Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Gillian Keegan and Tim Farron

Monday 29th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. Bexley’s apprenticeship event on 5 February will be a fantastic opportunity for local people to learn about the apprenticeships on offer in his constituency. We have transformed our apprenticeship system. People around the world look at us and say, “How on earth have you done that?” I am very happy to work with anybody, but all that is at risk. The Labour party would halve the number of apprenticeships, taking us back to square one.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

Sadly, the Government did not intervene to save Cumbria’s agricultural college. However, will they decide to invest in agricultural degree apprenticeships, working with the University of Cumbria and Cumbria’s further education colleges, to make sure we have a pipeline of new leaders who can feed us and care for our environment through farming?

[Gillian Keegan]

When I was apprenticeships and skills Minister, we worked together to ensure we had the right college offer in the area that was sustainable. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education will be very happy to work on that. We are looking to expand degree apprenticeships. We have provision in place to work with providers to offer many opportunities, including in agriculture.

Higher Education Reform

Debate between Gillian Keegan and Tim Farron

Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

My hon. Friend knows that we have already looked at that in careful detail. It is kept under review, and we recently made changes to the taught course route.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

Of course students deserve high-quality education at university. They also deserve to be cared for during what is, for most of them, their first time away from home. Does the Secretary of State agree with me, and with the families of young people who have tragically taken their own lives at university, that higher education institutions should do more to look out for and protect those students, including by having a statutory duty of care?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Gillian Keegan and Tim Farron

Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

I thank my hon. Friend for his continuous campaigning on this subject. I do not know how many meetings we have had, but I see his passion to get a UTC in Southampton. I recently met Becky Smith, one of the fantastic former students of UTC Portsmouth, who is now a degree apprentice studying mechanical engineering at the University of Chichester in my constituency. She was full of praise for her time at UTC Portsmouth. We are currently considering the applications we have received. I have seen them all, and I have been through them in great detail in the latest free school wave, including Portsmouth’s bid for a new UTC in Southampton. We hope to announce the successful applications very soon.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

Hospitality and tourism is an industry worth £3.5 billion a year to Cumbria, and it is our biggest employer. Apprenticeships are an important way into a career within that sector. The problem is that T-levels are a useful stepping stone into apprenticeships, yet the Government have again kicked into the long grass the T-level on catering, having already taken out the hospitality element of that. Will the Secretary of State meet me and representatives from Cumbria Tourism, so we can talk about how she can change that policy, and so that more young people can enter that important profession?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Gillian Keegan and Tim Farron

Monday 12th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Gillian Keegan]

What I am doing is ensuring that the quality is better. It is very easy to chase numbers and targets. The Labour Government did that a lot—some of the things in which they used to invest for skills were not of any value at all, either to the individual or to a single business in this country. We are ensuring that we work closely with employers. We have worked with them to design the T-levels qualification. We have worked with 5,000 of them to build the apprenticeship standards. We have had 5.4 million apprenticeship starts since 2010, and all of them are of a high quality that will give people the skills they need to get the jobs they want.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

The hospitality and tourism industry is the biggest employer in Cumbria and is worth £3.5 billion to the economy every year. Yet those businesses are suffering a huge staffing crisis: 63% of them are operating below capacity because they cannot find enough staff. One solution is to recruit and train our own young people into the industry, and a T-level would surely be one way of doing that, but sadly, the Secretary of State’s Government have decided to kick the catering T-level into the long grass. Will she rethink that and bring it back front and centre of her campaign to ensure that young people get into that important industry with the right qualifications?

[Gillian Keegan]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that that is a vital industry, not just in areas of tourism but across the country. We have many full-time hospitality and catering courses at various levels and lots of apprenticeships as well. We will bring forward and look at T-levels and at what more we need in that area, and potentially at management in the sector as well; I know that businesses are looking for more skills in that.

Cancer Treatment: Patient Travel Times

Debate between Gillian Keegan and Tim Farron

Wednesday 10th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron]

Yes, I fully agree. That is why the NHS England consultation is the right time to set criteria. If we all say, “We’d rather like it if these issues are addressed,” nothing will happen, but if they are set as firm criteria and priorities as a consequence of the consultation, something should happen. The hon. Gentleman was right to raise that point.

Requiring NHS trusts to make it a priority for investment to ensure that radiotherapy is available more locally—such as by bringing a satellite unit to our local hospital in Kendal—would significantly improve outcomes for patients. That has been the focus of our long-running community campaign. I want to say a massive thank you to the many thousands of people who have been involved in that campaign so far. Just before Christmas, on behalf of our community, I presented a private Member’s Bill that would specify 45 minutes as the maximum time that patients have to travel to access radiotherapy treatment. I urge the Minister to support that Bill and ensure that the Government accept it.

I was asked on the radio this morning why, after nine years of fighting this campaign, I had not just accepted defeat and walked away. The answer is that every week in Westmorland, more families learn that they must fight cancer, and we have no right to turn our backs on them. Sadly, the challenge of cancer renews itself week after week, and so our zeal in fighting for those families must also be renewed week after week.

[Gillian Keegan (Chichester) (Con)]

Some 840,000 people live in West Sussex and yet we are the only county in the whole of England that has no radiotherapy facilities within its boundary. I can also confirm the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti). I recently visited the Sussex Snowdrop Trust, which looks after desperately ill children. The stories of them traveling up to London or Southampton and having to stop several times along the way were heartbreaking; it is the worst thing to happen when they are facing that kind of trauma. I agree with the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) completely that patient travel times need to be taken into account during the consultation. I hope that they are, and that St Richard’s Hospital in Chichester is considered as a worthwhile investment for LINAC—linear accelerator—machines to help local people in West Sussex.

[Tim Farron]

All the points that the hon. Lady makes are absolutely right and relevant to those of us who are here today—especially so, given the nature of her county.

Our community in south Cumbria remains proud that we won part one of our fight for a cancer centre. When we launched our campaign in 2009, it was for chemotherapy and radiotherapy. In 2011, we cut the ribbon on the Grizedale ward—the chemotherapy unit—and we are determined to win our fight for radiotherapy too. We have had an overwhelming response to the petition we launched again last September, adding to the 10,000 people who signed the original petition. Thousands more have written in and shared their stories with me locally and nationally. They include stories of the pain they went through in travelling hours every day to get the treatment that they desperately needed; stories of families who suffered watching relatives deteriorate as the long days of arduous travel visibly took their toll; and stories of choosing not to proceed with treatment because of the unbearable rigours of travelling huge distances. All those people have told me how a centre at Kendal could have helped them and their loved ones.

Most of us know, and all can imagine, the shock of being diagnosed with cancer. It is a life-shattering blow. Imagine then being faced with weeks of daily, grindingly long and tiring journeys to receive care. The travel can become the biggest part of the problem. One of my constituents, Philip from Grange-over-Sands, gave me this story, and his words speak more powerfully than any I could use. He said:

“At the age of 81 I had to attend 37 visits for treatment between the May and July 2013. The round trip from Grange to Preston Hospital was in excess of 100 miles per day whether by road or by train and then bus to the hospital. The times of my treatment varied day by day from 8am to 6pm. The treatment machine was not always available at the specified time which meant further time added on to the days travelling. All the above resulted in a very stressful time for myself and my wife on top of suffering from prostate cancer.”

Thankfully, Philip has now been discharged following three years of follow-up visits. He added:

“I trust that future patients may get their treatment at Kendal so good luck with your efforts.”

I was also contacted by the parents of Josie from Oxenholme. They told me:

“After a truly horrific chemo-therapy regime, which nearly killed her, Josie was left shattered and we faced the prospect of having to make daily trips for 4 weeks to Preston for Radiotherapy. The round trip typically takes 4-5 hours. She is left tired and with little time in the day to do much else. A unit in Kendal would have transformed this experience and left her with more energy and time to take more care of herself.”

Lastly, the words of Magda from Windermere sum up the problem perfectly:

“The whole idea of ever having to do any of this again would make me think twice about undergoing the treatments I was offered”.

Thousands of residents joined me back in 2009 when we launched a similar campaign to bring chemotherapy treatment to the south Lakes. Back then, patients had to travel many miles for any kind of cancer treatment. Thanks to local support, the chemotherapy ward at Westmorland General Hospital opened in 2011, and since then hundreds of local people have benefited from treatment there. We showed that when a community gets behind a campaign and the Government recognises that there is a real issue, changes can be made, funding can be allocated and problems can be solved.

It is true that the problem of outrageous travel times thankfully affects a relatively small proportion of the population throughout the UK—evidenced by the fact that although this is a massively important issue, only a few of us are here today—but in the places where access is a problem, it is a dreadful problem. NHS England must address it directly and explicitly in its current consultation on radiotherapy. I ask the Minister to ensure that NHS England does just that.

Solving the problem for south Cumbria would not create an expensive precedent—there are relatively few sizeable communities in this position—but for the people who are affected, living in rural areas makes accessing treatment unbearably difficult and arduous. That was highlighted recently by Age UK’s Painful Journeys campaign. It would cost the Government a relatively small amount to fund a satellite radiotherapy unit in Kendal: a capital cost of about £12 million—a sum that had been earmarked during the coalition Government in early 2015. That investment would lead to important changes. Above all, it would stop local people opting not to take up lifesaving treatment because of the need to travel those distances. In south Lakeland, the number of people aged over 60 is 10% above the national average, so older people and people with disabilities in our area are disproportionately negatively affected by distant access to radiotherapy treatment. That makes it all the more important for us to take advantage of this consultation to tackle the problem.

The Equality Act 2010 was passed by the House to ensure that services are offered to people in such a way as not to discriminate against older and disabled people, among other characteristics. Through those unbearably long travel times, those groups are disproportionately disadvantaged and indirectly discriminated against in breach of that Act.

My request is simple. I want travel times and equality of access, particularly for people who are older or who have disabilities, to be key criteria when allocating cancer services. This NHS England consultation on radiotherapy is the opportunity to ensure that those criteria are set so that access is prioritised. I want the Minister to agree to do that today. An expectation should then be placed on hospital trusts to ensure that satellite units of existing established centres are provided in rural communities such as the south Lakes to meet those criteria. Only then will our community be able to access cancer treatment fairly, equally and safely.