Speech and Language Therapy

Danny Chambers Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I thank Mikey for being here today and for all his hard work to get to the point of having a debate. It takes a lot of campaigning to get as many people involved in a petition as he has done, and that is a fantastic tribute to him.

I also thank the hon. Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) for introducing the debate. I was struck by his comment that speech therapy is not just a treatment, but a lifeline. That was certainly brought home to me recently. In Winchester last year, I visited an aphasia support group. Its members meet every couple of weeks and they all have speech issues caused by various types of brain damage, which could be caused by a brain injury, a stroke, a brain tumour or dementia. They told me that aphasia affects about 350,000 people in the UK. Jez Hodgkinson, who is part of the group, said:

“Learning to live with aphasia takes hard work, luck and lots of support—and this isn’t helped by the lack of knowledge of the condition. I’d never actually heard of aphasia until I had a stroke so hence it’s so important to share our stories both inside the group and with the wider public—including those with a voice in parliament.”

I also have personal experience of living with my father who had a series of mini-strokes and then dementia, and really struggled to communicate. He knew what words he wanted to say but he could not reach for them. It made communication difficult, and especially did not help a very independent farmer who had quite a hot temper at the best of times.

All people who have difficulty communicating, whether it is the result of a hearing impairment, special educational needs or conditions such as strokes and Parkinson’s, have the right to participate in society fully and independently. Too often, those rights are not fully recognised. Everyone has talked about how fundamental it is for us to be able to communicate, because we are a social species; we function because we can communicate. Even with my veterinary background, I understand how fundamental that need is. Puppies communicate primarily by body language; when they have had their ears cut off or their tails docked, they lose that ability to communicate and cannot socialise—they get psychological issues or behavioural problems that last for their entire lives. And the issue is so much more important for humans who need to communicate with friends and family, access services and interact with strangers on a regular basis to be able to work and get an education. Everyone deserves independence and the opportunity to flourish, with them and their families supported so that they can express themselves and communicate with ease in the most comfortable way for them.

Speech and language therapy can make a life-changing difference to the people it supports. It is a vital and overstretched service. In recent years, demand has risen at a faster rate than the number of therapists or the support they can offer. That desperately needs to be addressed. By improving outcomes, speech and language therapy can help to deliver better care, and actually save money for other parts of the NHS. We heard about supporting people who are unable to swallow properly; that can have a significant impact on reducing repeat chest infections. The hon. Member for Leicester South (Shockat Adam) mentioned how every £1 spent on speech therapy can save £2.30 of NHS costs. When people ask how we can afford to do this, we have to ask, “How can we afford not to do this?”

Children and adults are waiting far too long for the speech and language therapy they need. As the hon. Member for Lichfield has already said, it is a postcode lottery; there are huge differences in outcomes depending on where someone lives. Helping people to swallow, eat and communicate is an essential service, and everyone should be able to expect that support if and when they need it.

We, the Liberal Democrats, are pressing for the NHS 10-year plan to address specifically the inadequate access to these speech and language therapies, and how that will be improved. We want the Government to develop a workforce strategy to end the chronic shortage of speech and language therapists, so that everyone can get the support that they need.

As a slight aside, but on a related note, we have also long campaigned for more support for those communicating through British Sign Language. We have campaigned for it to have equal official status to the UK’s other languages, and we are campaigning for free access to sign language lessons for parents of deaf children.

I visited St Peter’s primary school in Winchester recently. The headteacher was discussing how, since the covid pandemic, they had noticed a sharp rise in pupils struggling to communicate, as their speech and language had not developed as quickly as it did before the pandemic. We need to remember that it is not just people’s educational needs that are affected—both by covid and by speech and language challenges—but their entire social development and friendship groups as well.

We are really pleased that this issue has been highlighted, and that we have had this debate today. I urge the Minister to push forward on this issue as fast as possible.