Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

Carolyn Harris Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Carolyn Harris (Swansea East) (Lab)]

Today’s theme of making Britain the best place to grow up and grow old made me think back to my childhood. I grew up a stone’s throw from where I still live in Swansea East—a proud working-class area, as it still is today. We did not have a lot but we had enough, and that is the difference.

I am honoured to represent my local community and delighted to be able to help those in need. With the summer lunch club fast approaching, my team are working out how many children we can realistically feed through that scheme. We are already looking ahead to Christmas to try to establish whether we will need to help more than the 2,000 families we helped last year. While I am privileged to be able to use my platform to do this, it breaks my heart that I have to. If we are serious about making Britain the best place to grow up in, the Government need to do more—much, much more—to tackle the food poverty and social injustice that we all see in our constituencies every day.

Despite many promises in the Royal Address, words alone do nothing: action on promises is what is needed. Warms words are not delivering on the assurances by this Government that menopausal women in England would have to pay only one annual fee for their HRT prescription. The announcement was made in October 2021 but it now looks as if it will not happen until April 2023. That is not what was said, not what was anticipated, and not what the women who attended this place on that day to welcome the Government’s commitment believed. As a result, I, other colleagues across the House and very many menopause campaigners, groups and individuals have recently launched the menopause mandate, which aims to add our voice to make sure that there is fair and equal access to menopause support and services right across the country. I am not even going to start on the HRT supply shortage, which I have written to the Health Secretary about on so many occasions that I was beginning to think we had started a pen-pal relationship—although his lack of response obviously makes it a one-sided arrangement.

There were glimmers of hope in the Queen’s Speech, but they were just glimmers. Primarily, there was the commitment to publish draft legislation to reform the Mental Health Act 1983. As a woman who spent 12 years on antidepressants after wrongly self-diagnosing a nervous breakdown and depression instead of what it was—the menopause—I know how vital it is that links are made between the two. I am pleased that depression is listed as a clinical indicator on the quality and outcomes framework, but I am disappointed that menopause is not. I am not being critical of depression being on there, or of the fact that doctors are incentivised to diagnose and treat it; what concerns me is what is being missed. All too often, anxiety and depression are diagnosed when menopause is the problem. It is really important that the similarities and links between menopause and mental health are better understood by medical practitioners. The Government have an opportunity here, through the proposed changes to the Mental Health Act, to include the menopause and the impact it has on mental health in that piece of legislation.

I am truly passionate about making Britain the best place to grow up and grow old in. I have been called a lot of things in my time—the sandwich lady, the menopause lady and, if you listen to the gambling lobby, a prohibitionist and a Methodist, as well as quite a few other things that I cannot say in this Chamber—but in last week’s debate on the Queen’s Speech, the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Fay Jones) gave me perhaps my favourite title when she referred to me as

“a pain in the Government’s neck”.—[Official Report, 10 May 2022; Vol. 714, c. 11.]

I am very proud of that and, for the record, I fully intend to continue that trait.