Living with Dementia

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 25th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate. It is an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), who so expertly laid out the issues. I will say a little bit about social care and then move on to research.

Some 1,179 people live with dementia in Cambridge—around 1% of the constituency population—meaning that thousands of my constituents care for or know a close friend or relative with dementia. My hon. Friend touched on some of the social care issues. It seems hard to deny that we have a crisis in social care. In March 2017, the Government said they would publish a Green Paper on ensuring that the system will be sustainable in the long term. However, two years on, and after many delays, Ministers have still not given a date for when it will be published.

I understand that 400,000 fewer older people receive publicly funded care than in 2010. With local authority budgets cut by 49.1% since 2010, including £7 billion lost from adult social care, and a further £1.3 billion to be cut in 2019-20, it is hard not to conclude that the situation for many of those living with dementia, and for their families, has been made much harsher and more difficult.

Alzheimer’s Research UK has campaigned for more money to be invested into research, so that with new treatments we can really change the lives of those who have dementia. As we all know, research has revolutionised the ways we treat, cure and prevent diseases such as cancer. There is no reason why that cannot be the same for brain diseases such as dementia. New treatments would also ease pressure on our healthcare and social care services, improving lives and saving public service resources. Public donations have allowed Alzheimer’s Research UK to invest £100 million over the last 20 years to drive forward its research, but that funding alone does not allow it to further explore emerging fields.

However, when we do invest in dementia research, look at what we can achieve. Alzheimer’s Research UK’s Drug Discovery Institute in Cambridge couples the deep disease knowledge and biology expertise of the academic community with high-quality, innovative drug discovery technologies. More than 100,000 combined hours have been committed to drug discovery by 30 new staff. The institute is currently investigating 10 new potential drug targets in its own work or through collaborations, has generated 12 new internal collaborations at the University of Cambridge and has attracted nine new partners from both the private and the academic sectors.

In addition to the institute, the Cambridge Network Centre, launched 20 years ago, has grown to include 2,200 dementia researchers across the UK. It has helped researchers to buy cutting-edge technology to carry out their research, supported grant applications and fellowship applications and enabled PhD students to buy equipment such as virtual reality technology to further their research. I suspect I am not the only one to have seen the virtual reality dementia simulation and met Helen Davies when Alzheimer’s Research UK was in Parliament. I—like others, I suspect—found it extremely interesting and slightly surreal, but also very impressive at explaining the effects of the disease.

While £269 million is invested in cancer research, only £83.1 million is invested in dementia research—just 0.3% of its total cost to society. Alzheimer’s Research UK is calling for the Government to increase that to just 1% of its total cost, which would unlock the resources needed to really cement the UK as the world leader in dementia research and to make real breakthroughs. I very much hope that the Minister will commit to discussing that with her colleagues in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Treasury—even possibly one or two Conservative party leadership candidates, for whom money suddenly seems to be no object—to ensure that we make the progress that we all need.