Health and Care Bill

Debate between Lord Scriven and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

Committee stage
Friday 4th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, these amendments also relate to alcohol. Amendment 259 is about alcohol labelling to prevent harm and Amendment 296 concerns dealing with the harm when someone has become addicted to alcohol. I shall cut what I was going to say dramatically because of the time spent on other amendments earlier today.

Labelling is the way we inform the public of what they are getting. About 70 people die every day from alcohol-related causes in the UK. Alcohol is responsible for 12,000 cancers every year. Covid has compounded this harm, with deaths from alcohol now at the highest rate since records began. There is more information on a carton of orange juice than a bottle of beer. Awareness of the health risks of alcohol is very low. Just one in five people can identify the low-risk drinking guidelines and less than one-quarter know that alcohol can cause breast cancer. Alcohol is linked to the worst pregnancy outcomes and serious lifelong impacts for a baby, yet one in three people are unaware that it is not safe to drink in pregnancy. It has been estimated that 41% of pregnant women consume alcohol.

Alcoholic drinks are also extremely calorific, as we have heard. We have already spoken about the number of calories those who drink take in and I will not go there again, but calories need to be included on the labelling. People have a right to know what they are consuming, but they cannot make informed choices about their drinking. Voluntary inclusion of information on labels has not worked and has been very low: 70% of labels do not include the CMO’s low-risk drinking guidelines, over 70% do not list ingredients and only 7% display nutritional information, including calories. The public want the information. In July 2020, the Government agreed to consult on requiring calories and drinking guidelines to be on alcohol labels, yet here we are all this time later and we are still waiting for the consultation to even be launched.

Amendment 296 refers to treatment services. Alcohol addiction is a complex problem, with many factors driving and perpetuating harmful drinking. People who are trapped by alcohol dependence need help to move towards recovery. The benefits for the health service are reductions in emergency service call-outs and unnecessary hospital admissions, and the benefit for everyone is a reduction in avoidable deaths. These are the outcomes by which the effectiveness of any measure can be assessed.

Many people who require alcohol dependency treatment also have problems with other substance abuse, mental health, domestic abuse and homelessness. It is alarming that, during the pandemic, only 20% of people who need help for problem drinking have been able to access it and there has been a significant and sustained increase in the rate of unplanned admissions for alcohol liver disease. Since 2012, there have been real-term funding cuts in alcohol treatment services, yet every £1 invested in alcohol treatment yields £3 in return; that rises to a return of £26 after 10 years. Only 9% of people with alcohol dependence account for 59% of in-patient alcohol-related admissions. So, a cohort of more than 54,000 people accounts for 365,000 admissions and more than 1.4 million bed days, at an estimated cost of £858 million a year. There are also significant pressures on the treatment workforce because there is a shortage of psychiatry trainees.

I hope that these amendments are self-explanatory, and that the Government will look favourably on doing something about the problem of alcohol harm. I beg to move.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendments 259 and 296 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff. I speak on behalf of my noble friend Lord Shipley, who, unfortunately, cannot be here today but has added his name to those amendments.

The amendments are on the Marshalled List to push the Government to move faster on something that the public want that has now been shown to be effective, particularly alcohol labelling. A recent YouGov poll showed that 71% of the British public want to know the number of units in an alcoholic drink, 61% want to know the calorific content and 53% want to know the amount of sugar in alcohol. There is clear public support for this, so it is interesting that we have not moved faster.

Health and Care Bill

Debate between Lord Scriven and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff

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

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, this is my first intervention on the Bill. I draw the Committee’s attention to my relevant interests in the register, namely as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and a non-executive director of Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

I support this suite of amendments—particularly Amendments 11, 14, 65, 94, 186 and 195—which explicitly puts the issue of health inequalities in the Bill and makes it central to the aims of the NHS. It also deals with reporting and holding people to account for helping to reduce health inequalities.

The reason for my support is simple. I speak as a former NHS manager who, as a rookie many years ago, in the very early 1980s, was on the general management trainee scheme. For the first three months, our aim was just to go around. I remember asking the very naive question: “Who’s responsible for quality?” I expected the person who was showing me around to say, “Everyone”, but he said, “Follow me.” We went in his car for five miles outside the hospital to the health authority. We then went into a lift, down into the basement and through lots of corridors, and finally came to a door at the end of the corridor. The door was opened and in a dimly lit room was a middle-aged woman, surrounded by piles of paper. I said, “Who’s this?” I was told, “This is Gladys. Gladys is responsible for quality.” It was seen as someone else’s job.

That is why I have cringed a little when the Minister has said, in previous debates and Answers on health inequalities, that the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities is being established. That is well and good, but that office is not responsible for reducing health inequalities; everyone in the healthcare system and its partners must work together to reduce health inequalities. That is why it is really important that this is explicit. It is not just about health issues; it is about people’s income, work, environment, green space and transport. It should be explicit in the Bill as part of the triple aims—which will become four aims—and become part of monitoring. This issue must become central because something that I have learned about the health service is that unless the centre asks for it, and asks for it to be monitored, it just does not get done because it is not seen as important. That is why monitoring this at both local and national level will hold people to account so it does not become Gladys’s responsibility.

The Bill gives us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not just to put health inequalities centrally in the Bill but to make them explicit in the way that the NHS and its partners work. With a little extra legal push to the mill, so to speak, as well as the monitoring, the data and holding people to account, I believe that we can finally start to deal with these issues in a systematic way that shows improvement and will allow the NHS and its partners to know where to push a bit harder to get this done. That is why I support the amendments.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, this debate has shown clearly that attacking health inequalities must go beyond the bounds of the NHS as the impact of external factors is massive. I remind the Government that in 2015 poor housing alone was estimated to cost over £10 billion. That was in part because of the poor housing but it was compounded by inactivity and, as a result, obesity.

We should look at the antecedents of complex problems. Marie Curie’s report Dying in the Cold revealed failures in healthcare, bereavement and grief and the challenges of providing care for those with complex needs. Learning difficulties and autism, for which we often do not know the underlying causes, are disproportionately prevalent among people who are socially excluded and at high risk of homelessness, yet for them managing homelessness alone is particularly difficult because of their overall vulnerability. It has been estimated that autism alone has a twelvefold prevalence in those who are homeless compared to the general population.

The antecedents of many of the problems go back to childhood. They carry a life sentence of their trauma, which feeds into worsening health inequalities, aggravating factors such as alcohol and drugs consumption and other behaviours. Unless we strengthen the wording in the Bill to monitor and do something about the data that comes forward, the proposal of my noble friend Lord Kakkar—it is essential that we address this as a core problem to be tackled—will not be realised. I hope that when the Minister replies he will provide some assurance that the Government will consider strengthening the wording in the Bill in the light of this debate.