Health and Care Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Hywel Williams and Karin Smyth

Committee stage
Tuesday 14th September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Karin Smyth]

I concur with the comments of the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire and my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North. The hon. Lady referenced the Black report, which first got me interested in working in the health service. I was shocked that, after all those years, the NHS had not improved the dreadful health inequalities that much of the population, including my own constituents, suffered. Here we are 40 years later, and we still have some really quite shocking health inequalities, even in the wealthy city of Bristol.

This is a really important point. We learned a lot in the pandemic, and hon. Members spoke about meeting their directors of public health recently. I have known my director of public health in Bristol for some 20 years because we have worked together over that period. I supported the movement of DPHs into local authorities. I think that was the right move, although the lack of funding that followed has made their job really difficult, and we have not made the improvements we should have made, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North outlined.

There is real enthusiasm among clinical and financial leaders for some of the movement in the Bill to bring organisations together in integrated care partnerships or ICSs—wherever we think the power will be—to look at population health. Financial directors I have talked to have said, “This is the direction we need to be going in. We need not to be looking just at our own institutions.” There is a will with the Government, but not including health inequalities is a major mistake. I appreciate that when they drafted this legislation, they were perhaps not thinking in that form, but a number of organisations have asked for that addition to be made.

The pandemic required us to talk closely to our clinical leaders, and it really educated people in individual specialties, who are not terribly knowledgeable about health inequalities—perhaps we think they should be. Even in terms of our understanding of where vaccines have been successful and unsuccessful, and how different communities receive information and engage with local health and care services, the pandemic has been a wake-up call and a good education for many of those leaders. We need to capitalise on that.

I know that drafters do not like to change things, but if we were to put addressing health inequalities in the Bill, as we seek to do, it would focus the Government’s drive on place-based commissioning and service delivery, and send a message to the powerful acute trusts—which at the end of the day run the money, and still will—that addressing health inequalities and looking at where and how their services are delivered to the most vulnerable will be a really positive outcome for the entire system. I therefore support the pursuance of the amendments.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

To encourage the Minister to accept the amendment, I point out that addressing health inequalities would coincide with the Government’s stated aim of levelling up, so there is a happy coincidence there that might persuade him. Health inequalities are reflected geographically, and large parts of the country clearly suffer from them more than others. That pertains to England, but were I standing in the Senedd in Cardiff, I would say the same about Wales. That is slightly off the point, but there we are.