Health and Social Care Bill

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, was not here to move his amendment. However, I think that the general principles that the other amendments in this group address are very much what I want to bring to the attention of the House and the Minister. We now know so much more about the development of children. In the 18th and 19th centuries there was a great amount of dirt and other problems in the streets. This aspect of public health was taken up by municipal authorities, which had to build drains and sewerage. It was seen as critical to the future of this country. It also, of course, had an important effect on people’s health.

We now know much more. In my last job in government, I was the Social Exclusion Minister and had the enormous privilege of introducing to this country the Family Nurse Partnership Programme. In learning about that evidence-based programme, which affects the development of children more advantageously than any other single programme in the world, I discovered a little about what neurologists and others now know about brain development. The truth is, if we do not support parents and children in those early months and years, by the time they are three, they are so far behind it will take the rest of their lives to compensate for what they have not had in those early months.

I listened to the debate on alcohol and wanted to intervene. In family nurse partnerships, mothers learn that if you drink alcohol in pregnancy, it will affect the brain of the foetus and therefore the child. It has been incredibly successful, therefore, in giving young women the determination not to drink, because they want the best for their child when it is born. These are all things that we now have a lot of knowledge about.

Recently, I was at a meeting where a neurologist talked about research into the stress put on children and what elements in the body can be measured to tell whether or not there is stress and what can be done about it. Stress can lead to violence and violent behaviour. We know about these things, but they did not know about them in the 18th century, when they began talking about public health. We did not know about it when I was growing up, but we know about it now. That means we have a responsibility to take it into account and build the early development of children into our understanding of public health. We must make sure that we address it. It should not be until we get to extremes, when suddenly somebody notices that a particular child is developing in a difficult way, such as noble Lords have talked about, when children end up in the criminal justice system. We know what will happen to children if we do not pay attention to this: they will end up in the criminal justice system, and they are more likely to end up with an alcohol or drug dependency. We know these things now and, in my view, we have no option but to take account of them as a matter of public health. Therefore, I believe that we have to write that into the Bill.

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendments 72A, 81A, 91A, 200A, 201ZA, 327B, 327C, 329A, 331C and 333B—all amendments on speech and communication. I think that Amendment 218A should also have been included because it deals with integration—in this case, for the commissioning groups. I hope that when the Minister deals with that later amendment, he will be able to recall this debate.

I support these amendments very warmly for all the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and my noble friend Lady Wilkins have set out so cogently. I should also, in this very brief intervention, like to draw attention to the excellent BBC film “The Kid’s Speech”—not “The King’s Speech”, although that was very good too—which graphically portrayed not only the crippling effects of stammering on children’s development, as well as on their happiness, but also an integrated way to deal with it, employing educational as well as physiological expertise. I commend this short documentary to anyone who wants to understand why it is so important to help these children properly early on.

The assessment and treatment of speech, language and communication problems must come within public health. I asked the Minister about this when I made a few remarks at Second Reading. However, with that vast marathon of questions, I quite understand that he did not have time to reply, although I hope that he will be able to do so at the end of this debate. The information must be accessible to those with low literacy and poor understanding. Finally, there must be integration not only with the health and social care services but also with education and children’s services, or we shall fail that very large number of children with speech, language and communication difficulties.

[Lord Clement-Jones]

I, too, support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. He clearly has a great deal of support in the Committee for the amendments, on which he spoke so eloquently, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins.

I come at this as a former chairman, and now the president, of Ambitious about Autism, the autism education charity, and also as a very strong supporter of I CAN, the communications charity for children. I also strongly believe that speech, language and communications needs should be regarded as a public health issue. As both the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, highlighted, speech, language and communication needs are the most common disability experienced by children or adults, and it is now being recognised that communication is indeed the single most significant factor in determining a child’s life chances. Because our economy has become increasingly dependent on communication-based employment, the fitness of a person in this century will be defined ever more in terms of his or her ability to communicate effectively. The economic impact on society of people whose communication disability renders them unemployable is significant and is growing year on year. As a society, we need to recognise this issue and find ways to improve the communication skills of children and adults.

As has been pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, a number of primary care trusts and local authorities in England have indeed already recognised the importance of boosting early language and communication development. They have aligned the work of speech and language therapists with the Healthy Child Programme and Sure Start children’s centres to create a powerful public health approach based on primary prevention.

However, in contrast, many commissioners—this was also mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins—as reported by Sir Ian Kennedy last year in Getting it Right for Children and Young People, have a limited understanding of children with speech, language and communication needs. Many of these local areas are still not doing enough to address these needs, and it is clear that the economic and social benefits of early intervention and prevention of speech, language and communication needs must be much better promoted. That is why the approach indicated by these amendments is so important and why I support them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, noble Lords who tabled amendments in this group have drawn attention to the particular needs of children. I am in total sympathy with their wish to highlight the importance of children's health in all its facets. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, mentioned Sir Ian Kennedy's report, Getting it Right for Children and Young People, published last year. Sir Ian emphasised that the NHS does not always get everything right for children. He gave us some hard-hitting messages. I say again what I said in my letter after Second Reading: we are determined to build in children's health explicitly and clearly throughout the new system. The NHS reforms are designed to put firm foundations in place to secure improvements, and the Health and Social Care Bill contains sufficient levers to ensure that the new NHS will work better for children.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for his very compelling contributions today and at Second Reading, when he raised questions on speech and language therapy. I commend his work as chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Speech and Language Difficulties. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, for her extremely constructive remarks. I share the commitment of the noble Baroness and the noble Lord to ensuring the early identification of speech, language and communication needs among pre-school children. What can we do about this? One thing that we can do and are committed to doing is beefing up community health resources targeted at the well-being of children and families. In that context, I reassure noble Lords who spoke to these amendments that we are committed to increasing the health visitor workforce by 4,200 by 2015.

We are equally committed to improved delivery of the healthy child programme, which includes a development review at the age of two to two-and-a-half. That provides a huge opportunity, and we are clear that it has to be seized. Everything that has been said by noble Lords about child development in the early years is absolutely to the point. The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, rightly referred to the family nurse partnership programme, which has done a tremendous amount, as she explained to us, to address the needs of what were traditionally considered hard-to-reach families.

In his absence, I would also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, for his earlier remarks. I will take the opportunity to address his specific concerns. The Bill as drafted would already allow the Secretary of State or local authorities to provide services to parents or prospective parents where that was a step whose primary purpose was improving health. We recognise that the health and well-being of women before, during and after pregnancy is a critical factor in giving children a healthy start in life and laying the groundwork for good health and well-being in later life.

How can we do this better? The Health and Social Care Bill will, we believe, provide the basis for better collaboration and partnership working across local government and the NHS at all levels. The drivers of the integration in the NHS will be the CCGs and the NHS Commissioning Board. Both have new duties to promote integrated working by taking specific action where beneficial to patients. In addition, the Bill gives each health and well-being board a duty to encourage integrated working between health and care commissioners to advance the health and well-being of the people in its area. That would include children and young people.

The key NHS and public health contributions to speech, language and communication needs are these: first, early identification of pregnant women who may themselves have had the same kinds of difficulties and who would benefit from enhanced support in preparation for parenthood; secondly, building the capacity of universal services working with young children to provide the support required in the early stages, enabling speech and language therapists to focus their support where it is most needed; thirdly, early identification of children with speech, language and communication needs, where enhanced health visitor capacity and better delivery of early years reviews at the age of two to two-and-a-half will be a focus; fourthly, local planning and commissioning for speech and language therapy services through clinical commissioning groups; and, fifthly, consideration of how high-cost and low-volume provision should be commissioned in the new system.

The Government are also committed to tackling obesity and to the continuation of the national child measurement programme. Now in its seventh year, this is a trusted source of world-class data, providing annual information on levels of overweight and obesity in primary school children in their reception year and in year 6. The government amendments in this group amend the powers of the Secretary of State in paragraph 7B of Schedule 1 to the NHS Act 2006 so that he can make regulations about the processing of the full data set of information relevant to this programme. This would include both information resulting directly from the weighing and measuring activity and other relevant data held by local authorities. The amendments also ensure that he can require persons exercising functions in relation to the programme to have regard to guidance about the processing of that information. Our proposals aim to ensure that this important programme can continue to operate in full effect once it transitions to local authorities, along with other public health functions, from April 2013. I hope that the Committee will support the amendments.

I have discussed the vital importance of a focus on children’s needs throughout the NHS, but in our view it would not be appropriate to anticipate priorities in future mandates by enshrining in legislation the inclusion of objectives relating to particular sections of the population—a point I made earlier to the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, while he was in his place—nor would it be appropriate to impose requirements on CCGs to exercise their functions with reference to specific patient groups or treatments. What you do not emphasise, you can serve to downplay.

CCGs are already under a duty to exercise their functions with a view to procuring that health services are provided in an integrated way for all patients where they consider this will improve the quality of health services and outcomes and reduce inequalities in outcomes and access. The duty also applies in relation to the integration of health services with the provision of health-related and social care services. Where education and children’s services are health or social care-related, they would therefore already be covered by this duty.

The noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, and the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, tabled a series of amendments concerning the role of health and well-being boards. I fully support the need to ensure the effective assessment of need and access to professional advice on education and children’s services. However, although extremely well intentioned, the amendments are unnecessary and also run counter to the principle of local areas being best placed to assess local need and to access appropriate local expertise. I hope that noble Lords will not press those amendments.

On Amendment 91A, on our second day in Committee we discussed a group of amendments on the topic of integration. There were numerous extremely valuable contributions from many noble Lords that ensured that we had a very informative debate. However, it may be helpful to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, if I briefly mention that the requirement the Bill places on the board and the clinical commissioning groups to promote integration when commissioning services is very germane in this context. Clauses 20 and 23 contain new Sections 13M and 14Y which create duties for national and local commissioners to promote integration across health and social care. I am thoroughly supportive of the intention behind this amendment. Better integration of services will undoubtedly lead to high quality and better care for patients, and that is why we have asked the NHS Future Forum to consider in more detail how we can ensure that our reforms lead to better integrated services. I am very much looking forward to receiving its recommendations which will be published before the end of the year. I hope that the noble Lord and the noble Baroness will feel reassured by that.

I think the tenor of the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, was about whether all children’s public health services should be commissioned at a local level from the outset in 2013 to avoid fragmenting the delivery of programmes and care pathways. We believe that the commitment to secure a 50 per cent increase in the number of health visitors and thereby ensure associated improvements in support for families is best achieved through NHS commissioning, and we have therefore retained our original proposal that the NHS Commissioning Board should lead commissioning in this area in the short term. However, we wish to engage further on the detail of the proposals, particularly in respect of transition arrangements and the best way to begin to involve local authorities in local commissioning of these services in partnership with the NHS.

The noble Baroness also referred to the important issue of safeguarding children. Local authorities will continue to lead on safeguarding children arrangements under the Children Act 2004. The board and CCGs will be members of local safeguarding children boards. I have already spoken about the national child measurement programme, and I hope that I covered the noble Baroness’s questions adequately on that topic.

The noble Baroness asked why the government amendment allowed any other information to be prescribed. The amendment will maintain the Secretary of State’s powers to regulate the processing of child measurement data after local authorities undertake the measurement programme, in the same way that PCTs currently deliver the programme. It would not be appropriate to set out the full national child measurement programme data set in primary legislation, as she will understand. The power also gives flexibility to make changes to the data collection that will be needed going forward, and that will allow the Government to ensure that the national child measurement programme remains fit for purpose. Of course, the introduction of any new data would need to be set out in regulations, subject to public consultation and the negative parliamentary procedure.

I hope that that covers the ground adequately. Once again, I thank noble Lords for their contributions. I can now see that the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, wishes to ask me a question.

[Baroness Whitaker]

It is the same question. In the noble Earl’s very comprehensive answer, did I miss whether speech, language and communication problems were within public health? I do not recall hearing him answer that question.

[Baroness Thornton]

While the noble Earl is collecting questions that we feel were not answered, I asked specifically about the risk register, whether it is 100 per cent of children and where the weighing and measuring is taking place.