Sudden Adult Death Syndrome

Andy Burnham Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

We have heard some outstanding speeches this afternoon, and a good deal of consensus, which I am sure will be encouraging for the thousands, indeed millions, of people throughout the country who are campaigning on the issue that we are discussing. We must not forget that we are here for this debate because 110,000 people have signed a petition, in the belief that lives can be saved if Parliament will give the issue more attention and make changes. The debate would not be happening without the outstanding campaigning efforts of the OK Foundation and other heart organisations. I pay tribute in particular to Councillor Jake Morrison, one of the youngest councillors in the country and a shining example of the difference that councillors can make when they dedicate themselves to a campaign.

If it does nothing else, today’s debate will have achieved something, because the official record will contain a permanent memorial to Oliver King, and to the other young people mentioned in the debate, whose lives have tragically been lost. I want the debate to achieve far more than that, however, which is why I am leading for the Opposition today. I want today to be the start of a parliamentary journey in which the issues we are debating here will soon move to the Floor of the House and then, finally, into legislation supported, I hope, by a cross-party campaign. The debate is changing in the country. Every Member of this House will have seen campaigns in their local paper when lives have been lost, and those campaigns are calling for something to be done. It is now time for Parliament to show more leadership on the issue, which we have brought up the parliamentary agenda, and to make changes that will save lives.

We have heard from many hon. Members today, and the attendance of so many Members, not all of whom have spoken, shows the level of interest within Parliament. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) introduced the debate with a customarily outstanding speech, and he set out the issues very clearly. The hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) spoke from personal experience, and given his commitment, we should all listen to what he has to say. My right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) and my hon. Friends the Members for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper), for Bassetlaw (John Mann) and for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) have all made outstanding speeches.

The reason why people talk with such conviction and passion is that we have all seen the devastating effect of the unexpected loss of a life, particularly of a young person, but not necessarily so because this affects young and old. People have seen the inexplicable grief that a family feel when someone is brought down in their prime, often at the peak of their powers, playing sport.

That was certainly the case with Daniel Young in my constituency. He died in 2005 playing football for Leigh RMI football club. He was an outstanding young footballer, and at the time his mother, Dionne, told me that she bought everything for him to make his young football career a success. He had all the latest gear, but she said, “If somebody had just told me to pay for a screening test, it would have been the best £30 I could ever have spent, but I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know he was at risk.” My journey began there, and I started to look into the issue.

When I held office in the Department of Health, I asked the Department to look at the issue and to consider the case for screening, as proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton. While that work has been taking place, we have sadly seen further tragedies. Of course, we have spoken today about the loss of Oliver in Liverpool. He was another outstanding young sportsman whose talent was taken away from us. Oliver’s dad, Mark, was in a similar position to my constituent: he was not warned about the potential risks and, obviously, I am sure he now thinks about that all the time.

Close to my constituency, we have also recently lost a very young boy. Ciaran Geddes was seven years old, and he died in April 2012 playing football on his own. He was a member of the Winwick junior football club, who play in the same Warrington junior league in which my son used to play. That brings it very close to home, and it was such a young life. Ciaran’s mum, Marika, is now campaigning through the Ciaran’s Cause charity, which has given 27 defibrillators to schools across Warrington, with 10 more to be given soon. Marika says that, with every defibrillator the charity gives, she feels that Ciaran lives on. Three of the defibrillators donated to schools by the Oliver King Foundation have already been used, which brings home just how important it is to support those campaigns.

As my hon. Friends the Members for Bolton West and for Liverpool, Walton have said, we all saw the case of Fabrice Muamba—what an inspiring story that is —which shows just what can be achieved, but as my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley said, he was saved only because he fell at a premier league football ground. Obviously, he did almost die, but he survived because he was at the ground and because back-up was on hand. The poor kids who fall at grass-roots football locations are not so lucky, but simple support could be in place that might save many more lives.

[Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

I tried to be here for the start of the debate to hear the speeches that have been made on this most important subject.

There have been a number of high-profile deaths of young sportspeople on playing fields in Northern Ireland, where we have a very high rate of death by cardiac arrest anyway. I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman would agree that there have been positive outcomes from those tragedies—we have heard of examples from across England—and in Northern Ireland a new community resuscitation strategy has been launched that aims to train people in emergency life support and to provide more defibrillators. So, positives are coming out of those tragedies, and we must all redouble our efforts, as the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) said, to press people to really deliver.

[Andy Burnham]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely spot on, because we see incredible activity across all four nations of the United Kingdom in the wake of those tragedies. Communities are pulling together, raising funds and donating defibrillators to schools and sports clubs, which brings me to my main point: leadership is now needed at national level to co-ordinate that activity and to bring clarity to the whole situation so that the public know where to find a defibrillator and how to use one. I hope I can persuade the Government to work with Opposition Front Benchers on that. There is no politics involved here; this is about saving lives where we can and doing things to make human progress in this country. Other countries are more focused than we have been, and because of that they are saving more lives.

My feeling is that provision is too random at the moment—it is happening in some places and not in others—and we need clarity on policy at a national level so that we can piggyback on all those local campaigns to make progress. I do not think there is a funding issue, because communities will find the money to put these things in the right places, but we must know where they need to go.

It is crucial to understand that, with the best will in the world, the ambulance service is often unable to make a difference for the people who sadly fall in a busy shopping centre, railway station or sports ground. Why? Because they are unable to get there within the Government target time of eight minutes, which is too late. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West said, it is about that chain of survival; it is about equipping people with the knowledge and the kit at local level to start making a difference so that, when the professionals arrive, there is somebody there to save. That is what we have to do.

If we look at the statistics, 12 young people, as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton said, die from sudden cardiac arrest in the UK every week. We underplay that problem. Until recently, the Department of Health NHS Choices website stated that the figure was 12 young people a year. The figure was corrected after it was pointed out to the Department, but it is important that the problem is not underestimated.

The clinching fact for why we should do more is that across the world, survival rates are very variable. According to the British Heart Foundation, in this country between 2% and 12% of people who suffer a sudden cardiac arrest survive, which is way too low. Elsewhere, in Seattle, as has been said, 50% of people survive, and in Japan, a public access campaign for AEDs has resulted in an immediate increase in rates of survival with minimum neurological impairment for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests.

The evidence is absolutely clear, so what about policy? What did we do while we were in Government? We must be honest. I am not here to say that we did everything right, but we did something. On the back of the focus on heart services, we introduced the national defibrillator programme in the middle of the last decade. It made a modest amount of funds available to purchase defibrillators to give to local organisations. However, I think that a mistake was made. As the programme was wound down, responsibility was passed to ambulance services.

There are two ways of looking at that. On the one hand, ambulance services have been doing brilliant work ever since as they have taken on the responsibility to improve communities’ capacity to respond. It is fantastic to see representatives of the ambulance service here today. I have certainly been impressed by what I have seen in the north-west. The team there is working with communities across the region to build their capacity to respond. The ambulance service has done good work, but national focus on the issue was lost when responsibility was passed down to the ambulance services, and we must acknowledge that.

That brings me to the crux of what I wanted to say, particularly to the Minister. I think that, between us, we can develop a set of simple policy calls that could make a difference and save lives. I will identify three in particular. As hon. Members have said, there is a compelling case for putting emergency life skills on the national curriculum and for making time available, perhaps as part of the personal, social, health and economic education component, to provide training for all young people. No young person should leave school without knowing how to provide CPR and use a defibrillator, because it is not all about defibrillators or CPR—the two together are important. If we train young people in those skills, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw said, they will go home and talk to others about them.

I have seen what the British Heart Foundation does in schools. The courses that it delivers for young children are outstanding. It would be easy to add such courses to the national curriculum. My children tell me all the things that they are doing in school: the things that they are learning to make in home economics, and the kings and queens that they know about. It is odd that we do not ensure that every young person in this country leaves school at 16 knowing how to save a life. What more basic skill could we give them during their school years?

[Andrew Percy]

On the right hon. Gentleman’s attack on kings and queens, as a former history teacher, I attach importance to learning about them. An easy way to do what he suggests without crowding the curriculum too much would be simply to require all PE teachers to have the training, so that they can disseminate it as part of PE, which is required all the way through school. It would be a simple way to teach it without crowding the curriculum.

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[Andy Burnham]

Let me make it clear that I want children to learn about kings and queens. Yes, it must be possible. We are talking about a one-off course lasting a couple of hours. Surely it is possible to find the time to deliver it. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion is one way to do so. My point is that every child should leave with a certificate to say that they have done the course, they know how to use the skills and they are confident in using them.

[Julie Hilling]

A number of schools across Bolton West are already teaching emergency life support skills and Heartstart skills through the British Heart Foundation. They are teaching those skills in different ways: some are using half an hour during the registration period; some are teaching it as part of PE; some are teaching it as part of biology. There are multiple places within the curriculum, but the important thing is that they are taught as essential skills. Schools can then work out where best to teach them. They can be taught in half-hour blocks, and two hours a year is nothing.

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend is right. Let schools decide, but let us make it a clear legal requirement that they teach those skills. That is how to make a difference: by having a population that is much more educated in emergency first aid and CPR. The difference that it can make is huge. The Department for Education appears to be highly resistant; I do not know why. Surely we could link it to science or biology. Surely there are ways to deliver that teaching that are not irrelevant to the rest of the curriculum. That is our first request. Can we have a clear requirement?

Secondly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton asked, is there not a case for a screening programme, particularly for at-risk young people, such as those who play lots of sport? I know that the UK National Screening Committee has considered the issue, partly because I asked it to, but still no firm recommendations have been made. Will the Minister consider it? It could be delivered for incredibly small amounts of resource in NHS terms; a screening test costs about £30 pounds. It should be available to any parent who wants to make use of it, particularly for young people who play sport every week. My son plays a lot of sport, and I watch him play every week. I have still not had him tested. It crosses my mind all the time that perhaps I should. It should be an easy thing to do; it should not be hard to find. The time has come to provide more screening.

My third and main point is to ask the Minister to give serious consideration to setting a minimum legal requirement for the number of defibrillators in public places. The time has come for that to be required by law. Hon. Members have referred to fire extinguishers and smoke alarms. There comes a point when technology allows something to be made much more widely available in public places and buildings, and I believe that we have reached that point with defibrillators.

[Mr George Howarth]

My right hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Does he agree that workplaces could be added to the list?

[Andy Burnham]

I am sure they could. That is my appeal to the Government. I am not being prescriptive and saying that I want this, that or the other. A compelling case has been made for schools because of the loss of young lives. Shopping centres are also a possibility because of the footfall, as are train stations, airports and so on, and workplaces, particularly where people are under the extra pressure of carrying out intense physical activity.

The Government can advise on what the minimum requirement might be, but it is important to have one. Then we would have national clarity on where the public can expect to find a defibrillator. They would know where to locate one, because defibrillators would be required by law. Communities are crying out for it, and we do not have clarity at the moment. Earlier in the debate, someone asked where we would find a defibrillator in Parliament. I would not know. We need to start thinking about clarity and signage. If we did so, we might be able to have a national open register of defibrillators. It is not beyond the wit of man to ensure through an app on a phone that people in a situation where somebody had fallen could find out in real time, via modern technology, where the nearest defibrillator was. An effort could then be made to locate it as soon as possible.

Such things could be done. Lives could be saved. There is no excuse for complacency. We are not talking about huge amounts of money. This House could apply its mind to the issue, bring a little more focus to it and make proportionate and sensible requirements for where defibrillators must be located. Those locations could be publicised, and the public could be educated about how to use them. Why are we not doing it? We should be. I am not making a political point; I am being as critical of our time in government as I am of the current Government. We should be doing it. The case for action is unanswerable.

My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton has done us all a huge service by requesting this debate, which is long overdue. Other countries are way ahead of us in putting a proper, thought-through policy in place at every level: education, screening, prevention, and response through public access to defibrillators. My three requests can be given fair consideration by the Minister; if she were to act, we would secure something momentous for the people who have campaigned so vigorously on the issue over recent years. They know and people outside know that it is right to make a change, and some communities are just getting on and doing so; they are not even waiting for Parliament to do something, and that alone should be enough to make us think and act. If we made a commitment now, I am certain that in a matter of years we would see those statistics improve and more lives being saved which, at the end of the day, is the best memorial we can give to Oliver King, Ciaron Geddes, Daniel Young and all the young people who have tragically lost their lives.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anna Soubry)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter.

I thank everyone who has spoken in this excellent debate. A debate normally consists of one side of an argument versus the other side, but today we have had an outbreak of agreement and there has been no one side or the other. The debate is also momentous because I can say with my hand on my heart that I found myself in agreement with not only my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) but, most concerning, the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), with whom I share history, because I was born and brought up in his constituency. I would be absolutely delighted to take up the hon. Gentleman’s invitation to visit, because it means a great deal to me. To be serious, however, because I was being flippant, this has been a good debate. I pay tribute to all those who signed the online petition and particularly to the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) who opened the debate so well. He spoke with great passion and feeling and with considerable knowledge. We have had a good debate because of the outbreak of agreement and some well formed speeches, based on real argument, facts and figures, as well as on constituents’ experience.

Where are we? We all agree that defibrillators are good things; many hon. Members have spoken about the role that they can play and how we need considerably more of them. We all agree that we need more people trained in their use and in CPR and all manner of emergency measures for someone in a life-threatening situation. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) on her speech; she explained how training our children could bring us real benefits in the number of people trained, which would mean more lives being saved. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole, who spoke about his experiences as a community first responder and about how volunteers from the community, not only young people at school, could be trained in such skills. He gave some good examples of how effectively such a programme could be rolled out. Other hon. Members talked about the value of screening and, for example, I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) for his comments on the need for screening.

Unfortunately, I am going to be somewhat of a fly in this otherwise rather pleasant ointment, because I do not agree with everything said about legislation. My view is that we do not need legislation. We already have all manner of programmes locally. I am not denying that our system is patchy and that some parts of the country are clearly doing a far better job than others, but it is understandable why the previous Government decided to put defibrillators and training down to the local ambulance trusts: they know their communities best and they are the people to ensure delivery, to the best of their abilities, to meet the needs of their communities.

I usually flinch from legislation, because it can take a long time to go through this place and because when we start to be prescriptive, we can run into all sorts of dangers. We have accepted that different communities have different needs, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Bassetlaw for his compelling case for defibrillator training to be rolled out through our communities, depending on the nature of the community. For example, his constituency has a large number of parish councils—mine does not have as many, but it matters not—and he discussed putting pressure on and working and campaigning with the parish councils to start installing defibrillators. The parish councils can look at their own communities and at what would suit the needs of those communities. He then made a good point about work forces and the possibility of defibrillators in every place with more than a certain number of employees, and that is where the debate begins, because the difficulty with legislation lies in whether we look at a workplace with 50, 100 or 1,000 employees. The hon. Gentleman described how he could work with the trade unions in his patch and in effect, as a result, roll out a campaign of asking the work forces whether they think something is a good idea in a particular workplace or not in another. If we begin to prescribe, however, we will not deliver the sort of service that we want.

[Andy Burnham]

I realise the situation is slightly unusual: the Minister is defending the policy of the previous Government and I am asking her to reconsider and to go further. She said that ambulance services are best placed because they understand their communities. I partly agree, but the problem is that ambulance services do not have the power to insist on defibrillators going where they are most needed. The ambulance services are not the planning authority or the owners of the big buildings; they can only use persuasion and cannot ensure that defibrillators go where they really need to go, where lives can be saved. That is why legislation is necessary. If she is worried about overly burdensome legislation, it could start with a simple requirement to have a defibrillator publicly available in towns of, for example, 30,000 or more; it could be a modest requirement to get the ball rolling, as other countries have done.

[Anna Soubry]

I am grateful for the intervention, but it rather makes my point. Once we stipulate, for the sake of argument towns of 30,000, we can imagine that in the towns without that level of population people will think, “Well, we’re all right, so we won’t do much work on it.” That is the problem with a more prescriptive approach.

While we are discussing ambulance services, and referring again to the speech of the hon. Member for Bassetlaw, I wish to set the record straight on the East Midlands ambulance service. EMAS has been struggling for some time, with a number of difficulties that the hon. Gentleman and I are familiar with. As mentioned by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier), my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) has been involved in a campaign following the death of Joe Humphries, who did not live in her constituency but went to school there. As a result of her work, for which I am grateful, Leicestershire has 109 static defibrillators in public areas, 14 of which were installed in partnership with the Leicestershire police, and there are 24 Heartstart schools in the county.

The hon. Member for Bolton West also talked about the Heartstart scheme and its success in her area, although I can see that that may not be the case universally throughout the country. What is happening because of the debate, however, is that not only are we holding it and everything is being recorded in Hansard, but I will certainly go away and not hesitate to have that conversation with the relevant Minister in the Department for Education. An extremely forceful message has come out of this debate about the need for such training to be included in the national curriculum. I could not possibly give my own views on that, but the argument has been advanced extremely strongly and it has much merit and power.

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[Steve Rotheram]

I just wanted to put that on the record.

Many excellent points have been raised in the debate. What we have seen demonstrated during the past three hours is the clear and absolute desire for Parliament to act. I understand that the Minister has a difficult job. There are obstacles and challenges to overcome in relation to cardiac arrest and SADS, including raising awareness and overcoming people’s initial fear of helping someone who has sustained a cardiac arrest. The hope is that this debate will have teased out some of those things.

We have also heard about a number of issues that are not directly relevant to the Minister’s remit, so she may well have to have conversations not just with the relevant Education Minister, but with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and certainly with the Department for Communities and Local Government in relation to the planning issues. However, that does not mean that she or the Government can abrogate their responsibilities. As has been highlighted, some of these things are cost-neutral; they just need action. We are not asking for money or, at worst, they cost very little. They simply require political will.

A few weeks ago, after the debate was announced, I received numerous phone calls and e-mails from organisations and charities that have been campaigning for years on this issue, so it is only right that they receive recognition for their efforts. Therefore, in praising again the efforts of the OK Foundation, I would also like to pay tribute to SADS UK, the British Heart Foundation, Cardiac Risk in the Young, the London Ambulance Service, Hearts and Goals, the Arrhythmia Alliance, the North West Ambulance Service, AED Locator, the Community HeartBeat Trust, Kays Medical and Liverpool football club and the great Steven Gerrard, the England captain, who has also recently come on board and lent his support—my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) is shaking his head.

There is growing momentum for action, and campaigners will not give up on this issue until progress is made. Including first aid training in the school curriculum would take up 0.2% of the timetable, but have an incalculable value.

[Andy Burnham]

Can I add my own tribute to the organisations—most of them—that my hon. Friend has just listed? Obviously, we do not doubt the Minister’s good will, but I think that we will have been disappointed by the response, particularly on the issue of legislation. With that in mind, may I encourage my hon. Friend to return to the Backbench Business Committee and make a request to bring this issue to the Floor of House? It seems to me that Parliament might take a different view from the Government on the need for legislation. I think that we should try to test the mind of Parliament on this issue. I hope that my hon. Friend will not be put off and will pursue his campaign in that direction.

[Steve Rotheram]

I am happy to confirm to my right hon. Friend that I think that, following the discussion that I will have immediately after this debate, the next step will be for us to push the Backbench Business Committee for a further debate in the main Chamber so that we push this issue to a vote, because I genuinely believe that defibs will save thousands of lives every year. No one in their right mind doubts that, so it is for the Government to show their resolve and to back the campaigners. A national lead is needed on this issue. We have not been given that today, so we will push in the future for that lead.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the e-petition relating to preventable cardiac deaths arising from Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.