Business of the House

Bob Blackman Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I am delighted to join in the congratulations to Luke and Jemma. We hope they have a wonderful day at the weekend and a great life thereafter.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

Happy Hanukkah, Mr Speaker. The Chairman of the Backbench Business Committee has been called away on urgent constituency business and he asked me to explain what has happened with the business for next Thursday. The Committee advertised the normal pre-recess Adjournment debate, but by the close of business on Monday only five Members had requested to speak in it, so on Tuesday the Committee took the decision of allocating the debating time to two items that have more than 30 Members wishing to speak on them. I trust that Members will understand the rationale for the decision making.

I now come to the issue I want to raise. This week, Harrow council has announced that it is going to slash public health funding by 60% over the next three years. That short-sighted decision will mean that programmes on smoking cessation, tackling obesity, diabetes, sexually transmitted diseases and other aspects of public health will go awry. Clearly, other councils may be deciding to take a similar approach. When this money was allocated to councils I warned of a risk if it was not properly ring-fenced. May we therefore have a debate in Government time on the important issues of public health, because in the long term addressing this will cost the NHS millions?

[Chris Grayling]

First, I thank my hon. Friend for explaining the reasons for the debate structure next Thursday. I was slightly disappointed that we are not having a standard Adjournment debate, as I know one or two other Members are. We should take this opportunity to send a message across the House to say that to ensure that this debate does happen in its usual form before future recesses, Members need to put in a request to make sure that there is demand; otherwise we end up with the kind of debate that he described.

My hon. Friend makes an important point about public health. It is often a false economy to economise on public health, but as a senior member of the Backbench Business Committee he is very well placed to secure such a debate on a topic that he rightly says is very important.