Children and Mental Health Services

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing this important debate. My constituent Elodie Fleet, who is now 18 years old, experienced anxiety, which came to a head at the age of 13. She wanted to see the school counsellor, but her needs were not deemed to be urgent enough because “she hadn’t tried to hang herself or taken a blade to her wrists.” I hope the Minister will say how we can get more counsellors in our schools to deal with people such as Elodie, because she is not alone.

[Andrew Griffiths]

The hon. Lady makes a powerful point. It is true that her constituent is not alone. When I publicised this debate on my Facebook page, I was amazed by the number of parents who got in touch. I was overwhelmed by parents who have either battled through and managed to get to the other side, or are in the midst of fighting to keep their children alive, safe and well. As a parent, I realise what a scary thought that is.

Health

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

The House has no greater champion of clean air than my hon. Friend. He is quite right—we have to tackle the wider social determinants of ill health, including pollution. We would introduce a clean air Bill. I am disappointed that the Government do not seem to agree that that is necessary.

I shall run through—[Interruption.] The Secretary of State is chuntering. He will have a chance to respond to the points that I have made. We all accept that smoking is a No. 1 cause of ill health and early death, causing about 115,000 deaths a year. Some 480,000 hospital admissions are attributable to smoking, which is an increase of 6% since 2013. That costs the NHS £2.5 billion a year—it costs primary care £1 billion and social care £760 million—but because of public health cuts, smoking cessation services in communities have faced cuts of £3 million. Over half of local authorities have been forced to cut services. Some local authorities have had to decommission smoking cessation services altogether, and 100,000 smokers no longer have access to any local authority-commissioned support. The number of people using smoking cessation services to help them quit has decreased by 11%—the sixth year in a row that the figure has fallen.

That means that smoking cessation services are, in the words of The BMJ,

“withering on the vine as councils are forced to redeploy funding to other areas”

Those cuts will lead to the risk of more people developing cancer and to higher costs for the NHS. It is a similar story with drug and alcohol services, which have seen cuts of £162 million, with more cuts to come this year.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

A family came to see me to tell me about their alcoholic son who, in the past year, had been taken to hospital by ambulance 35 times, and had spent four weeks over that year in hospital. All that they wanted was support services to help him get his addiction under control. The urgent care was there, but that was not good enough for them. It is devastating for him, but it makes no financial sense for the NHS.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend makes an eloquent and powerful point. She is absolutely right. It makes absolutely no sense to cut alcohol addiction services, as that fails a number of vulnerable people in society and only increases pressures on the wider NHS.

The NHS recognises the pressures on alcohol services. It announced in its long-term plan that it wanted to roll out alcohol care teams in hospitals—a proposal that I made at the Labour party conference last year. At the same time, public health budgets are cutting alcohol addiction services in our communities. Years of investment under the Labour Government in drug and alcohol treatment and recovery centres helped to reduce HIV, hepatitis and drug-related deaths, and also helped to reduce drug-related crime and wider social harms. Yet the number of those receiving treatment and in recovery for alcohol problems has fallen by 17% since 2013. When alcohol misuse costs wider society £18 billion a year in crime and lost productivity, and when drug misuse is also a factor in so much crime, surely these cuts represent the very worst type of short-term thinking—cutting proven preventive services for a short-term saving but ignoring the bigger and longer-term human and financial cost.

What about weight management programmes? The Government pride themselves on their obesity strategy, but when the NHS spends £5 billion on obesity, when there are 617,000 hospital admissions because of obesity, when 18% of hospital beds are occupied by a person with diabetes, when 25% of care home residents have diabetes, and when we have one of the worst childhood obesity rates in western Europe, why are weight management programmes being cut in communities? One GP told Pulse magazine:

“This is crazy. It makes conversations between GPs and patients very difficult. They say, “you tell me that I need to lose weight, but the only help you can give me is advice and a diet sheet printed off Google.”

Another GP told Pulse:

“You try to refer someone for bariatric surgery but they can only have it if they’ve undergone 12 months of a weight management programme—but there isn’t one.”

NHS 10-Year Plan

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Tuesday 19th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the Minister for his brevity. I am sure the House will appreciate the way in which he both took a number of interventions and made his remarks speedily. I will endeavour to copy him. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]

I start where the Minister almost concluded, by thanking NHS staff for the work they do day in, day out. He is a relatively new Minister to the post—so new that you gave him a different surname, Madam Deputy Speaker, but we will gloss over that. He inherits his portfolio after a time in which the NHS has suffered the most severe financial squeeze in its 70-year history. At one point under the Conservatives’ spending plans for national health services the money was set to fall on a head-for-head basis, although they have now revised the spending plans. Because of that financial squeeze over many years, he inherits a portfolio where 4.3 million people are on waiting lists and 2,237 people are waiting more than 12 months for treatment, more than 2.9 million people waited more than four hours in an accident and emergency department, and nearly 27,000 people wait two months for cancer treatment. The 18-week referral to treatment target has not been met since February 2016, the cancer target has not been met since December 2015, the diagnostic target has not been met since November 2013, and the A&E target has not been met since July 2015. Those targets are all enshrined in the NHS constitution and in statute, and they were routinely delivered under the last Labour Government. Under this Government, they have, in effect, been abandoned.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

People in my constituency have to wait longer than most people in the country for a GP appointment: 23% waited more than two weeks; and 15% waited more than three weeks. Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the many brilliant things the last Labour Government did was introduce the 48-hour target to see a GP?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

The last Labour Government put record investment into the NHS, which was voted against every step of the way by the Conservatives. That Labour Government delivered some of the best waiting times on record and some of the highest satisfaction ratings, and they increased access to GPs in constituencies such as Ashfield.

The A&E standard is important not only for patients waiting in an overcrowded A&E but because it tells us much about flow through a hospital. Last week we had the worst A&E performance data since records began, with just 76.1% of those attending type 1 A&E seen, discharged or admitted to a ward in four hours. Behind the statistics are stories of patients left waiting in pain and distress and of the elderly languishing on trolleys. In fact, we have had 618,000 trolley waits in the past year. Patients have been waiting without dignity, at risk of cross-infection. There is no road map at all in the long-term plan to restoring access standards. Of course, the A&E standard is being revised in the long-term plan, even though the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has said:

“In our expert opinion scrapping the four-hour target will have a near catastrophic impact on patient safety in many Emergency Departments that are already struggling to deliver safe patient care in a wider system that is failing badly.”

I hope that when the review reports we can have a full debate in the House.

NHS: Staffing Levels

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Tuesday 11th December 2018 Westminster Hall

[Tracy Brabin]

That is something that we have discussed with our trust. The cost should not necessarily fall on the shoulders of the people we want to employ, so that seems like a good thing.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

For Sherwood Forest Hospitals trust, which covers King’s Mill Hospital in my constituency, the latest figures show 200 nursing vacancies and, since nursing bursaries were abolished, a 32% decline in those applying to do it. Is it not time to bring nursing bursaries back?

[Tracy Brabin]

I absolutely agree that training for this most lauded position should not be done at the cost of nurses themselves.

NHS Outsourcing and Privatisation

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I can reassure the hon. Gentleman that no, it is not. I agree with the Secretary of State that the

“use of the independent sector to bring waiting times down and raise standards is not privatisation.”

They were the words of the Secretary of State when he spoke at his own party conference the other year. The Labour Government did spot-purchase from the private sector to bring down the huge waiting lists that we inherited in 1997; but our concern is about contracts for delivery of healthcare services being handed out to private sector providers who not only provide poor quality to patients but give the taxpayer a poor deal. It is a different situation.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

Thirty-five pounds a week to watch the basic TV channels from a hospital bed; 60p a minute for a relative to call a patient on a hospital phone; a minimum of £1.80 for the car park for a short visit: these charges are happening at my hospital and at hospitals across the land. They are a tax on sickness and a particular tax on long-term sickness. They have to stop.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend has hit upon a brilliant new campaign, which I am sure she will be running. The charges for watching television in wards are absolutely extortionate. It is a scandal; it is a tax on sickness; but it happens because the hospitals, and the health service in general, are so desperately underfunded.

Emergency Services and New Estates

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the response of emergency services to calls from newly built estates.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I am grateful for the opportunity to bring this issue to hon. Members’ attention. In August 2017, my constituent Charlotte told me about a heartbreaking incident that claimed the life of her partner and changed her life dramatically. My constituent and I want the debate to be the beginning of a meaningful conversation, and to press for change in the way that emergency services and local authorities communicate when a house becomes occupied on a new housing estate.

On average, it should take the emergency services seven minutes to be on the scene of a critical incident, or a maximum of 15 minutes. In my constituent’s case, it took over half an hour. Neither the operator nor the paramedics were at fault. Instead, we found a significant problem with the GPS system on which our first responders rely.

We all have new developments springing up in our constituencies.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing the important debate. I had a similar incident in my constituency in Kirkby on a new housing estate, where the ambulance took 30 minutes to arrive. Thankfully, that did not result in my constituent’s death, but we are talking about life and death situations. There must be a practical way of solving the problem.

[Jenny Chapman]

I agree, and I am grateful to see my hon. Friend and other hon. Members present. I regret not asking for more time, because conversations that I have had with hon. Members in the lead-up to the debate have indicated that there is substantially more interest in the problem than I had realised.

Like many young couples, Andy and Charlotte had recently moved into their new property. It was their first home together, in which they dreamt of starting a family. On the night of 11 February 2017, Charlotte found herself in a situation she had never thought she would encounter. Her partner Andy, a fanatical cyclist, had just completed a 50-mile bike ride—he had ridden more than 1,000 miles in the previous year. After settling down for the night, Andy became unwell, and it was later confirmed that he had suffered a cardiac arrest. Charlotte called 999, proceeded to carry out CPR on her husband and spoke to the operator.

Charlotte told the operator that the ambulance crew would need to access her estate via a particular road. Unfortunately, although a property may have a postcode, many homes on the 40,000 unadopted roads on new estates are not visible on the systems used in emergency or first responder vehicles.

As I later found out by sending freedom of information requests to all ambulance trusts, in many cases, emergency vehicle sat-navs are updated only every six to eight weeks on average. Even when updated regularly, the information used to update the sat-navs is only as up to date as that provided by Ordnance Survey. There is no standard process across ambulance trusts or other emergency services. One trust stated that it is

“aiming to update a minimum of every 6 months but sooner if practically possible”.

Thanks to Charlotte’s directions, the paramedics were in the correct area, but the ambulance ended up driving down a lane that led to a river bank with no bridge across to her estate. Charlotte could see the ambulance, but its way was blocked by a five-foot wall on one side and a six-foot fence on the other. The paramedics had no choice but to reverse back up the lane for three quarters of a mile, causing further significant delay.

Charlotte heroically gave CPR to her husband and directions to the operators. Thirty minutes after she dialled 999, paramedics finally arrived on the scene and took control. Their best efforts to resuscitate Andy tragically came too late to save his life.

I applied for the debate because in different circumstances, we would not be having this discussion. It is often the case that, through awful events, faults are identified and can be dealt with. Although nothing can bring Andy back, Charlotte would like his story to be used to stop similar incidents happening in future.

About 200,000 homes were built in 2017. Many hon. Members have such developments in their constituencies, so it is important that we get this right.

NHS Winter Crisis

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Wednesday 10th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend, who is an excellent member of the Health Committee, speaks with great eloquence, pointing out the hubristic response of Tory Members in saying that this was not predictable or preventable. This winter crisis was entirely predictable and entirely preventable.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

Two hundred and thirty-three patients were left in ambulances for more than 30 minutes outside King’s Mill Hospital in the week of 25 to 31 December. That is more than 40% of those arriving by ambulance in that week. Does my hon. Friend agree that those patients and their families deserve an apology and a promise that that will never happen again?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

Absolutely. I have absolute praise for the staff at King’s Mill—it is where my first daughter was born, in fact. The way in which patients have had to wait for ambulances outside King’s Mill is entirely unacceptable, and this Government need to do something about it.

Vaping

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Wednesday 1st November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of vaping.

I was pleased to secure this debate, because I have been interested in the phenomenon of vaping for some time. There are now millions of people vaping in the UK and many of them are former smokers. This is an important issue because if many of the reports and studies carried out on vaping are correct, it has the potential to save thousands of lives in the UK, and millions worldwide. It therefore has to be worth looking at very carefully. We all know that smoking is bad for a person’s health—indeed, more than half of smokers will die from smoking.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate; he is making some excellent points. In my constituency in Nottinghamshire, there is a class dimension to this. Of those in managerial and professional occupations, 8% are still smoking cigarettes; that rises to 26% of those in routine and manual occupations in the Nottinghamshire population, so this is a social justice issue as well as a health issue. Vaping is much cheaper and safer, so it should not be taxed, and people should stop deterring it in public places. The hon. Gentleman is right: we have finally found a way to stop smoking. We should celebrate it, and I say that as somebody who has stopped smoking and now vapes.

[Gareth Johnson]

It is good to see some enthusiasm for this subject. The hon. Lady is absolutely correct: it tends to be more vulnerable people, if I can put it that way, who are affected by smoking, but smoking affects the whole of society. Almost everybody knows somebody who has died from smoking or has been seriously affected by the consequences. As she rightly says, we have potentially found what is almost a silver bullet that will allow us, at long last, to tackle the issue of smoking among those who want to stop.

NHS Pay

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Wednesday 13th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes that in 2017-18 NHS pay rises have been capped at one per cent and that this represents another below-inflation pay settlement; further notes that applications for nursing degrees have fallen 23 per cent this year; notes that the number of nurses and midwives joining the Nursing and Midwifery Council register has been in decline since March 2016 and that in 2016-17 45 per cent more UK registrants left the register than joined it; and calls on the Government to end the public sector pay cap in the NHS and give NHS workers a fair pay rise.

This is the first Opposition Supply day for six months, and it is my pleasure to bring a motion to the House on lifting the public sector pay cap. In the past 24 hours, the Government have been briefing that the pay cap has ended. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury has said that Ministers now have “flexibility” when setting pay above 1%. If—and it is a big “if”—that flexibility means lifting the cap for the whole public sector and giving public sector workers a fair pay rise above inflation, which stood at 2.9% yesterday, that will be a victory for the Labour party, for the Leader of the Opposition, for the Royal Colleges, for the trade union movement, for the MPs of all parties who signed the early-day motion and, above all, for the millions of public sector workers who have campaigned for fair pay. That flexibility that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury has talked about must mean giving NHS staff fair pay as well.

What a climbdown this represents for the Prime Minister! The House will recall that, in the general election campaign, she showed the deftness of touch that has come to characterise her dismal, beleaguered premiership by dismissing the heartfelt concerns of a nurse, saying that there was no “magic money tree”. It is funny that the money was there when the Conservatives needed the votes, though.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

May I tell my hon. Friend about Neil Thompson, a district nurse from Eastwood in my constituency? He has told me:

“I didn’t expect, after 40 years in the NHS, to be as poor now as when I first started out.”

How can that be just?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend is right to raise that point. It is not just, which is why the Labour party has consistently campaigned to get rid of the cap. The Conservatives have voted against getting rid of it when we have brought motions on this issue to the House.

Given that the Government are now briefing that the cap is being abandoned, I trust that they will accept the motion in the name of the Leader of Opposition and myself and not divide the House later today. If they are indeed abandoning the cap, let us put them on notice that it must apply to the whole public sector, including the 55% of workers not covered by pay review bodies. We also put them on warning that we will not accept a divide-and-rule approach that plays one set of public workers off against another. Nor will we let Ministers get away with presenting below-inflation pay offers as amounting to a fair pay rise when that is still, in effect, a pay cut.

National Health Service Funding

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I have given way to the right hon. Gentleman. [Interruption.] He can check Hansard tomorrow.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that when funding is cut, our hospitals seek to raise cash in other ways, such as the unacceptable level of car parking charges at our hospitals—charges which the Government promised before the last election to clamp down on?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend is running a brilliant campaign on that. I hope that when the Minister responds, he will reply to that point.