Health and Social Care Committee
Debate between Alison Thewliss and Paul Williams(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Dr Paul Williams
I absolutely join the hon. Lady in commending the breastfeeding peer support workers in Totnes, and those in many other parts of the country—I have met some in my constituency, too. There is a common theme: when services are reconfigured and new services are put out to tender, the people who have devoted a lot of time and effort as volunteers can find themselves excluded. That is partly because of the nature of commissioning and tendering.
The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health gave us compelling evidence about breastfeeding. In the United Kingdom, we have some of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the whole of Europe, and there are wide socioeconomic disparities. Investment in breastfeeding support is crucial.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
I will pick up where the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), left off. I saw from the report that there was extensive consultation with Mumsnet. Why is there not a more specific recommendation in the report for more comprehensive breastfeeding support? What the hon. Gentleman says is correct, but it would have been good to see it in the report. During the Committee’s visit to Blackpool, were the cuts to the Breastfeeding Network’s star buddies programme mentioned? That service was lost in 2017.
Dr Williams
I thank the hon. Lady for those questions. One of the Committee’s early reports of this session was about childhood obesity. We made specific recommendations in that report that we have not necessarily repeated in this one.
We saw many wonderful things in Blackpool. We did not learn about the specific service to which the hon. Lady refers, but we did learn that many services have come under a lot of financial pressure. Even though there was some Big Lottery investment for transformation, services still needed to be cut, which sounds counterintuitive.