Dementia

Debate between Alison McGovern and Hazel Blears

Thursday 10th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Hazel Blears]

Yes, there was. The all-party group had an interesting presentation from the Scottish Health Department. Diagnosis rates in Scotland are very high indeed, and we learned that the highly organised, managed and focused system there was driving up diagnosis. It is driven, to some extent, from the centre, and I know that that is not always popular these days, but the drive from the centre out to the GPs is really making a difference. I think that there is room for us to adopt a more driven process—it need not necessarily be more centralised—in which GPs are more accountable and in which they report back on rates of diagnosis. There is much more that we can do in that regard.

Diagnosis is a problem, but once a diagnosis has been made, the availability of support in the community becomes relevant. There are many problems in that area. Our inquiry revealed that many carers felt that nothing happened after the diagnosis, because there was no help or support available. In my area in Salford, we are lucky. We have one of the 10 national demonstration projects established under the national dementia strategy in 2009, and we are developing some really innovative services in the community. I should perhaps declare an interest: my mum attends the centre two days a week, and I sit on the strategic board that drives the process there. I have seen that when people are really committed to such projects, they can make a huge difference.

Our centre is the result of a partnership between the local authority and the Humphrey Booth charity, which has existed in Salford since the year 1600. It is a marvellous example of people working together. The centre is known as the Poppy centre, and its facilities include a dementia singing group, on a Wednesday, which attracts 150 people. That is an incredible resource. The centre also offers day centre services, art work, music, personal tailored care, a dementia café for when friends and family drop in, living history, hairdressing and hand massage. It is a wonderful place, staffed by brilliant people.

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

I apologise to my right hon. Friend and other Members because I cannot stay for the whole debate. The lesson I have learned from her expertise and from the evidence I have heard about Salford on this and other occasions is that we cannot think in the old way about how we help people with dementia; we have to be creative and provide the best range of services possible.

[Hazel Blears]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We are at the beginning of the kind of innovative care that she talks about. One thing we need to do is to get more young people and more young clinicians involved in this area, because that is how we will see innovation coming through.

We have a brilliant centre in Salford run by the manager Sue Skeer. There is also Sue Smyth and Nicola Fletcher, and users and carers are on our board. Margaret and Fred Pickering are an inspiration: Fred has dementia, Margaret is his carer and the whole of our practice is driven by users and carers at the centre. We are lucky, but many places have nothing like the Poppy day centre to support them.

We want to make Salford a dementia-friendly community and to make sure that transport, housing, leisure and local shops are all aware of the issues around dementia. My local university in Salford is setting up a dementia centre—a collaboration between the department of the built environment, including architects, and the department of social care. Design is being looked at really seriously. A marvellous Italian Professor Ricardo Codinhoto and a wonderful nurse, Natalie Yates-Bolton have inaugurated not just the design centre at Salford university, but now a European collaboration so that we will have an international design network on how we can make dementia-friendly communities work.

My question to the Minister on dementia-friendly communities, which we hope to be in Salford and which York, Plymouth and other places are pursuing, is: what resources have the Government committed to support the work of these communities, and how will it be sustained in the long term? We can push on, but we need a resource to make it happen. Yesterday, I met Duncan Selbie, the new director of Public Health England, who is going to make dementia a national priority for public health, so there really is commitment and energy behind all this. I want to hear from the Government what they can do to help.

Let me briefly cover my second theme—I have accepted two interventions—which is about the research challenge. I met the Wellcome Trust this week, and I was hugely encouraged by its willingness to put serious research funding into this area. It is looking not just at clinical research, which it might have done in the past, but at research on “living well with dementia”, recognising the importance of a holistic approach. I was impressed, too, when I met David Lynn and Dr John Williams. They acknowledged the difficulty of this area because there is so much that we still do not know about the brain. Nevertheless, despite the failure of the recent clinical trials, the data from them could prove very useful in taking us forward to the next steps, which we hope will help us find drugs that will at least slow down or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s. What everyone who has Alzheimer’s wants is a cure; they are desperate to get some progress here.

If we have a really big push on research, I feel that progress could be made. Our scientists are some of the best in the world in this area, yet for every six scientists working on cancer, only one works on dementia. Only 2.5% of the Government’s research budget goes to dementia, with 25% going to cancer. We should look at the progress made in cancer over the last 20 or 30 years; I do not want to wait another 25 or 30 years to make the same progress for the hundreds of thousands of people who are suffering from dementia now. The Government really must press on.

There are many people out there who want to help us. Just this week, the Daily Mail featured a long article about the possible benefits of coconut oil and the work done on that at Oxford. I have no idea whether that is likely to help people. It has helped some families, but we can see from that the absolute desperation people have to try to find something that can help the life of their loved one. Research is thus a huge challenge, as is help in the community.

I want to express some concerns about where we are at the moment. It is a time of great change in the health service. We are moving from primary care trusts to clinical commissioning groups, and it could be a time of instability. I am worried about the expertise—or lack of it—in the clinical commissioning groups when it comes to commissioning for something as complex as dementia. I want every CCG to have a lead for dementia, developing expertise and knowledge so that they know how to get the best from the money available. I would like to hear the Minister say that he wants to see a dementia lead in every CCG.

My final point is about the resources available to us. Over the last three years, my local authority has faced cuts of £876,000—30% of the adult social care budget. I know the Government will say that they have put £1 billion back in and that £1 billion has been lost, but when the budget is not ring-fenced, it can easily get spent on other issues. It is virtually impossible for councils to meet their targets without looking at the adult social care budget, which is 40% of their overall expenditure. That is why we can see day centres closing. They are an essential support network, providing a lifeline for carers, yet they are being cut. I am very worried indeed—not just about local authority cuts, but about buddying services provided by Age Concern. These voluntary and third-sector groups, so essential to people, are now quite fragile.

I am sure that the future funding of social care is going to be discussed. I make a plea: please may we have the cap at a level that helps the majority of families that need to be helped? If it is set at £75,000, I will be worried that those who really need the help will not receive it.

I think we are now at a point where progress can be made of the kind that has probably not been made for years. I really hope that we can press forward on a cross-party basis. We need a long-term settlement so that we can support people at what is probably the most difficult and frightening time of their lives.

I remember what it felt like to discover that my mum had dementia and that her future would be so different from the one that her and my dad planned together. We have been lucky in that we have been able to speak up and get help and support from the fantastic caring people at the Poppy centre, but it is hard for many people who might not have a strong voice or someone to advocate on their behalf. My mum instilled in me that sense of justice and fairness, which has driven me throughout my political life. I know that she would want me to continue to fight for all those who often find themselves bewildered and powerless, and to make sure that they are treated with care and dignity. We owe them all nothing less.

North-West Economy

Debate between Alison McGovern and Hazel Blears

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Westminster Hall

[Hazel Blears]

My hon. Friend is right and has championed those ideas for a long time. The proposals are important because, without the infrastructure it will not be possible to draw in the investment that will provide jobs and prosperity, enabling Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Cheshire and the northern part of the region to prosper, and giving them proper connections. That is fundamental to what we are trying to achieve. If we can get support for the city region, it could be a model for other city regions in the future. I urge the Government to proceed with that.

Even when there is devolution of housing, transport and planning, the issue of skills continues to be a challenge, as it has been for many years. There is a big skills gap between young people’s qualifications and abilities and some of the new jobs on offer. Unless we close the gap there will continue to be generations of people without work. The north-west has the highest percentage of neighbourhoods—more than 20%—in the most deprived 10% in the country. We have more out-of-work benefit claimants than any other region: nearly 700,000 people are out of work and in receipt of Department for Work and Pensions benefits. That is about one in six of England’s workless population. We have 375,000 people who have been claiming out-of-work benefits for two years or more, with 308,000 of them claiming for incapacity. In addition, 9.3% of our working age population is in receipt of incapacity-related benefit. That is not just a waste for the economy but a waste of lives—of opportunities and life chances for many people.

One thing that we should do to ensure that the economy prospers is tackle the deep generational structural worklessness in some communities. I commend the pilots that are happening in Greater Manchester on connecting people to opportunity. They are a new way of doing business and have been designed and championed by Chris Marsh, who works for the urban regeneration company in Salford. He has been commissioned on behalf of all 10 authorities to consider how to drill down into the families where there is generational worklessness. The early results are extremely encouraging. He has adopted a system called Total Place in which all the agencies—health, police, regeneration, education and employment services—are brought together. Budgets are pooled, the same targets are agreed and there is the same evaluation. That means more efficiency; things are not done 10 times. Everyone is targeting the families with the most problems. It makes absolute common sense. The total public sector budget in Greater Manchester, across all the agencies, is £22 billion. No one can tell me that we cannot get some efficiencies and savings, but also better results, by bringing together such public sector resources under the Total Place scheme. The pilots, which are getting people back to work because every agency is involved in targeting the relevant families, are a huge success.

I want to ask some pointed questions about how we are to work in the future. The Northwest Regional Development Agency has been a success story by anyone’s measure. It is probably second to none in the way it has levered investment into the region. There has been great confusion about where the new Government want to go in relation to RDAs. The Business Secretary appeared to change his mind three times in the space of just one speech. I think that we now know that the Government intend to abolish RDAs, and many of us are very concerned about that, but we are not sure what is likely to take their place. Local authorities have been asked to consider setting up local employment partnerships with business. We are not sure at what level that will be, or how many clusters of local authorities will be involved. Will they follow the economic footprint, which is a matter of practical common sense, or will they be artificial structures that will not, in my view, work?

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

I wonder whether my right hon. Friend agrees with me that one of the most worrying things about the present situation in relation to the Northwest Regional Development Agency is the effect on the many relationships that have been built up around it. I have been going around my constituency talking to representatives of big business and smaller business—I was at Unilever yesterday. Local economic partnerships may be two years down the line, and that leaves a hiatus. Those relationships and the work that was being done are falling by the wayside.

[Hazel Blears]

My hon. Friend is right. In her relatively short time in the House she has made a tremendous contribution to highlighting those issues. She understands that in many cases business works on the basis of relationships, and that some long-established relationships are in danger of fracturing and disappearing in the interim. We need to get on with whatever is going to be done, and make sure that it is properly established.

It is important, too, as we proceed with the local economic partnerships, that when investment is drawn in local people should have the opportunity to get the jobs that are on offer. I urge the Minister to talk to his colleagues in the Department for Education. For those of us who were lucky enough to get Building Schools for the Future programmes in our constituencies—many of us did not, and are rightly angry about it—I want the contracts for those major public building projects to include apprenticeships and construction job opportunities for local people. My hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) is right to say that 40 per cent. of the construction sector’s business depends on public sector projects. Many BSF programmes would have employed bricklayers, joiners and plasterers and those jobs are now lost to our economy.