Budget Resolutions

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Jackie Doyle-Price

Thursday 7th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. We have quite a lot of time this afternoon, but that is an incredibly long intervention. I am looking forward to the hon. Gentleman’s speech in due course.

[Dame Jackie Doyle-Price]

I acknowledge that there have been cuts to local authority budgets, but the root of this is that so much local authority funding comes from the centre. Where is the accountability? As far as local electors are concerned, the council can spend only what it is given. Given the cuts, it is incumbent on councils to make sensible decisions. They cannot have their cake and eat it. They have to live within their means.

Given the rainbow coalition that the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) has just described, I suspect that there is an awful lot of playing to the gallery. We expect our councillors to be more mature.

List of Ministers’ Interests and Ministerial Code

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Jackie Doyle-Price

Monday 24th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I want to just make absolutely certain that nothing has been said that ought not to have been said. I totally trust the hon. Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle) not to have said anything that she should not have said, but just let me make it clear to the House as a whole that, when we are discussing a sensitive subject such as this in particular, moderation is important and that reputations are important. I am sure the hon. Lady was indeed moderate in her use of words, as the Minister has been. I just want to make sure everybody else is.

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

The ministerial code is, of course, there to regulate the broader aspects of ministerial behaviour, not just financial interests—that tends to be the issue that the House gets really concerned about, but actually it is the broader behaviours that are more important. Given that we have had such a turbulent 18 months with regard to the code, will my hon. Friend, or the Prime Minister, consider rebooting it and focus on exactly the values that we expect of Ministers? Specifically, could I invite him to clarify that the ministerial code is very important when Ministers are deploying their operational responsibilities?

Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Jackie Doyle-Price

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), who represents an exciting area of the country on the Humber. Thurrock may be in the south-east, but I share her exasperation about London-centric policy making, which has gone back decades. In that sense, we should welcome the commitment to levelling up, although she set quite a high bar for proving what it means in practice. I share some of the concerns that she has expressed. When I look at my local road infrastructure in Thurrock, I can see that a national approach has not served us especially well. We must make sure that levelling up really means something in practice.

We are talking today about making this country the best place to grow up and grow old, and it is the greatest country in the world. When I look at what is happening around the world, I think, “Aren’t we lucky to be here in the United Kingdom?” When I read our newspapers, watch our TV or listen to Opposition Members, I often think that this country is much better than they say it is, and that should be celebrated. That is not to say that we cannot do better and there are not challenges that need to be addressed.

In this place, we talk too often about how much we are spending on solving a problem, rather than about the outcomes that we are trying to deliver. Success is not measured by how much we spend; if we try to measure it in that way, we end up with a very short-term approach that does not fix the problem. That is why we end up having the same debates over and over again.

One area I want to highlight in that regard is social care. For the last 10 years, we have been obsessing about how we pay for social care, without properly looking at how we design a social care system that is fit for purpose. The challenge is that we are all living longer, and we have not revisited our systems and policies to address that. We need a life course approach to our housing. We know that falls are the biggest source of elderly ill health, so why are we not doing more to incentivise people to approach how they live in a way that suits their new length of life?

We also need to give younger people hope that they will be able to buy their own home, and this is where the two policies come together. Too often, we look at policies in silos. Why are we not encouraging people to make better use of their housing assets for their whole family? We can incentivise granny annexes, and we can give young people some hope by ensuring they have greater access to the wealth in their parents’ home. If we can do that, we will save money in the health service, because unnecessary hospital stays are much more expensive than dealing with a little inheritance tax problem, which might unlock some investment.

Housing is a big challenge, and we need some radical approaches to it. Council housing is a big part of it, and we must have a Macmillanesque expansion of our housing supply. We can deal with that by having fixed-term tenancies, to make sure that we are giving the most help to those most need it and not having homes being stuck.

I also wish to say something more widely about health, because I have always said that government perhaps works too well for the pointy-elbowed middle classes who are good at fighting for their interests and not for those who most need it. In that respect, I am disappointed that we have not made more progress with reform of the Mental Health Act 1983. It is now four years since Sir Simon Wessely brought forward his review. We spent a great deal of time consulting users, who often had to relive their own trauma in order to give us their advice. So we have really let those people down in delivering material change. We know that deprivation of liberty can be an important part of looking after people with severe mental ill health, but we also know that it is misused, as Sir Simon Wessely’s report shows.

I have little time left, but I wish to highlight a couple more things we need to properly address in that regard. We are still using the Bail Act 1976 to remand people in custody for their own protection. The criminal justice system should not be the place where we deal with people with severe mental ill health; in 21st-century Britain, that is completely unacceptable. We have made much of acting to remove prison cells and police cells as places of safety, and I assumed that we were making considerable progress on that—I thought that this was used in a very limited way. So I was horrified to hear from Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons that in the three women’s prisons it visited last year 68 women had been remanded for their own protection. That is not acceptable and I want more speed in dealing with it.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I now call Paulette Hamilton to make her maiden speech.

Health and Social Care

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Jackie Doyle-Price

Thursday 16th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Enfield North (Feryal Clark). She has just proved that what she lacks in height she makes up for in her energetic performance, and I have no doubt that she will give the Treasury Bench considerable challenge in the future. So many firsts, but I must congratulate her specifically on being the first refugee Member of Parliament. Does that not show that this country is open and liberal, and welcomes those from all parts of the world, whatever their circumstances, who want to make a contribution and do the right thing? I congratulate the hon. Lady. When I go around schools, I give the message to everyone that if they work hard and take advantage of every opportunity that comes to them, they will get on in life. I now have a new poster girl, and I look forward to hearing more contributions from her.

I was struck by the opening speeches, because it is getting a bit boring that all we hear is, “We’re spending this much money” and “Well, it’s not enough and we would spend more than you.” That will not get the best for our NHS. The truth is that whichever side of the House we sit on, we all want our NHS to be the best it can be. Every Government, of whatever colour, will always make the NHS a priority when it comes to the Budget. Let us not make this debate all about money. When we do, we let those areas in which we are not doing as well as we should off the hook. Getting the best out of the NHS is not just about money; it is about leadership and about behaviour—on the part not just of medical professionals, but of patients too. We need to make sure that we have honest discussions about outcomes, what we need to do better, what we expect from everyone and what patients can legitimately expect from the NHS.

That was very much part of the discussion during the general election. I remember knocking on doors and being asked, “But can we trust you on the NHS?” I would reply, “Conservatives are not aliens from the planet Zog who never get ill. We depend on the NHS as much as anyone else. Why would we ever engage in an act of self-harm by not doing our best for it?” We can be clear that under this Government the NHS will have the investment that the country can best afford, and we will focus on making sure that it delivers the best service possible.

The biggest challenge facing the NHS is not money. The workforce remains a considerable challenge. While we carry on talking about imports and the need for more doctors and nurses, we will continue to feed perverse behaviours and make the labour market in the NHS dysfunctional. Medical staff know that they can earn more as locums, so we have a massive vacancy rate and sky-rocketing salary bills, because of the choices people make. We need to do more to address that issue.

Much healthcare can be delivered by those who are not medical professionals. We need to look at where the NHS can commission services from the voluntary sector and how that could work. It is not just about doctors and nurses: it is about a more holistic approach to wellbeing. I would really welcome it if we could move the political debate away from pounds towards patients.

My right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) spoke passionately about patient safety. Again, we need to focus on outcomes, and no one did more than he did to meet that challenge. When he became Secretary of State for Health, my constituency had a failing hospital, but thanks to the measures that he put in to improve performance, we now have a hospital that provides the service that we deserve. We should not be shy about challenging poor performance. The excellent doctors, nurses and others delivering medical services know when things are failing and would welcome the challenge to the leadership of their institutions to make them better.

We need to do more to help more vulnerable patients. The public services do very well for the pointy-elbowed middle classes who are able to fight for what they want, but the test of a society is how we treat the most vulnerable. In that regard, I welcome the commitment to reform the Mental Health Act 1983. That Act was a product of an era in which people with mental ill-health were an inconvenience to be managed. I am pleased to say that we have moved on very far from that, and we will introduce reforms that will empower patients to look after their own recovery. We should be grateful to people who have been through detention and shared their distressing experiences to make things better.

I can see that you are rightly looking at the clock, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I want to mention one final challenge in an area where, as a Minister, I was disappointed not to be able to do more—the issue of people with autism and learning disabilities being detained in institutions that, frankly, are doing them harm. I was horrified to see a report on “Sky News” only this week that showed that we have lost 10 people in the past year in those institutions. That is a mark of failure of the state: families entrusted their loved ones to that care and then lost them. I hope very much that we will redouble our efforts to make sure that we are not putting people into inappropriate care settings and are giving them the tools to be able to live outside those institutions.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I am delighted to call Florence Eshalomi to make her maiden speech.