Health Bill

Debate between Caroline Dinenage and Liz Twist

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.