The Arts: Health Effects

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Wednesday 11th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Dorries. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) on securing this debate.

Moving directly on to a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero), the all-party group’s excellent report highlights the inequality in access to the arts. One of the difficulties is that people who suffer from other social inequities are precisely the ones who are least likely to be able to access the arts. At one point, the funding was run so that there was 14 times as much per person in London as there was in the regions. I know it has improved, and I hope the Minister can tell us how it has improved, but it is still not enough. That is an important point.

I also highlight the work of the fantastic Auckland Castle project in my constituency. At the moment, they are running a summer night show, with a phenomenal 1,500 people participating, all of them volunteers. It would have been good to have measured the wellbeing of the people before the project began and again at the end. If there are any academics listening to the debate, I urge them to come to Bishop Auckland and measure where people are at the beginning and at the end of the summer season. The people who are involved tell me that they feel on a real high, they get a lot out of it and there is a lot of community building, and I am sure that the improvements in wellbeing are measurable.

Finally, I will say something about the report’s proposals on training for people in healthcare. That relates particularly to the needs of people with Alzheimer’s and the extent to which they can benefit from music. It is all very well for people doing PhDs or hospital consultants to understand this, but what is really important is that the people who work with elderly, frail people day by day get the training. I am concerned about that, having seen it with my mother, who had Alzheimer’s, and my father-in-law. It is the people who make the food, who wipe their bums and who get them up in the morning who also need to understand that wellbeing goes beyond the physical and into the emotional. I strongly agree with what the right hon. Member for Wantage said about also receiving a response from a Health Minister. Perhaps a Health Minister could write to the hon. Members taking part in today’s debate.