Oral Answers to Questions

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[James Morris]

I am very happy to meet the hon. Gentleman. We are investing further money—£350 million in diagnostics—and making efforts to address the backlog caused by the covid-19 pandemic.

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

Brain tumours kill more children than any other cancer. My constituent’s five-year-old granddaughter has a brain tumour. She, and many children like her, are being given chemotherapy drugs that were originally developed in the 1960s for adults, and we need more research into this. What can the Minister and the Government do to help accelerate research into paediatric brain tumours to save children such as my constituent’s granddaughter, and will the Minister meet me to discuss the case I have mentioned?

[James Morris]

That sounds like a very distressing constituency case. Obviously we are investing lots of money in research across the whole cancer spectrum, and I would be happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss the issue he raises.

Covid-19

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Monday 28th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

I want first to put on record, like many other speakers, my thanks to the Health Secretary and his team of Ministers for the outstanding work that they have done over recent months in very difficult circumstances.

Covid-19, as we all know, is a very difficult disease—it is a terrible disease. It can be fatal. My father got it. He is an NHS doctor/consultant, very much in the target danger range. He survived and is fit and well. My mother also got it—from him, she likes to add—and she recovered much faster. This is a dangerous disease, and we all know that our first act as Member of Parliament, or as Ministers, is to preserve life. This Government have tried to do that as best they can. I will not lie; I found the restrictions that the Government were forced to put on us over the past few months very difficult. I wanted to go to big events and have lots of people round. I wanted to go on holiday without having to quarantine when I came back. I wanted to do a lot of things, and I know that many of my constituents—many of whom got in touch with me in many ways over recent weeks and months—have felt the same. It is very difficult. As the Prime Minister said, we are a freedom-loving people. We want to do what we want within the law. We want social contacts and to work the way we want; we want to take the tube, and do all those things. It is very frustrating, but just because it is frustrating, does not mean that we do not need controls.

I have spent a huge amount of time thinking, researching, reading, and talking to people over recent weeks and months, about the different ways that we can go through this. Of course we can all point to a decision that we might have made slightly differently, or slightly earlier or later, but overall I think the Government’s approach has been right thus far.

Going ahead and looking forward, there are things that I believe we must bake into our approach now. First, we must all remember that we might have to live with this virus for many months. We hope there will be a vaccine, but there may not be. If there is one, it might not be very effective at first, and we must accept that from the start. We must ensure that we keep our children in school and keep businesses open, and due to the good work of the Government, whether in test and trace, improving testing capabilities, or the financial support given to many businesses, we are better placed to do that. We must keep those things.

We must also remember that social contact matters. It is not a nice ancillary to life; it is critical. We have heard from many speakers about how loneliness and bad mental wellbeing can hugely damage people’s lives. I was struck by the number of people who have got in touch with me and said, “I live alone. I have no family. If there is a lockdown, I don’t know if I can take that.” We must bear social contact in mind as of critical importance.

I urge the Government—this appears to have happened during the course of the day with various discussions—that Parliament needs more of a say in these decisions at the appropriate time. That would help MPs to understand the requirements better, and it would also help the Government and the public if we explained those measures to the constituents we represent.

Covid-19

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The point behind household isolation is precisely to address the concerns that the hon. Gentleman has raised. Furthermore, by reducing all unnecessary social contact, we will help to reduce the sorts of transmissions that he talks about.

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

Will the Secretary of State explain how he and his team have been working to learn from the experience of other countries that are ahead of the curve, so that we can see the things that they have done well, and the things that they have not done so well?

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, we are constantly looking at what is happening around the world, what people are doing and the research in order to try to make sure that we calibrate the very best possible response.

NHS Funding Bill

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Legislative Grand Committee & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Legislative Grand Committee: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & 3rd reading & Programme motion
Tuesday 4th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)]

I rise to speak to the amendments in my name and the names of my colleagues.

As we have all heard, our NHS needs to be properly resourced in both physical and mental health, but far too often patients are losing out under this Government, with longer waiting times, a huge increase in cancelled operations, and crumbling hospitals. Colleagues have already raised these important issues. I urge the Government to accept the amendments in the name of the Leader of the Opposition as a real signal of their intent to reverse the damage that their party has done to our national health service over the past 10 years.

My amendments focus specifically on mental health. The Government have made much of the need to ensure parity of esteem. This would mean us valuing mental health equally with physical health and adopting an approach that tackles it using the same standards that we expect for physical health patient treatment as a template for treatment that we provide for mental health patients.

I have heard warm words from the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State and Ministers about the importance of mental health and the growing need to tackle mental ill health as an urgent priority, but I have not yet seen that wholehearted commitment manifest itself in actions to tackle the situation we are in. The British Medical Association found that the mental health workforce has had little growth over the last 10 years. The Royal College of Psychiatrists found that the rate of unfilled NHS consultant psychiatrist posts in England has doubled in the last six years. The first briefing paper from the Centre for Mental Health’s Commission for Equality in Mental Health found that mental health inequalities are closely linked to wider injustices in society. Far too many patients with a mental illness are still being sent hundreds of miles away from home.

By accepting the amendments in my name, the Government would show that they are willing to be transparent about the way they go about achieving their long-stated aim of parity of esteem. The Government have already shown, with the presentation of this Bill, that they think it is a good idea to commit, in law, to a minimum allotment that the Secretary of State will make to the health service in England in each financial year for the next four years. That is designed to show that their promise is legally binding and can be scrutinised by Parliament and the public if they do not reach those targets.

To ensure that our mental health services are properly resourced and truly responsive to the various complex conditions that people present with, the public need to know how much is being spent, including how much is being proposed, and what happens in practice. That is all my amendments seek to do—they would provide Parliament and the public with the opportunity to compare the proposed allotment with the final allotment across different years.

Of course, that is not enough, and it is clear that additional resources for mental health services are only one part of the answer to tackling the mental health problems in this country. We know that education and training services are essential to bring about the necessary increase in the workforce. We know that local government provides significant elements of mental health support through public health, youth services, housing and social care, and two thirds of schools fund their own mental health support. We also know that the Government’s roll-out of universal credit will exacerbate mental health inequalities, which all too often relate to people’s economic and social circumstances. This is not the time to go into those in detail, but I urge the Government to remember the need for those essential services to have a long-term funding settlement and, in the case of social care, an agreed basis for future financing. With ambitious targets to meet in the long-term plan, there is a risk that resources will be diverted from other areas of mental health support to achieve compliance.

I would like to invite colleagues across the House to join me on Thursday for my adjournment debate on Children’s Mental Health Week, which is this week, to discuss these issues further. I know what a commitment to transparency on mental health spending would mean for all those suffering mental ill health and those fighting for them. I hope that the Secretary of State will accept amendment 1 and new clause 1, to ensure that mental health services get a fair deal from the legislation and that pledges made by the Government and NHS England are realised in practice.

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, because it is a rare one in so far as there is quite a lot of agreement across the Committee on the substance of it. There appears to be agreement—I await an intervention if anybody disagrees with this—that increasing funding for the NHS is a good thing, that it is good that mental health is a Government priority and that it is very important to establish what parity of esteem means in practical terms.

I would like to take this opportunity to describe what I have seen in my constituency in terms of the importance of mental health and how the increased funding will make a practical difference. One way in which the funding will make a difference is with mental health support teams. There are mental health support teams in 25 areas in the country. Hertfordshire was picked as one of those 25 areas, and we have two teams—one in my constituency, and one just outside it—that effectively piloted a hub-and-spoke model. As the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) said, it is Children’s Mental Health Week, and the aim of that model is to ensure that young people get better mental health support in and around their school, working in conjunction with the NHS.

As I have seen in my constituency and everywhere I go, when I speak to young people, one of the first things they ask me is, “How can we improve mental health?” Whenever I have spoken to young people, their teachers or local NHS staff, they say this model has the potential, as it is rolled out and developed over the coming months and years, to make a real, fundamental difference. If people are looking for the practical impact of our increased funding for mental health, these teams are one way in which we are already starting to make a difference, not just in my constituency but across the country.

I would like to mention a couple of charities I am involved with that are starting to work in an integrated way with the NHS in improving young people’s mental health. There is a charity called GRIT—a word in politics that we should all remember—or Growing Resilience in Teens. It was set up by a fantastic doctor in Hitchin called Dr Louise Chapman, and it does what it says on the tin: it is about growing resilience in mental health.

As politicians, when it comes to legislation or speaking to each other in the Chamber or outside, we think often about pounds and pence and talk about structures such as hospitals and stuff that can be measured in a very easy way, or at least what we think is an easy way. However, growing resilience is one of the things we need to ensure the NHS does more effectively. Not just in mental health, but particularly in mental health, growing resilience in our young people is an integral part of prevention. The former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), talked about that in his speech, saying that half of mental health problems are established before a young person is 14.

We need to grow resilience among young people to future-proof each and every one of us, and our communities and our society, against serious mental health problems in the future, at the same time as investing in mental health services such as CAMHS, which has already been mentioned several times in this debate. However, we need to do both: to grow resilience and to improve the institutional frameworks. Again, that is what the money this Bill is providing will go towards.

Another charity is called Tilehouse Counselling, which again is based in Hitchin. I do not mean to say that Hitchin has all the charities in my constituency, but in this area Hitchin is a real regional leader and, indeed, a national leader. Tilehouse Counselling provides counselling services to young people, and young people often find themselves at Tilehouse when CAMHS does not have the capacity.

I urge the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Ms Dorries), who is on the Treasury Bench—she knows this because everybody knows how much she cares about the NHS, how much she knows about it and her own personal experience in it as a professional—to use the money provided by this Bill to increase the workforce and to improve the state of CAMHS so that it can treat more people. Again, that means helping the mental health hubs to work with young people and the education system to improve prevention and, when mental health intervention is needed later on if things have got more serious, making sure that CAMHS has more capacity. Again, the money in this Bill will help to provide that.

Another new organisation in my constituency is called GoVox. It has already been in discussions with NHS Digital, and NHSX, about online ways of improving mental health for young people. Increasing funding matters, and it is always worth stating and restating in the Bill that these are minimum numbers, not maximum numbers. This money is hugely needed, and it should make a big practical difference.

On the pleas from Opposition Members—in relation to new clauses 1, 2 and 9, and a few others, which say that the Government must report on this or must do that—I urge the Minister for Health to commit in his response to showing how he and the Government will improve the existing reporting procedures and mechanisms so that the House can be kept fully informed. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) spoke about how Members of Parliament often feel distant, not from information about funding, but from outcomes. Will the Minister explain how the Government could improve that delivery mechanism, as that would allay some concerns across the Committee?

Health and Social Care

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, I hope that we can make some progress on Royston, because Royston is an example of how the NHS needs to be formulated more in the future. The NHS needs to be both more specific and more local—more specialist and more local—with the high-quality, specialist, cutting-edge technologies in the most specialist of centres, such as the tertiary hospitals of this country. At the same time, it needs to get those services that can be as close to home as possible as close to home as possible, using the best of modern technology to be able to do it. That means that hubs that are somewhere between primary and secondary care are the future, because so often someone can go and have a scan at a hub and the scan can then be interpreted off-site in one of the specialist centres, which means that the patient does not have to travel as far. For instance, especially for an elderly patient, it can be incredibly helpful to be able to go just to the local health hub or walk-in centre to have such a diagnosis.

That is the future of the NHS: more local and more specialist at the same time. It is one of the reasons why I am such a fan of community hospitals, for instance. This is about making sure that we support the NHS where people live, and that we end the generation of putting more and more services into the really big hospitals and sucking them out of local community services. I will end that sucking out of local services, and in fact I will put more into local communities. I have talked about the technology agenda; one thing technology can do is empower the movement of the NHS to local communities. It is incredibly important that we do that.

Let me make some progress, Mr Deputy Speaker, in case you are unhappy with the amount of time I am taking. I mentioned that we will be having 40 new hospitals over the decade, and we will also have—how many more nurses? Fifty thousand more nurses! We will have 6,000 more doctors in primary care, and 50 million more GP appointments. In response to a point raised by the shadow Secretary of State, this Government will deliver on their promises. Given our ageing population, there is record demand on the NHS. I want to thank each and every one of the 1.4 million colleagues who work in the NHS, and the more than 1 million people who work in social care. We must support those people so that our health and care systems are always there for each and every one of us. With this Queen’s Speech, we will do that.

The Queen’s Speech commits us to six major legislative reforms that will help us to ensure the NHS is set fair for the future and underpin our priorities across health and social care. The top priority is people. The NHS is nothing without the people who work in it, and as demand increases, we need more people—more GPs, more nurses, more mental health staff, and others—all better trained and better supported by the best technology. They must be better cared for by their employers, and work to the top of their capabilities—that is incredibly important, and we must get the most out of people. For instance, pharmacists can do so much more than the current contract allows, and I want them to do much, much more.

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

Does the Secretary of State agree that this is not just about having more GPs, although we do need that, but about the way GP practices work, with managers using technology and other things to manage the demand for GP services? Will the Secretary of State further set out his plans in that regard?

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend is dead right. Pharmacies should be doing more to keep the pressure off GPs, because they are in the community and more accessible, and within a GP surgery not everything needs to be done by the GP. We are expanding the number of GPs by 6,000 over this Parliament, and increasing by 26,000 the number of other clinicians who work in primary care, supporting GPs. When someone goes to their primary care practice, they might see the GP, a practice nurse, a pharmacist, a physio or a geriatrician. The boundary that has existed since Lloyd George between primary and secondary care, where someone either sees a GP or goes to hospital, needs to become more porous so that we can have that care where it is right for patients.

My next point is that prevention is better than cure. Expanding primary care, allowing pharmacies to do more, growing our community teams—that is about driving prevention. My third priority is technology. That is not just because we stand at the cusp of a health tech revolution that has the potential to transform healthcare for the better, but because the first task is to drag the NHS out of the 20th century and into the 21st.

The next priority is infrastructure, much of which we have already started to discuss. Buildings have to be expanded and improved, and while we do that expansion, with upgrades to the 40 new hospitals, we will also repair the damage done by those terrible private finance initiative deals that have hamstrung hospitals—deals struck by the hon. Member for Leicester South and his friends: Mr PFI himself. When we hear from him about the challenges that the NHS faces, everyone should remember with every word he says that he was at the heart of the Treasury that was driving PFI, which has caused so many problems across our national health service. Our plan is for a more integrated NHS, with a culture that gives patients more control over their healthcare, and colleagues more control over their work.

Oral Answers to Questions

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The agreement that the hon. Lady’s Government—the UK Government—reached with Vertex means that this drug will be available in Wales and Northern Ireland as well. It is true that Scotland chose to go it alone and as a result has not received such good value for money, but what really matters is that the drug is now available throughout the United Kingdom.

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

Will the Secretary of State pay tribute to campaigners in my constituency such as Matthew Dixon-Dyer, who campaigned very strongly and lobbied me very effectively? Will he also illuminate the House on how, in future, we can have smoother access to drugs such as Orkambi on the NHS?

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend has campaigned long and hard and has talked to me an awful lot about how important it has been to obtain Orkambi and the other cystic fibrosis drugs that will save lives, and I pay tribute to his campaigning. As I have said, we now have a system that allows access to drugs for the NHS at some of the best value in the world, and that system is working. It is clearly getting the drugs that are needed into the NHS, and I think that we should all get behind it.

The National Health Service

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Whitford]

rose—

[Bim Afolami]

rose—

[Chris Stephens]

I give way to my hon. Friend first.

[Chris Stephens]

As usual, my hon. Friend makes her case excellently. There are few people in the House who could match her knowledge of healthcare.

[Bim Afolami]

rose—

[Chris Stephens]

The hon. Gentleman seems desperate, so I will allow him to intervene before he falls over.

[Bim Afolami]

The hon. Gentleman is generous in giving way. On the subject of trade deals and the NHS, I have listened to him. Am I right in thinking that he believes that the European Union should negotiate trade deals on behalf of this country and that being in a customs union with the European Union is therefore his preferred outcome, if Brexit were to happen at all, which I accept is against his party’s policy?

[Chris Stephens]

I do not want Brexit to happen at all because of my real fear that health services in this country could very well find their way into a trade deal with the Donald Trumps of the world. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) might mumble “Nonsense”, but many of us have a real fear that that is the case, so we have an opportunity in supporting the Opposition amendment.

I wish now to touch on the Pension Schemes Bill and to follow on from some of the comments by the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney. First, let me welcome the measure on collective defined contribution pensions that will be in the Bill. Such a measure, which we have discussed in the Work and Pensions Committee, is long overdue. It is another example of trade union pressure and trade union lobbying. We should congratulate the University and College Union and the Communication Workers Union, which have campaigned long and hard to ensure that collective defined contribution pensions become a reality.

I also welcome the fact that we are going to see the Pensions Regulator get increased powers. The Pensions Regulator was asleep while Carillion was paying out more in dividends to its shareholders than it was putting into its pension scheme. Clear evidence of that came out in the Carillion inquiry, so I welcome that change, just as I welcome the move towards pensions dashboards, which increases transparency.

I come back to the point made by the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney—the scandalous injustice that is not being dealt with. We are talking about women born in the 1950s growing up and discovering that they could not get access to a cheque book unless they got the permission of their father or their husband—[Interruption.] I am not joking. It was in 1980 that the law was changed; I would have thought that someone sitting on the Minister’s Bench would know that it was the Thatcher Government who actually stopped that. It was also the case that women could not obtain credit without permission from male relatives. They went through that during their lives and they are then told at some point that they cannot retire when they thought that they were going to retire. Many women tell me that they did not receive correspondence or a letter from the Department for Work and Pensions saying that their retirement age had changed. In fact, I suggest that, in my experience, we would be more likely to find someone who has the six numbers than a woman who has received a letter telling them that their pension age has changed.

NHS Long-Term Plan: Implementation

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

Making sure that we have the right allocations for CCGs across the country that reflect the needs of the local population is a very important responsibility for NHS England—as the commissioner of those services—to make sure that the money follows need. After all, the principle of the NHS is that it is available to everybody according to need, not ability to pay.

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

We all know that the Secretary of State is a great fan of technology and of improving the mental health of young people, and all people across the country. In my constituency, a man called Richard Lucas has set up a new online system called govox, which is a revolutionary, technologically enabled way of improving mental health among young people. Will the Secretary of State advise the House how innovative new technological solutions at a local level can best get into CCGs and the local NHS, so that we can improve mental health for everybody?

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend has raised with me before the new technology developed by Mr Lucas. A new technology such as this can be picked up by all sorts of different parts of the NHS—by different CCGs or mental health trusts—which can then use it. One of the reasons that we have brought in NHSX, which opens today, is to make sure that there is a central place to which people with a good idea for how to improve the health of the nation by using technology can go to find a way into the NHS, so that great practice and good technology can be promulgated across the NHS as quickly as possible.

Oral Answers to Questions

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Tuesday 19th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

If the hon. Gentleman really cared about stopping no deal, he would vote for the deal. There is something else that is worth saying about this shadow Secretary of State. He is a reasonable man—he is a sensible man—and I like him. My politics are probably closer to his than his are to those of the leader of his party, so why does he not have the gumption to join his friends over there on the Back Benches in the Independent Group, instead of backing a hard-left proto-communist as leader of the Labour party?

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

8. What steps the Government are taking to support charities and other organisations working on treating acquired brain injury.

[The Minister for Care (Caroline Dinenage)]

Everyone who has an acquired brain injury deserves to receive the best possible care and rehabilitative service. To ensure that, the NHS long-term plan included £4.5 billion of new investment to fund primary and community health services over the next five years.

[Bim Afolami]

I thank the Minister for that answer. The NHS has a good strategy on community-based care. On acquired brain injury, will the Minister advise me and Headway Hertfordshire, a brilliant local organisation, on how we can be more proactively involved with the strategy and attract more funding from local clinical commissioning groups? Will she meet me and the organisation to discuss this matter further?

[Caroline Dinenage]

I am delighted that my hon. Friend mentions Headway, which is a fantastic organisation that does great work. I meet it regularly in my own constituency and I would be more than happy to do so with him. The partnership boards of local integrated care systems, which will plan and shape those services, will include the voice of voluntary services and the voluntary sector in their area. His local Headway branch would be well advised to engage with that group.

Oral Answers to Questions

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Tuesday 15th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Steve Brine]

Yes, we will. We recognise that it gives a good start in life. Working with my colleague the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price), I will meet one of the groups in that area to talk about it shortly. I know the hon. Lady chairs the infant feeding all-party group, and I am happy to talk to her about that at any time. We see it as an essential start in life.

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

10. What the aims are of the new mental health support teams to be placed in schools and colleges; and what steps those teams will take to improve mental health for young people.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Jackie Doyle-Price)]

The new mental health support teams will deliver evidence-based interventions in or close to schools and colleges for children and young people with mild to moderate mental health issues. In December, we announced the first 25 trailblazer areas in England, and 12 sites will pilot a four-week waiting time to speed up children and young people’s access to NHS mental health services, including in Hertfordshire, serving my hon. Friend’s constituents.

[Bim Afolami]

I thank the Minister for that response. She will appreciate that the answer is not just spending more money on mental health—it is how that money is spent. Can the Minister explain in further detail the nature and scope of the research, scientific and otherwise, that has underpinned the Department’s response to the increase in poor mental health in our young people?

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

My hon. Friend is right: it is important that we get the best value from any investment we make in improving the nation’s mental health by making sure that it is evidence-based. On that basis, the Government engaged extensively with a range of expert organisations and individuals, including children and young people, to inform our proposals to improve mental health support, including through a consultation. We also commissioned academics to undertake a systematic review of the evidence which directly informed our proposals and we will, of course, learn from the trailblazers as we commission additional services later this year.