NHS Funding Bill (Money Bill)

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

3rd reading & 2nd reading & Committee negatived & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 26th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the Minister on his new position and declare my interests as a past president of the BMA, a fellow of various medical royal colleges, and vice-president of Hospice UK and Marie Curie.

Yesterday, a letter went to the Prime Minister from the medical royal colleges and faculties and the Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Nursing, urging him to

“accept the recommendations of the report Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 years on, and to go a little further.”

They announced that they

“are coming together to establish the Inequalities in Health Alliance”

and

“will be asking other organisations across the UK to join … particularly those representing social services and local authorities in all four nations.”

They went on to point out that

“The report published today by the Institute for Health Equity and commissioned by the Health Foundation, says life expectancy has stalled for the first time in at least 120 years. We are sure you know that there is a 15-20-year difference in healthy life expectancy between some of the new seats represented by the Conservatives, and others that your party has traditionally held. These disparities directly impact on NHS services, with emergency attendances doubling in the areas of lowest life expectancy.”


The letter goes on to say that it is essential that the

“government works with the devolved administrations”.

It points out that health is not in isolation and that

“earning a living wage is linked to healthy life expectancy”

and that

“Poverty has the most impact on infant and child health”


and therefore that needs to be focused on too.

The co-signatories to that letter—a full page of them—make the point clearly that looking at health in isolation is not adequate. Although we all welcome the funding that will be coming forward and the fact that it will go to the devolved nations, the problem is that it will be made on a population rather than a needs basis. The funding needs to be according to needs-based consequentials. Taking Wales as an example—I declare an interest as somebody who lives and works there—we have a population that is iller, older and poorer. It matches the north-east of England and is now reaping the disbenefit of all that happened prior to devolution, with the problems of poverty, industrial closure, and so on.

Wales, like the north-east of England, has been heavily impacted by welfare cuts. It now has protected combined spending on health and social care that is 11% higher than in England, working out at £3,051 per head of population, and there is a policy to protect social care. I urge the Minister and the Government to abandon the phrase that social care workers are “low skilled”. They are not; they are low-paid. They are very highly skilled. It is the skilled social care worker who will avoid a hospital admission and sound the alarm before a problem arises; and when it comes to people with mental health problems, learning difficulties and so, I defy anyone in this House to claim that they will be any better than a skilled care worker at managing a crisis in the community. It is very difficult work. However, there is no protected spend in the Bill for population health and, as the Minister has said, there is nothing on public health, but change will occur only through public health initiatives.

In Wales, we are tackling alcohol-related harms by bringing in minimum unit pricing on 1 March. I declare my role as chair of the Commission on Alcohol Harm. Minimum unit pricing is already in place in Scotland. We also have the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and are trying to reverse our heritage of really poor health and lack of health gains in our population. However, in Wales, as in other less wealthy parts of the UK, we have until now been quite dependent on Objective 1 funding and the European Social Fund, particularly for the third sector. That money needs to be replaced. I urge the Government to recognise that not only is there a requirement for needs-based funding but they have a duty to replace the funding that has now been lost.

As I have said, across England the royal colleges are calling for social care to immediately receive better—and, indeed, sustainable—funding. This will alleviate the pressures caused by delays in transfers to care. There is no reason why people should be discharged late in the day. There is a fair amount of evidence that if people are discharged from hospital in the morning with a care package in place, the result is a lower number of readmissions and better long-term outcomes. Other than the fact that the system is completely gummed up and log-jammed, there is certainly no excuse for discharging people to their homes in the evening or during the night without adequate care being in place. There has to be integration between the sectors at every level, with efficiency built in, and that requires a new financial settlement for social care and finding a long-term sustainable solution to providing care and support for people in England. That will probably be one of the greatest challenges for England, Wales and Scotland in the future.

Years of underfunding in social care have meant that thousands of older people have failed to receive adequate funding for their care. Delays in transfers to care will continue, resulting in the accumulating backlog arriving in A&E. As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has pointed out, the figures for A&E are worse than ever. That is through no fault of the A&E departments at all. In December, fewer than 80% of patients were admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. This was a record-breaking monthly low and the 53rd consecutive month that the 95% target was not met. As well as 200,000 more people waiting more than four hours to be admitted this winter compared with the same point last winter, there were nearly 200,000 waiting more than four hours in trolley beds in corridors this winter, 56,000 more than this time last year. The number of trolley waits is almost six times more than last winter. These figures alone demonstrate the logjam that exists across the whole system.

Will the Minister, having announced that this is not a ceiling, confirm that the money to go for training and workforce, the money to go specifically to public health, and other funding will continue to be distributed as well to the devolved nations? As well as it being calculated on a population basis and the old Barnett formula, there should be a needs assessment, taking into account the sophisticated data that is now available from the Marmot review and similar reviews, so that the spending is actually targeted at the areas of greatest need.