huge medical data sets, they are able to identify whether patients also have other conditions, such as high blood pressure. So you can see why many are enthusiastic about the potential of AI in medical diagnosis but also in helping clinicians to make more informed decisions. However, taking that a step further and automating decision-making should give us pause for thought. Going even further, when we allow AI systems to rewrite their own algorithms, some see that as a step too far, with fears of machines enslaving humans and ruling the world.

Some of that AI is actually with us now. In a documentary about the use of AI by Ocado—you can see what an interesting guy I am when I watch documentaries like that—the manager explained that, while humans wrote the original algorithm, the system itself rewrites the algorithm to improve the efficiency of preparing the crates for delivery. He admitted that he no longer understood or knew what the algorithm was. For some, that will sound scary, but so far no Ocado robotic pickers have broken out of the warehouse, rampaged through the nearest town and left a trail of destruction.

With regard to medical applications in other areas, especially the military, there are concerns about fully automated processes, as a number of noble Lords have said, but even here it is not always clear cut. Consider AI-driven missile systems. While some have a human in the loop—that is, the AI identifies a legitimate target for a missile strike but a human operator still has to press the button—what happens when, effectively, the human operator says, “Actually, that system gets it right most of the time”, and just automatically presses that button? The same thing happens when we click the button for cookies—we just automatically click. That is a process of self-automation. Now imagine that in the healthcare system.

Interestingly, as an aside, when an AI algorithm was blamed for the recent missile strike that tragically murdered 180 schoolchildren in Iran, as mentioned by my noble friend Lady Helic, it turned out that the US military had not updated the data on that building, demonstrating that AI is not only only as good as the algorithm but only as good as the data it is trained on.

The other concern is that, while we see more use of AI in tech and commerce, the same systems may not always work in healthcare. I shall illustrate with a couple of examples. A few years ago, I arrived at an airport and scanned my boarding pass to get to the gate, but when I went to board the plane, the system was not working. I asked easyJet staff about it, and I was gaslit by many; over the next hour I had meeting after frustrating meeting, trying to find someone who would help me. The next day they admitted to me that a flag had gone off in the system—as if that explained everything.

Another example is when I applied for a Monzo bank account. I got a message saying, “We will process your application within 48 hours”, but a week later I had heard nothing. I chased them up, and a week later I got a message saying, “We’ve decided to reject your application, and by law we don’t have to tell you why”. The point here is that, while those companies can get away with that because there is competition and choice, imagine that happening in healthcare. You turn up for your operation, to be told, “I’m sorry, we don’t have to tell you why you’ve been declined for your operation, but you can’t get in”. So, while we should be excited about the huge potential of AI for medical research and diagnosis, when it comes to combined AI and automation for delivering health and care services, of course let us continue to innovate, but let us do so with caution and humanity.

El Niño: Impact

Lord Kamall Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My noble friend is right, which is why the severe weather resilience network exists. It is led by COBRA and includes Defra, MHCLG, the Department of Health, DCMS, the Department for Education, DESNZ, DSIT, the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, UKHSA and the devolved Governments, who meet and co-ordinate a response to any and all severe weather events. As the noble Baroness from the Opposition Benches stated, there are no borders in this space, especially with regards to weather, so making sure that the devolved Governments and the devolved space also have a co-ordinated response is key. I am really hoping someone asks me about the weather for the weekend because I can tell the House.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, I am not going to ask the Minister about the weather for the weekend. I am going to ask her about a debate around how we tackle wildfires. There is a view that in order to tackle wildfires we have to remove scrub, but at the same time people believe that that reduces biodiversity. There is clearly a tension in wanting to reduce wildfires while keeping biodiversity. What is the Government’s perspective on that balance and how do we make sure that we land in the right place?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right that there are challenges here, as there are in all issues, about how we balance protection and environmental developments to make sure that the answers work for each community. There will be different answers in different parts of the country depending on their land and the local environment. Some of this is a very localised response, which is why we have local resilience forums to make sure that that is working. If the noble Lord has something specific, I am more than happy to come back to him. I would like to reassure noble Lords that this weekend it will be warm with the chance of thundery showers at times with the highest temperatures reaching into the mid to high 20s in the south-east of England.

NHS 10-Year Plan

Lord Kamall Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, before I begin, it is the first opportunity for me from these Benches to wish the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, a speedy but restful recovery over the summer. I look forward to seeing her back after recess. I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. As she will appreciate, for many questions that have been asked on health in this House in the last few months, the answer has often been, “You have to wait for the 10-year plan”. As the 10-year plan is here, now is the time to have some constructive debate. We will ask questions but also perhaps suggest some improvements. It gives us a chance to scrutinise and, I hope, to work constructively to make sure that the Government can deliver on the plan.

Let me be clear that the Government welcome aspects of this plan—sorry, the Opposition; it has been a year now and I am still getting used to it. I am sure that the Government welcome it too, but we have many questions. First, I know there is the Casey review, but surely, we have to understand that we must get social care right if we are to unblock many of our beds. Some 13% of NHS beds have patients waiting for discharge. It is not about the financing of social care; it is about making sure people can go into the community.

Secondly, we completely agree on the use of technology. I was the Minister for Technology in the Department of Health and Social Care, and we will support pushing through technological change as quickly as possible, but we also want to make sure we can save both time and cost and improve the patient experience. Far too many functions are duplicated, but, at the same time, if you fall off your bike in an area where you do not live, surely it ought to be easy for the clinicians and paramedics there to pull up and view your record. We still have not quite got there.

How will the single patient record link with the NHS summary care record and the National Care Records Service? Will there be duplication, or will the Government be merging the SCR and the NCRS into a single patient record? The plan rightly places a lot of emphasis on the NHS app. I am proud that a Conservative Government introduced that app and welcome the fact that the Government are going to build on it.

Page 121 talks about wearable medical technology being integrated into the app, which is very welcome. We know that many people already have these wearables and that they integrate them with apps other than the NHS app, but what about the concerns of some patients who worry about where else their personal data will be shared when they share it with the app? How will the Government reassure those people that the data from their wearables will not be shared elsewhere? Will patients be able to see who has accessed their records and when, so that they can have greater confidence in the idea of data sharing?

Turning to the shift from the hospital to the community, which is something that we also agree with. On page 36 it says:

“Our aim is to establish a Neighbourhood Health Centre … in every community”,


and on page 32 it says that a neighbourhood will consist of 50,000 people. However, in his answers on the Statement, the Secretary of State said:

“We aim to go for 250 to 300 new neighbourhood health centres by the end of this plan and 40 to 50 over the course of this Parliament”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/7/25; col. 449.]


If the Government create 300 neighbourhood health centres that each serve 50,000 people, the total served by these neighbourhood health centres will be 15 million people. England has a much larger population of about 57 million people, so, far from there being one in every community, simple maths suggests that there will be 42 million people without one.

To help noble Lords understand, can the Minister explain some of the maths behind this assertion about neighbourhood health centres and what this really means? There needs to be some clarification. If they do not serve the whole population and we are not going to have neighbourhood health centres everywhere, on what basis will they be set up? Who decides where they will be? How do we make sure that they are located on the basis of need or deprivation rather than the politics of a local area? Will they complement existing GP practices and surgical hubs, and how do we make sure that there is no duplication?

On prevention, we all know that we must tackle the obesity crisis and the ill-health crisis. The problem is that quite often we are tempted to go for top-down solutions. We like to say, “Let’s ban this and let’s ban that”, but when I speak to local community civil society organisations, which work with people in local communities to encourage them to eat healthily, they are very sceptical of a lot of these top-down measures. I think of a project like BRITE Box, near where I live in south London, which goes into family homes and delivers healthy ingredients and an easy-to-read menu that children can enjoy and teaches families to cook healthily together. Surely we need to get healthy eating, healthy cooking and the sharing of meals into family homes, particularly those in deprived communities, rather than adopt a top-down solution from Whitehall or Westminster. I would have liked to see more about how we engage the power of the community and civil society at local-community level to tackle many of these issues.

Finally, there is one omission in this plan: fracture liaison services. There is only one mention of it, on page 165. That is rather disappointing, because I remember in June last year, before the last election, the current Secretary of State for Health said that he would take “immediate action” on fracture liaison services. Of course, we had to give the Government time to bed in, but it has now been a year, and we have got the 10-year plan, and there is nothing concrete on fracture liaison services. This is an easy win for the Government, because the savings to be gained from the rollout of fracture liaison services will be realised in two or three years—easily within the political cycle and easily before the next general election.

If the Minister does not have the answer to all these questions, she can write to us and deposit a letter in the Library. We look forward to her replies.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches welcome the Minister to her place. I know that, when I say that we hope that she is not too long in her place and that the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, is with us again soon, she will understand that I say it in the nicest possible way.

From these Liberal Democrat Benches, our unwavering commitment to the NHS remains absolute. We welcome any stated ambition to improve the health service, particularly with a focus on prevention, leveraging technology and moving care closer to people’s homes. However, our support is contingent on plans being genuinely deliverable, properly funded and, crucially, addressing the interconnected crisis in social care. We have long championed that you cannot fix the NHS without fixing social care.

I confess that, as I read the Government’s new 10-year plan, a familiar echo resonated through my mind. Having started my career in the early 1990s as a manager in the health service, much of what is proposed sounds eerily familiar. This plan speaks of a network of new neighbourhood-based care that provides services between general practice and traditional general hospitals. This mirrors strikingly similar initiatives from previous governments—echoing, for example, the advocacy of the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, for polyclinics in 2007.

What does history teach us about such wholesale shifts of care from hospital? It tells us that this inevitably involves running the old and new systems simultaneously, which is, without exception, expensive. Hospitals will continue to perform their essential functions, and their fixed costs will remain. The new community service demands significant new investment in buildings, staff and technology, and there are no immediate savings to fund the shift. Let us not forget the stark reality: we currently lack the capital simply to repair our existing crumbling health estate, let alone build numerous new hubs.

Crucially, for any plan that speaks of shifting care out of hospitals, the most frequent users of the NHS are our elderly population. Keeping them well and out of acute settings profoundly depends on effective social care, yet this essential pillar remains largely absent from this new plan. We search in vain for a decade-long funding and development road map for social care, or for a stand-alone, fully resourced social care strategy. This is a crucial strategic failure, undermining the very foundation upon which this shift to community is based.

Moreover, while the enthusiasm for digital transformation is understandable, the detailed implementation plan of how to do it is absent. The app is a diagnostic tool; it does not provide direct care, it does not give the jabs and it does not provide the treatment. The King’s Fund has shared its concern on this:

“AI scribes can only transform the productivity of the NHS if staff don’t need to spend 30 minutes every morning logging into multiple out-of-date IT systems”.


The fundamental question remains unanswered: how will this be delivered? The plan is ambitious, but it has been launched into an incredibly chaotic delivery environment marked by significant structural change within the health system bureaucracy. The key question for the Government is how this will be delivered. I therefore have a few questions for the Minister.

What precise funding strategy is embedded within the 10-year plan to deliver the necessary reform and integration of adult social care? Given the dual running costs of new neighbourhood health facilities, can the Minister provide a year-by-year financial breakdown of expenditure and demonstrate how these investments will lead to overall system efficiencies and net savings? Will the Minister commit to publishing within the next four months a comprehensive, independently overseen delivery road map for this 10-year plan that details specific year-by-year objectives and names leads and mechanisms for public reporting on progress? While we wish the ambitions well, the key challenge for this Government is how they will deliver and being open and transparent on that.

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

My Lords, I also start by sending my very best wishes to my noble friend Lady Merron. No one more than me is looking forward to her making a very speedy recovery. I am very pleased to hear from her that she is making good progress, so we look forward to her return. I think it is appropriate that I declare an interest: my son is a GP, which I think is perhaps slightly relevant to the debate before us today.

To recap before I go into more of the details, I emphasise that this plan is different in so many ways to the NHS plans that have come before it. As we have heard, it is a road map for radical reform that is built on three fundamental shifts. Those of us that have been around the health agenda for a while recognise the past aspiration for some of these measures, but there was never a bold, innovative, collaborative plan to take our ambitions forward.

From hospital to community care, bringing care closer to home and making access to GPs faster and simpler is absolutely fundamental, particularly in the current climate—and from analogue to digital, giving staff modern tools and patients the kind of convenience and control they expect elsewhere in their lives. All of us have heard heartbreaking stories of patients who go from one specialist to another, and there is not that join-up. This has to be changed. There is no reason why this cannot apply across all the experiences the public have, regardless of where they are seeking services.

Many of us have been talking about the need to move to prevention in so many areas of life. Where better than people’s health, looking at the root causes of poor health and making healthy choices? It is the easy choice, but at the moment it is not that easy.

The new NHS has patients at its heart, will deliver equity and quality, is devolved and decentralised so that we are more responsive to local community needs and the front line is freed up to harness innovations, and the rules and incentives in the system support clinicians and lead us locally to be able to make the right decisions. This means that there is no simple chapter or section within the plan for individual conditions or groups setting top-down actions. The impact on particular services and outcomes will be through successfully transforming how our health ecosystem works. As we will come on to with the more specific questions, this is very much a work in progress. I am delighted by the reach the consultation has had over the last year. That has informed the debate and the outcome that is seen in the plan, so there have been no surprises. Many people who have been involved recognise what is in the plan.

The plan is backed by £29 billion per annum of extra investment by the end of the review period and, crucially, by a drive to cut unnecessary bureaucracy and empower front-line staff, giving them the tools to do what they do best: caring for patients.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, for his very constructive comments; they were exceptionally helpful. Across the House, we all look forward to taking this extremely seriously and moving forward.

Turning to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, on social care, he and I share a very positive background in local government, and nothing could be closer to our hearts than working out how we are going to bring the two together. That is fundamental. Both noble Lords made the point very clearly, and we welcome that.

Over the next three years, we will focus on the neighbourhood health approach to those most let down by the current system. That includes older people with frailty and those in care homes. Social care professionals will work alongside NHS staff in local teams, supporting recovery, rehabilitation and independence. We have examples from around the country where this is already happening: services are joined up and the cultural differences between the NHS and local government have been successfully broken down. We need to make sure this is replicated and spread to every part of the country. We need to enable care professionals to take on many more health-related responsibilities, such as blood pressure checks and reducing avoidable hospital administrations. Of course, pay terms and conditions have to be improved through fair pay agreements.

In the longer term, the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, will produce an interim report next week, but it is very much a work in progress.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

It will be next year.

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

Sorry, I meant next year—I was just testing that everyone was still with us—in anticipation of the in-depth work she is already involved with. There will be cross-party discussions and a real engagement with stakeholders.

On the single patient record, I will have to write to the noble Lord about how the merging of the different systems will be achieved, but it will very much be about the patient being in control and giving a full picture for staff moving forward. The digital red book for children is absolutely fantastic.

On the shift to the community, as we have made clear, we will initially prioritise those living in areas of greatest deprivation. We will be opening neighbourhood health centres in places where life expectancy is low. There will be principles that we will follow, bringing all the multidisciplinary teams together.

On the fracture liaison service, I will have to respond in writing. I am sorry but I do not have the specific details in front of me.

Returning to the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, and his comments about social care, it is critical that we get this right and make sure that local leaders are right in there, responsible for delivery, proactive, providing a co-ordinated response and building on the work already being done.

On the funding, £29 billion is quite a significant amount of resource to work from. We recognise that there are challenges, and it would be wrong of me to pre-empt the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. But I know she has been encouraged to work with the best of the best, and I look forward to the outcomes.

I have to finish—I am sorry; there is never enough time. Our health system is in crisis, and we need to act now. We must make sure that the NHS continues as a publicly funded service free at the point of use. We need to seize the opportunities provided by all the new technologies and medicines outlined in the plan, go forward with innovation and make sure that the patients are at the heart of everything we do.