Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 26th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Wes Streeting)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Today, across the UK, 350 young people aged 25 and under will take up smoking. It is a decision that the vast majority will later regret. They will try to quit again and again, but most will not be able to break their addiction. They will suffer strokes, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stillbirth, dementia or asthma as a direct result of smoking. For two in three of those young people, the habit they are beginning today will eventually kill them.

Smoking takes 80,000 lives a year and causes one in four deaths from cancer in England, a hospital admission almost every minute and 100 GP appointments an hour. It is the leading cause of sickness, disability and death in our country. And today, Members of this House can consign it to the history books.

The Bill before the House will raise the legal age of the purchase of tobacco by one year every year, creating the first smokefree generation and, eventually, a smokefree nation. The Bill will enable the Government to extend the current indoor smoking ban to certain outdoor settings, and we will consult on banning smoking outside schools and hospitals and in playgrounds, protecting children and vulnerable people from the harms of second-hand smoke.

The Bill will come down on the vaping industry like a ton of bricks, to prevent a new generation of children and young people from getting hooked on nicotine. Taken together, these measures add up to the most significant public health intervention in a generation. They are a giant leap in this Government’s mission to build a healthy society and, in doing so, they will help to build a more healthy economy too.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

Can the Secretary of State imagine the plight of a shop assistant, some decades hence, when a middle-aged or elderly person presents themselves seeking to buy a packet of cigarettes? Is that shop assistant really expected to demand their bone fides?

[Wes Streeting]

I can not only imagine it, but I recently experienced a similar situation. There I was in Barkingside Sainsbury’s one evening, only weeks ago, buying a bottle of wine to have with dinner and, to my surprise, I was asked for my ID. I am afraid it is just a burden that those of us with youthful vim and vigour in our early 40s have to bear, and it is a price I am willing to pay—for good moisturiser. However, there is a serious point. Along with many others that I am sure we will encounter during the passage of the Bill, this is one of the cynical arguments being deployed by the mendacious smoking lobby, which would have us believe that, decades hence, there will be people who are at the margins—one aged 41 and one aged 40, for example—being asked for ID on the sale of cigarettes. The point is that the Bill will create a smokefree generation. Young people growing up in our country today will not be smokers, because we will have stopped the start. We will do everything we can to support adults who are currently smoking, because the vast majority want to break the habit but struggle to do so.

Hospice Funding

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sally-Ann Hart]

I agree, and will come to that later in my speech.

Demelza receives just 10% of its income from the children’s hospice grant, which ends in March 2025, and just 4% of its income from spot purchases, so 86% of its income must come from fundraising. I am concerned that neither the UK Government nor NHS England has set out whether the children’s hospice grant, which is worth £25 million, will continue beyond 2024-25. The grant is a vital source of funding for children’s hospices. Dependence on the generosity of members of the public to pay for vital healthcare would not be tolerated in other core areas of healthcare such as maternity services, cancer care or A&E. Hospices are the only statutory service that relies on fundraising to keep going, despite end of life care being an essential service that so many of us will need.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

What makes hospices so remarkable is their independence. My fear is that the more one demands that they be funded by the state, that independence will be curtailed and questioned. The hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) put her finger on the difficulty: the problem is in the difference between the policies of different ICBs. Were they funded centrally by the grants available, as they were during the pandemic, I think it would be much better.

[Sally-Ann Hart]

I agree. It is important to point out that most hospices do not want 100% funding from the Government because they need the flexibility to do what they want. Fundraising is a really important part of the local community effort, bringing people together, but when the dependence on fundraising is so vast we might need to intervene to provide extra funding.

End of life care is an essential service that so many of us will need, but the situation is made worse by inflationary pressures and rising demand. We have an excellent ICB in Sussex—NHS Sussex, led by Adam Doyle—which has highlighted that hospices are recognised as having become increasingly fragile in recent years, due to a lack of resilience in their funding model, which is heavily reliant on gifted income alongside NHS grants.

Oral Answers to Questions

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Maria Caulfield]

We are in the process of issuing another bulletin to both GPs and pharmacists on the serious shortage protocols and to make clear the alternatives available. That is a clinical decision. I will certainly look at the issue of Provera because medicines have to tick off a number of criteria to be eligible for the prepayment certificate. I will certainly look into that particular drug on the hon. Lady’s behalf.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

16. What steps he is taking to increase the social care workforce.

[The Minister for Social Care (Helen Whately)]

Social care depends on the skills and compassion of our care workforce. That is why we are investing £250 million in reforming care as a career, with a new care qualification, specialist training courses for experienced care workers and a new career structure to support progression, alongside increased funding for social care, our national recruitment campaign and the care worker visa.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

We need many, many more domiciliary care workers. How will we get them?

[Helen Whately]

My right hon. Friend is right. We have some good news: Skills for Care data shows that home care job vacancies are falling—something I hear when I speak to home care providers. Looking ahead to next winter, I want every local authority to have enough home care on hand. That is why I emphasised the importance of home care when we distributed £600 million of discharge funding to local councils and NHS organisations in April. We are asking all local authorities to plan ahead and book enough home care in advance for this coming winter.

NHS Strikes

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Monday 17th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

The rather odd thing is that we have a larger cash offer on the table for 2022-23 than the Labour Government in Wales, and we have reduced our longest waits far more than they have in Wales. We have a deal that the trade union leaders themselves have recommended, that the majority of staff councils have recommended and that the largest health union has voted emphatically in support of. It is right that we allow time for that deal to go through, and we stand ready to have similar meaningful and constructive engagement with the junior doctors once they move from what is an unrealistic position.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

Regulars in this Chamber will know that Opposition Members have habitually taken to urging Ministers to adopt their own policies. Does the Secretary of State share my difficulty that, in respect of this urgent question, none of us has any idea what their policy is?

[Steve Barclay]

In short, the position of the shadow Health Secretary seems to be to deny the vote of his own union, Unison, which voted 74% in favour; to not wait for the NHS staff council to reach its decision; and to unravel to some extent what has been meaningful and constructive engagement with the “Agenda for Change” staff council. My right hon. Friend is right to be confused about the Opposition’s actual position.

Junior Doctors’ Strikes

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

The Opposition do not seem to like their question being answered. The shadow Secretary of State asked me to confirm the position, for the avoidance of doubt, at the Dispatch Box. That is exactly what I am doing. I have checked the minutes. I have spoken this morning with officials to confirm, before I made the statement to the House, that it was a precondition of the talks. We were told, in terms of the pay erosion of 26.1%, that that needed to be restored at 35%, alongside other things. The reality is that he does not support that. He is facing both ways, wanting to support the junior doctors, but not actually willing to support the pay that they are demanding.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

What does it do for a respected profession that, when one visits a hospital, one is confronted by a rabble chanting like a schump of rudies, particularly when they have not co-operated with hospital authorities to minimise the impact of their absence?

[Steve Barclay]

I would draw an important distinction between a militant group that appears to have taken over the junior doctors committee and the vast majority of junior doctors who do a hugely important job within the NHS. We recognise in Government that they have faced considerable pressures from the pandemic, and we stand ready to work constructively with them. There are, on the other hand, some within the BMA junior doctors committee who appear to have a more political agenda. Indeed, I refer hon. Members to the statements of members of that committee, who have said that they want to move the BMA to more traditional trade union activity and to pursue a more overt political agenda.

Health and Social Care Leadership Review

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Gentleman is right to talk about the importance of recruitment in the NHS—bringing in the right people in the first place and then retaining them—but I hope that he will also recognise that good leadership plays an important part in that. This morning, I went to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, which is an outstanding and incredibly well run hospital, and heard from the leadership team about the important role that they play in attracting and retaining talent. I hope that he recognises that point as well.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

Why is the Secretary of State’s departmental leadership team advertising for a deputy director, delivery, for the Covid Pass programme? What is that about?

[Sajid Javid]

The reason why the Department keeps that under review is that, although the pass has stopped and there is absolutely no prospect that I can see of its ever coming back into place, it is right that, as we wind things down and work on the digital resources, all things are looked at appropriately.

Vaccination Strategy

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Wednesday 12th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Maggie Throup]

I reassure the right hon. Gentleman that we are doing what we can to ensure that people get vaccinated. Some of the stats speak for themselves: people are eight times more likely to be hospitalised if they are unvaccinated and more than 60% of those in ICU are unvaccinated. We are not a nation that forces people to do things unnecessarily. The behavioural insights team across Government has been looking at different ways to get those who have not come forward yet to get their jab and at the pros and cons of different ways of doing that. At the moment, I think we have the right approach, which is explaining why it is important for them to come forward to get a jab.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

The question of my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) was about whether there was a reassessment of the strategy on the basis of what we know now about omicron that we did not when the strategy was set out. Will the Minister answer that, particularly in respect of the policy of sacking NHS staff who are not vaccinated, given that we know that the rationale has disappeared because it does not stop people from catching it or from infecting others?

[Maggie Throup]

My right hon. Friend makes a very good point, but I go back to the MHRA, which is globally recognised as one of the best regulators and has advised that,

“the benefits of vaccination still outweigh any risk in most individuals.”

With regards to myocarditis, to which I think he was referring as well, it is greater in those children who have been infected with covid than in those who have been jabbed. I must stress, however, that instances of both those circumstances are extremely rare. The JCVI continually reviews all the data.

Public Health

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

On a typical winter’s day, between 200 and 350 people will die of flu. Do we hide behind our masks? Do we lurk at home, working from home? Do we demand that people provide their bona fides before going to a venue? Do we require people to be vaccinated as a condition of keeping their jobs?

The question whether the measures before the House today are proportionate comes down to a matter of opinion. Do we take seriously some of the extraordinary extrapolations that we have been given, particularly given the previous record? The fact is that those are things that might take place, and we have to balance them against the known costs and damage to enterprise, economy and society.

In the end, it comes down to a matter of opinion—a matter of our prejudice. Typically, we are capable of organising our lives and making those decisions for ourselves. We decide what our risk appetite is and what we are or are not prepared to encounter. Notwithstanding the carnage on our roads, which is certainly killing more people than covid at the moment, some of us still decide to drive. It is a matter of opinion.

It comes down to letting loose the dogs of war—getting the fear factor into it and getting the officials, the members of SAGE, Independent SAGE and SPI-M and all those who speak in their private capacity out there twisting the fear lever. What about the Health Protection Agency? What Stalinist minds thought up that nomenclature? Get them out there, twisting the fear button, and by and large you will get the reaction that you want: people will crave more enforcement and fiercer measures to protect them from the great danger that is out there. Let hospitality be just collateral damage—let the industry endure the deluge of cancellations at what should be its most productive time. That is the situation that we have delivered.

The Government, having administered this Ministry of fear, are absolutely complicit with their officials and organisations who have designed and delivered it. In doing so, they have abandoned any principle of social democracy or liberal democracy, absolutely beyond anything that we have endured in recent living memory, in the history of this pandemic. As a consequence, having abandoned what might have been their ideology, they are rudderless and so much more at risk of the opinions and predictions of the advisers to whom they are in hock.

Covid-19 Update

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

The NHS and social care has £5.4 billion of extra funding over the second half of this financial year. A lot of that funding is being deployed to create extra capacity, especially with work on discharges between the NHS and the social care sector, because people can be clinically ready to be discharged, but the care packages have not always been easily available.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

How many of those who have tested positive in the UK are ill?

[Sajid Javid]

The number of confirmed cases in the UK is 336. By definition, they are all infected. Some may be asymptomatic and others will be feeling ill. As far as I am aware, none of them has so far been hospitalised.

Public Health

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Maggie Throup]

In September, the Government set out their autumn and winter plan for fighting the virus, which could be implemented to ensure that the NHS is not overwhelmed. Although we are not implementing the entirety of the plan now, we are taking steps to respond to a potentially potent mutation of the virus. We have taken great steps in our fight against the virus, having delivered nearly 115 million vaccine doses so far, and more every day, with almost 18 million people having also received their booster jab, including me.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

Will the Minister deprecate those public appointees who, notwithstanding the clear proportionate advice of the chief scientific adviser, have been on the airwaves telling people that they should not socialise, to the huge detriment of people’s wellbeing and of an industry struggling to recover from earlier lockdowns?

[Maggie Throup]

I am sure the people my right hon. Friend is referring to will have heard him loud and clear. We all enjoy socialising but, as he will appreciate, we are in a difficult situation. However, we also have personal responsibility.

We are confronted with an emerging threat, which is familiar but not yet well known. The measures that we are putting in place are proportionate, precautionary and balanced, and are being made in response to the specific threat.

Late last week, the challenge arising from the latest covid-19 threat from the variant of concern known as omicron emerged. Public health officials in South Africa shared information on the omicron variant and it was identified as a coronavirus variant of concern. Thanks to our world-leading genomic sequencing experts at the UK Health Security Agency, we were able to identify that some cases of the new variant are present in this country. So far, we have identified 14 cases in the UK and, unfortunately, we expect to find more in the coming days.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Graham Brady]

I am grateful to my medically qualified right hon. Friend for that intervention. He is of course right that that is unlikely. There would have to be some evidence of a very different kind of variant of covid for it to pose any kind of threat of that sort. He is also right to point out that when we first went into a lockdown, it was intended to protect the NHS for long enough for us to increase capacity in the service for a three-week period. The first lockdown then spread into three months. That is the most important thing the House should be guarding against: the mission creep that allows Governments simply to introduce restrictions and further restrictions, and then extend them, getting into the habit of regulating what we do. That is my most important concern of all.

In the summer of 2020, the Prime Minister said that it was time to move on and time to start to trust people to make decisions for themselves. I rejoiced at that and thought what a wonderful thing it was that we were moving to a point where we would advise people, inform people and make sure they had the best evidence to make decisions in their own lives. Now, however, we see the first instinct of the Government when we do not even have any evidence that the omicron variant is worse in its effects. There is some suggestion from South Africa that it might be less severe, but the Government’s first instinct is to introduce further compulsory measures and regulations relating to self-isolation and to face coverings in some settings but only until 20 December, plus measures that affect the travel industry, particularly the move back to PCR tests on day two.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

We are about to have another pingdemic as we approach Christmas, to the huge disadvantage of enterprises across the country. It fundamentally undermines the other main effort of the Government, which is to increase vaccinations. One of the advantages of being vaccinated is not having to self-isolate if in the company of someone who is infected. If that is taken away, one of the incentives—the principal incentive—to get vaccinated is removed.

[Sir Graham Brady]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is a very serious concern that we might be entering a world where we lurch from one set of restrictions to another, where no business and no individual can get used to the idea of the freedoms they are able to exercise or what restrictions might be in force at the time.

What really concerns me—I think we all know and recognise this—is that we are dealing no longer with a pandemic, but with an endemic virus that will be with us for many, many years and probably forever in some form. Further variants will emerge. They might do so every couple of months or every year. We tend to have a new flu strain on an annual basis and some are much worse than others. But surely, we need to get back to an assumption that people will make decisions for themselves and have control over their own lives. We cannot move, as we appear to have done, to an environment in which the Government simply assume they can instruct us whenever there is the first small evidence from anywhere in the world of a new strain that might behave in a different way, and new and potentially swingeing public health measures are put in place. I ask Ministers to consider the implications of that and for looking at other diseases. Will we start to treat other diseases and viruses in the same way, assuming the best thing to do is to compel people and instruct them on what actions they need to take?