Paediatric First Aid

Debate between Bob Russell and Richard Graham

Monday 15th December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mark Hunter)—not just for securing the debate, but for his calm and measured argument.

This debate marks yet another milestone in democracy. A while back, the tragic death of a nine-month-old child would not have led to a giant petition, signed by over 100,000 people, being considered by Parliament, with the chance perhaps to change the law. Although that would not have happened but for changes in parliamentary procedure, it is above all the result of the remarkable reaction and leadership shown by Millie’s parents, the Thompsons. Joanne is motivated by the purest motive that any of us parents could hope for—to make something positive out of profound tragedy, and light a candle in the darkness.

Although many of us can think of other recent examples of constituents campaigning successfully on issues dear to their hearts, today’s starting point must be to recognise both the very sad circumstances of Millie’s death and the positive reaction of Joanne and her husband afterwards in founding their charity. The heart of today’s debate is whether it should be mandatory in law for everyone working at nurseries to be given paediatric first aid training, or whether the law should stay where it was when the Childcare Act 2006 was brought in, under which it is mandatory that someone on the premises is trained, but not everyone.

My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell) made a case for first aid training for every individual in the United Kingdom. He has a point: it is right that we should all go on a course. It is one of the best things I have ever done—I did so fairly recently, and no doubt far too late in life. However, that does not necessarily mean that to do so should be mandatory, thereby having rules, regulations and punishments attached to it—that people should be fined or there should be some other punishment for not going on a first aid course. I am not sure that today is the moment for a discussion of whether we should legislate that everybody should go on a course.

[Sir Bob Russell]

I should point out to my hon. Friend that I was not saying that there should be first aid training for every person, but that it should be part of the school curriculum. Clearly, over three generations everybody in the country would then be a trained first aider; others could—this is the example he has set himself—go voluntarily for training. However, if parents are entrusting their children to a nursery, it should be mandatory for the staff to have specific training for the needs of the role that they may be called upon to perform.

[Richard Graham]

My hon. Friend is right to differentiate between the two. The point I was going to make was that the fact that I went on a first aid course about two years ago does not necessarily make me that competent to attend to someone in a life-or-death situation today, let alone at some point in the future. Although it is a great idea that everybody at school should learn first aid, again, that will not necessarily make them competent to act in a life-or-death situation. As other hon. Members pointed out, the stress of that situation, the possibility of panic and the absence of recent and up-to-date experience of handling dummies and so on, will be crucial.

That brings me to the key points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle. He rightly touched on the fact that the number of children in child care is rising and on the need for care for the most vulnerable—this point will be especially relevant to the Minister, whose son cannot be much older than Millie was at the time of her death in 2012. The case that has been made today for mandatory paediatric first aid training for everybody working in child care is therefore a powerful one. The coroner concluded that, first, the ambulance service should carry paediatric equipment for such a situation and, secondly, that there should be a national review.

Joanne and her campaign for Millie’s Trust have already achieved the first objective, which other ambulance services around the country may want to consider. I shall certainly write to my own ambulance service in Gloucester. The second objective is open for the Minister’s response, and I hope he will bear in mind the already remarkable achievement of the trust in having trained several thousand teachers for free. This is a fantastic objective, and the number of teachers who have already been trained is fantastic.

I do not know the precise cost of ensuring that every person in every nursery is trained, and I hope that it would not increase the cost of the child care provided to so many of our constituents around the country. I hope that it will be absorbed by the nursery as a necessary part of providing that trust in child care that all of us who are parents would expect.

Today’s debate is an important step in recognising what an individual has done on behalf of her own child and her own family situation, but it has much wider applicability across the land to all of us who are parents and to everyone who puts their children, with trust, into a nursery school. My hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle made a strong case that is the stronger for having been measured and reasonable. I hope that the Minister—a reasonable man and a young father to boot—will be able to give us some reassurance about the national review as quickly as possible. I suspect that all of us here today hope that that review will lead to mandatory provision of paediatric first aid.

Child Poverty

Debate between Bob Russell and Richard Graham

Wednesday 9th June 2010 Westminster Hall

[Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

Despite the current economic uncertainty, Britain remains one of the wealthiest nations on earth. It is therefore to the lasting shame of successive Governments that our country has one of the worst levels of child poverty in the developed world and one of the worst in Europe, with poverty rates worse even than those of the former communist countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—a point I have already made in an intervention on the Prime Minister.

According to the charity Barnardo’s, in the UK there are 2.8 million children living in poverty before housing costs are taken into account, which I gather is the previous Government’s preferred measure. However, Barnardo’s tells me that that figure soars to 3.9 million after housing costs are taken into account, according to the 2007-08 “Households Below Average Income” report, published last year by the Department for Work and Pensions. I was shocked by the following disturbing extract from the “Hard Times” report published by Save the Children in 2006:

“One third of British children are forced to go without at least one of the things they need, such as three meals a day or adequate clothing.”

What should the new Government do now? Well, here is one thought that Barnardo’s has put to me:

“The poorest families in the UK are struggling during the recent economic crisis and are very likely to bear the brunt of forthcoming spending cuts. Barnardo’s proposes pragmatic, cost-effective solutions to redistribute money to the poorest families without the Government spending a single penny extra.”

Save the Children told me:

“It makes financial sense to end child poverty—the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates it costs the taxpayer £25 billion a year.”

Putting to one side the obvious reasons why a civilised society should not tolerate child poverty, Save the Children then makes the financial case for ending it:

“In the long-term, huge amounts would be saved from not having to pick up the pieces of child poverty and associated social ills.”

I therefore invite the Minister to have a meeting with Save the Children, Barnardo’s and the other charities that do so much work to help children, to discuss what needs to be done. Working together, as a big coalition of people with shared interests, makes sense. It would make further sense if there were a permanent standing committee, for example, involving Government and those organisations, to help with formulating policies and strategies, in the spirit of joined-up government across all Departments. I also seek a pledge from the Minister this afternoon that there will be no delay and no dilution of the provisions set out in the Child Poverty Act 2010, including measures on the poverty reduction target and setting up the child poverty commission, which are a matter of urgency.

Child poverty issues are usually even worse for households with one or more children with a disability, and for single-parent families. Today, I shall combine strong criticism primarily of the last Labour Government with a reminder to the Conservative party that the situation has not arisen in the past 13 years but was inherited from when it was last in office. Successive Governments should hang their heads in shame. Generations of young people have been let down.

My message to the new coalition Government is this: quite simply, we must do better. Abolition of child poverty in the lifetime of the present Government must be the target. Whatever the economic issues facing the country, it simply cannot be right in a civilised society to have children living in conditions that are deemed to be below the official poverty line.

I recognise that this is all relative. What is described as poverty in the UK is not the poverty that can be found in third-world countries or in the slums of some overseas cities, where obscene wealth and grinding poverty are physically close to each other but worlds apart in terms of quality of life and life expectancy.

That said, I was deeply shocked by a poster I saw in a church in Colchester last month. It prompted me to table early-day motion 39, which states:

“That this House is deeply concerned at the content of posters issued by The Children’s Society and displayed on church premises which state ‘A vital project that is helping feed, clothe and assist in finding destitute children somewhere safe to live will close on 30th September due to a lack of funds; when it does, hundreds of poverty-stricken families will be left to fend for themselves’; and calls on the Government to hold urgent talks with The Children’s Society to avoid the closure.”

And this is Britain in the second decade of the third millennium.

Much was expected of new Labour in tackling child poverty. I do not doubt for a minute that it had sincere intentions, but the stark reality is that it failed, and failed big-time. I cannot speak of child poverty at first hand. I grew up in a family environment in which I did not want for food, clothing or housing. My wife and I were able to provide for our four children. I am now a grandfather and grateful that my two grandsons and my infant granddaughter do not experience the child poverty that so many children experience. However, I have been involved in political life in my home town for 40 years or so, and have experience of working on a local newspaper; and as every MP can vouch through work in his or her advice bureau, we know child poverty when we see it.

As word spread that I had secured the debate, I received considerable background briefing from different organisations concerned with tackling child poverty. That so many exist is proof of the seriousness of the situation. I cannot possibly in 15 minutes do justice to what they told me, but I hope I will be able to convey the importance of their concerns. I place on the record my thanks to those that have contacted me: Barnardo’s, Save the Children, the Children’s Society, the National Childminding Association and the Child Poverty Action Group.

The Children’s Society told me about the good childhood inquiry, the report of which was published last year. I shall quote one telling comment from its briefing to me:

“One of the most striking things about the evidence received from children was how frequently they mentioned their basic needs. Over 5,000 children filled in postcards about their lives and the three topics they talked most about were ‘friends’, ‘family’ and what was termed their ‘material needs’.

Their comments on this subject were mostly about the importance of having a home, a bed, clothes, warmth, food and water. Interestingly, far more children talked about material ‘needs’ such as these than mentioned material ‘wants’ such as money and possessions.”

I look at life as though it is a jigsaw—lots of pieces need to come together to complete the picture. It is not enough to talk in isolation about education, health, employment and so on. We must look at the whole picture, and if any of the pieces are missing, which tragically is the case for children living in poverty, that young individual will struggle throughout their life, with the guarantee that their life chances will be considerably less than those for a child from a household that is not lacking in the necessities of life; and they will have a shorter life expectancy as well. Why should nearly 4 million children be so grossly disadvantaged? It is not their fault.

As we know with a jigsaw, the first pieces that need to be put in place are the corners and the edges. For our children, the corners and the edges of their jigsaw of life are a decent home. Successive Governments have also failed to deliver that over the past 25 years, with the ending of the building of council houses for families. Oh for the return of the days when local councils built family houses—houses fit for purpose, built to Parker Morris standards—not today’s cramped dwellings with paper-thin dividing walls, which in any event are inadequate in number to deal with the worsening housing crisis. If we addressed the shortage of truly affordable family houses to rent by the resumption of the building of public housing, as was the ambition of successive Labour and Tory Governments for broadly the middle 50 years of the 20th century, excluding the war years of 1939 to 1945, that would help us dramatically on the road to the abolition of child poverty.

It is interesting that post-war Conservative Governments built more council houses than Labour Governments. Indeed, the Thatcher Government built more council houses than the Blair and Brown Governments combined. I contrast the last 13 years with the inspirational Labour Government of Clement Attlee, who in 1945 set about tackling the housing crisis after six years of war. If it can be done in those circumstances, why can it not be done today? After all, if new Labour could fund an illegal war in Iraq, then housing British families should have been affordable.

As a nation, we would do well to revisit the Education Act 1944. It was not about education only; it put forward an holistic approach to the health, welfare and general well-being of the child, of which the universal provision of school meals was an important part; its authors were determined that the child poverty of the 1930s should be a thing of the past. It is perhaps an indication of Britain’s divided society—the gap between rich and poor has widened since 1997—that even in a relatively prosperous town such as Colchester at least two primary schools have breakfast clubs, so that children who would otherwise start the day without a meal have one.

I hope that my debate will encourage the new coalition Government not to let their planned cuts in public spending further damage the life chances of another generation of children. Even in a recession and an era of cuts, expecting children from less well-off backgrounds to experience a further lowering in their living conditions is simply not acceptable.

I observe in passing what I consider to be the silence of the Church on child poverty. I sense that churches collectively, with notable exceptions, are too comfortable, and that the missionary zeal for tackling inequalities in society—and not only child poverty—is something they do not want to get involved in.

As a penultimate point, I pay tribute to the late Professor Peter Townsend, the joint founder of the Child Poverty Action Group, whose work over more than 40 years did so much to highlight the plight of children in this country. I knew him when he was at the university of Essex; from its inception in 1964, he was one of its first professors. Indeed, for a time he lived in the same part of Colchester as me. A tribute to him was published in June last year by the university of Bristol, where his name lives on in the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research. That tribute included this observation:

“He had brief hopes when New Labour arrived, and especially after Tony Blair pledged to eliminate child poverty in 1999. In the end, however, he was left bitterly disillusioned”.

In conclusion, I trust that all Members will accept an open invitation from the Child Poverty Action Group to attend the launch of the group’s handbook on Tuesday 6 July at 10.30 am in the Jubilee Room. MPs will have an opportunity to discuss with folk from CPAG how to help end child poverty in every constituency in the land. Surely, ending child poverty is not asking too much of the new Government.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate and on making so many valid points about the poverty of children. Does he agree that the Government’s commitment to providing an additional 4,000 health visitors through the Sure Start scheme would be a significant step in the right direction?

[Bob Russell]

I welcome anything that will help eliminate child poverty and promote the welfare of children. I also welcome the inclusion in the coalition Government agreement of the pupil premium, which will help children from disadvantaged backgrounds.