King’s Speech

Lord Thurlow Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thurlow (CB)]

My Lords, I will direct my comments towards the healthcare aspects of today’s debate.

I welcome the mental health Bill, as it is vital and overdue to provide greater needs-based patient care, but I am disappointed that it is the only reference in the gracious Speech to change in the NHS. More reform is required. The reality is that our wonderful NHS is badly broken. While the Labour manifesto promised to build the NHS for the future, there is little sign of that in the gracious Speech. Have the Government abandoned this challenge? I hope not. The NHS model desperately needs cost-saving reform. As we have heard, its huge cost is projected to grow quickly to an astonishing sum, yet it remains short-staffed and with IT systems at breaking point.

There is a list of unnecessary expense items. Health tourism is a good example, blocking beds and filling the diaries of specialists simply to look after those who come from abroad for a short stay to enjoy our world-class standard of medical provision and the fact that it is free at the point of delivery. The “Lagos shuttle”, as many will know, is the aptly named people trafficking equivalent organising medical travel arrangements from west Africa. Yet the NHS seems to do nothing. Hospitals have tried, and some use volunteers, but where is the initiative from senior management across the sector?

Missed appointments are another glaring opportunity. There are thousands of them every week that lengthen delays, yet there appears to be no attempt to penalise those who simply cannot be bothered to turn up. In France, a recent Act of Parliament penalises those who fail to turn up. We could do the same.

Hospital administrators could manage the process of confirming eligibility for free care as a British citizen, yet to us this seems unthinkable—even offensive— whereas most other countries with a national health service manage the process perfectly well. We should make strenuous efforts to prevent such waste.

My comments do not focus on the delivery of service that we as patients receive. The doctors, nurses and all the staff are not at fault. We still enjoy the wonderful level of care and compassion for which the NHS is so famous. Staff at all levels are heroes, but the BMA has referred to staff burnout, junior doctors have taken the last resort of strike action and morale appears to be low.

I conclude with a request to the Minister. The provision of healthcare for those suffering with Huntington’s disease is woefully lacking. It is a neurological condition like motor neurone disease, but unlike MND it has nothing like the profile and public awareness that leads to improved fundraising, research and wider clinical provision. Those suffering from Huntington’s are in a particularly tragic place, as it directly impacts the lives of their children. It is a genetically transferable condition which creates terrible anxiety for those children, who can establish whether they in turn will suffer from it only by testing. The decision whether or not to test is traumatic and immensely stressful. We have centres of excellence, but they are few and far between. There should be a positive drive to replicate this best practice throughout the UK. I ask the Minister to do what she can to improve these facilities.