Health Bill

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 8th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Liz Twist (Blaydon and Consett) (Lab)]

I welcome the Bill, and was pleased to be a member of the Bill Committee. I also welcome the Government’s new clauses, about which the Minister has spoken today.

New clause 159, to which I have added my name, seeks to address a long-standing legislative omission in our health service. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson) for tabling it. For over a decade since the Health and Social Care Act 2012, Parliament has recognised the principle of parity of esteem between physical and mental health, but without statutory accountability that parity has remained an aspiration rather than a clinical reality.

The scale of the problem is clear. NHS data shows that 1.87 million adults and more than 576,000 children and young people currently hold open referrals for mental health services. While the Government set clear targets to reduce physical healthcare waiting lists, mental health services are excluded from these core constitutional ambitions, and the division has severe consequences. A survey conducted by Rethink Mental Illness found that 83% of patients experienced a deterioration in their mental health while waiting for support, and that nearly a third of those whose health worsened attempted suicide.

New clause 159 would require the Secretary of State to publish national waiting time standards for mental health services within 12 months of the Bill passing into law. The fact is that what is measured is addressed, so we need to give the same attention to mental health that we rightly give to physical health measures. These standards, which cover both community and urgent care, must be developed in consultation with the chief medical officer. Crucially, the new clause mandates the Secretary of State to report performance against those waiting times, alongside mental health expenditure, to Parliament every year. That will ensure that the funding that we allocate in the House is linked transparently to patient outcomes. If we do not measure waiting times we cannot manage them, and patients will continue to be left until they are in crisis before they receive support. It is time that we started to pay the same attention to mental health as we do to physical health, so that we can really achieve parity of esteem.

The Government have set out a welcome and ambitious path to rebuild our NHS, and achieving true parity of esteem is central to that mission. I urge the Minister to look closely at new clause 159 as a constructive measure.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

I will speak about new clause 41, which stands in my name.

We put enormous, unquestioning trust in those who care for the bodies of our loved ones when they die. However, in this Chamber six months ago, I told a former Health Minister, the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Dr Ahmed), about Elkin and Bell, the Gosport funeral directors who left 46 bodies decaying in an unrefrigerated room. One of them, an elderly gentleman whose family had already paid for his cremation, was left decomposing for 36 days. I said then that the funeral sector was nothing better than a lawless wild west with no mandatory qualifications to practise, no accreditation for professionals, no licensing of businesses, no inspection of premises, and no law to fall back on when things go wrong. It was only persistence and ingenuity on the part of Hampshire constabulary that saw Elkin and Bell brought to justice. The Minister at the time told me that a decision on regulation would come in the Government’s full answer to the Fuller inquiry, and we are still awaiting.

Since then, matters have worsened. In July, Robert Bush, a funeral director in Hull, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to 67 charges for bodies left decomposing in squalor. Forty-six grieving families had been reunited with the wrong ashes, but the real horror is that these will not be isolated cases. Under the law as it stands today, almost anyone can set themselves up as a funeral director.

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Lady for her work in this area in the neighbouring constituency. The vast majority of funeral directors operate with integrity, compassion and professionalism. Does she agree that, as reputable businesses, they are crying out for robust regulation?

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

I genuinely could not agree more. This is not at attack on the profession. The vast majority of funeral directors do their job with extraordinary skill, great care and huge professional integrity. It is precisely because of the trust that grieving families place in them every single day that we cannot allow a rogue minority to drag the reputation of the whole sector through the mud.

In a written statement on 1 September, the Government said they intended that proposals for regulation would be forthcoming, but they set out no timetable, and detailed plans were promised only “in due course”. Families have already waited years and cannot be expected to wait indefinitely. New clause 41 would require the Secretary of State, within six months of the Bill passing, to extend the remit of the Human Tissue Authority beyond hospital mortuaries, which it currently covers, to funeral directors, private mortuaries, direct cremation services and any other organisation that transports or holds the bodies of the deceased.

[Stuart Andrew]

Does my hon. Friend agree that Donna Ockenden’s report into what happened in Nottingham, particularly the harrowing stories of the mortuary issues there, adds to the case that she is making?

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for the fantastic work that he did as shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, and he is absolutely right. We really need the full response to the Fuller report in order to implement not only changes to mortuaries, but all the other amendments that it recommended.

New clause 41 would place a duty on the Human Tissue Authority to establish and maintain a register of every business brought within its oversight, with how that register operates set by regulation, so that for the first time a grieving family could check, before they hand over the body of a loved one, whether the business in front of them is properly overseen. I recognise that the hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mark Sewards) has tabled new clause 42 on a new, bespoke freestanding regulator. Both new clauses would fix the same issue, and either will do.

The key thing is that this is a moment for the Government to seize, not resist. Ministers have already said that, in principle, they agree with what new clause 41 would require of them. Every trade body agrees. Every family who has been failed agrees. Every Member from across the House who signed our letter agrees. It feels like the Government agree, so I ask the Minister to tell the House exactly when a statutory scheme will be brought forward by the Department of Health and Social Care, and to set out the timetable for implementation.

None of us is comfortable dwelling on our own mortality, which is exactly why the funeral sector has gone on for so long without proper scrutiny. It is a truism—we hear it all the time—that funerals are for the living; they are for families to say goodbye to their loved ones with dignity. They should be able to grieve without the added horror of questioning whether the body they buried was the right one, or whether the ashes they scattered belonged to the right person. Robert Bush’s sentencing should be the last time that this House has to debate such a gruesome case, but it will not be unless the Government push ahead to close this regulatory black hole.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

I am sure that many Members from across the House are aware of the campaign in memory of Hugh Menai-Davis, the son of my constituents Ceri and Frances who tragically passed away at the age of just six. As part of that campaign, the amendments that I have tabled to the Bill are designed to support families at the most difficult time imaginable.

Our national health service and welfare state have changed and evolved over almost a century, and we should always keep a close watch on how faithfully they remain connected to their founding principles. Support “from the cradle to the grave” should not a dusty slogan; it must be a constant aspiration. Wherever gaps or shortcoming are identified, we must address them.

It should concern us all that support for parents of seriously ill children is one such gap. When a child becomes seriously ill, the NHS mobilises around the child, quite rightly, but parents must mobilise around everything else—getting to work and hospital appointments, looking after other children, managing existing caring responsibilities, and somehow keeping on top of bills, rent or mortgages that do not stop when a child becomes ill. When all of this takes place alongside the fear that their child may die, the pressure on families is near impossible to bear.