Under-age Vaping

Debate between Jerome Mayhew and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster

Wednesday 12th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Kirsten Oswald]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. I would gently say that the hon. Lady has made a long contribution, and I do have two other speakers to get in. That is the only problem.

[Jerome Mayhew]

Thank you for that indication, Madam Deputy Speaker.

To wrap up my submissions, I will say that the Government are absolutely right to have put out a call for evidence. That evidence has now been obtained, last month, and the Government should take every second that is needed to assess it and come up with draft proposals, but not a second longer, because this is a very important issue. As a parent, I share the concerns that have been expressed across the House. We need to address this issue—we cannot waste time—but we should do so based on the evidence.

Labour Market Activity

Debate between Jerome Mayhew and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jerome Mayhew]

Right hon. Member: he is quite correct. It seems that we agree on the concept behind universal credit. When did he experience that damascene conversion?

The Government are providing extra help, not for the unions but for the young, the disabled and those who are termed “the old”—meaning those over the age of 50, which, in my view, is hardly old. For the young, we have halved youth unemployment. We have the kickstart scheme, which the right hon. Gentleman criticised earlier, saying that it did not help 250,000 people into employment. However, it did help 160,000 into employment, including many of my constituents. As for the disabled, 1.3 million more have been employed since 2017. For the old, we have the age-friendly employer pledge and the 50PLUS champions. This is a work in progress, but it shows the direction of travel of this dynamic Government.

More widely, we are boosting support for 600,000 people on universal credit by securing greater access to job coaches. It is this Government who have doubled the number of job coaches, increasing it by 13,500 to give more help to unemployed people wishing to get back into work. I have seen this lately in my constituency. The Jobcentre Plus in Fakenham does amazing work, and the staff say the job coaches are wonderful and do a fantastic job.

There is a great deal to do. There is, for instance, post-covid recovery. We are experiencing a reduction in economic activity, and that position needs to be improved, but I trust that this Government—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order.

Dental Training College: East Anglia

Debate between Jerome Mayhew and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster

Tuesday 11th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

It would be all too easy to focus any speech on dentistry on a call for the renegotiation of the NHS—[Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. Could colleagues leave quietly? Otherwise we will not be able to hear what the hon. Gentleman is saying.

[Jerome Mayhew]

As I was saying, it would be all too easy to focus any speech on dentistry on a call for the renegotiation of the NHS dental contract. Every Member of Parliament will know from their postbag the suffering that ordinary people are experiencing every day because they are simply unable to see a dentist.

The pandemic has caused the loss of 40 million dental appointments—more than an entire year’s worth of standard pre-covid treatment—but covid is not the cause of our problems. Ever since Labour imposed its NHS dental contract on the profession back in 2006, trouble has been brewing. Dentists have been voting with their feet, moving in their thousands away from NHS treatment into private work.

That trend has only accelerated through covid. Between the start of the pandemic and May 2022, 3,000 dentists have stopped doing any NHS work. Three quarters of those who are left say that they are likely to reduce their coverage further over the next year, so we simply cannot ignore the problem any longer. The pain and suffering are too great. Labour may have created this bad system, which fails to pay for the cost of complex work, but our job is to fix it, and the sooner the better.

The purpose of this debate, however, is not to moan about the state of NHS dental provision, but to put forward a positive case for solving the long-term problems in Norfolk and the east. Put simply, we have a desperate shortage of dentists of any description. Too few dentists and too few dental technicians—whether NHS or private—are choosing to work in East Anglia.

Nationally, the General Dental Council says that we have more dentists than ever before, with a national average of 43 for every 100,000 of the population, but in Norfolk and Waveney, that figure is just 38. That is the fifth lowest ratio of the 106 clinical commissioning groups around the country. Dental practices are crying out for new staff, but they simply cannot get them.

In the town of Fakenham in my constituency, I lobbied successfully for the NHS to award a brand-new NHS dental contract to increase local NHS provision. That was the Government being prepared to pour new money into increasing NHS provision. However, when that contract was advertised, not a single company bid for the work. There simply was not the staff to supply the need.

That is not just an NHS issue. In the same town, a private dental practice has been advertising for a private dentist for two years, but without success. In the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker), there is a dentist in Sheringham who operates practices both in London and Norfolk. He has not had a newly qualified dentist come to work in his Sheringham practice for 10 years. Job vacancies in London are snapped up, but he simply cannot get them to take the jobs in Norfolk.

Why can we not produce dentists in East Anglia? The answer is that there is nowhere for them to train. If someone who lives in East Anglia wants to become a dentist, the nearest place they can train is Birmingham or London. None of the 10 training facilities around England is in the east of England.

That has to change. We know from our experience with the University of East Anglia that graduates tend to stay and build their lives close to where they have studied. Each year, the UEA does a survey of its graduates to see where they go to accept their first employment. If we look at that survey for doctors coming through the medical school of the University of East Anglia, we see that more than 40% end up taking jobs locally every year. That is great for us in relation to doctors and particularly for the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, which is based in Norwich. Unfortunately, however, the same problem is true in dentistry.

Let us look at the number of dentists working near existing dental training schools. As I said, Norfolk has 38 dentists per 100,000 of the population. Devon is a broadly similar county—it is largely rural, with coastal communities and one major conurbation, Plymouth—but there is a big difference: Plymouth has a dental school, which was installed in 2005, and Devon’s ratio of dentists per 100,000 of the population is not 38, but 49.6. If we look at the north-east, where there is a school in Newcastle, we see that its ratio of dentists to the general public is 56 per 100,000 of the population. In Cheshire and Merseyside, there is a school in Liverpool, so the whole area benefits from 58 dentists per 100,000 of the population. We can see from the hard data that people tend to settle down where they have trained.

So if that is the data, surely the solution to East Anglia’s problems is obvious: first, we need to open a dental school in East Anglia. I raised that need directly with the University of East Anglia some months ago and I have been enormously encouraged and impressed by their response, strongly supported by the NNUH, the region’s training hospital. The University of East Anglia has developed an innovative solution to our dental training problems that would minimise cost and get students out into the workplace from the start of their training, helping with capacity in the short term and dealing with the training deficit in the long run.

Growing Back Better Report

Debate between Jerome Mayhew and Baroness Winterton of Doncaster

Thursday 25th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I remind Members that we must have short questions and answers, because we have two very well-subscribed debates this afternoon, and we only have 20 minutes put aside for this session, which means we have about five minutes left.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con) [V]]

I will do my best, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Committee’s report highlights the evidence from the Bank of England that we will need a carbon tax of about $100 per tonne by 2030 for a smooth transition of the economy to net zero. If we want to prevent large-scale offshoring of our industry and support the growth of low-carbon manufacturing here in the UK, we will need a scheme of carbon border adjustment. The EU and the USA are already working on this policy, which is both a good and a bad thing. Does my right hon. Friend agree that our presidencies of both the G7 and COP26 are an unmissable opportunity to lead an international approach to carbon border adjustment, rather than risk the imposition of piecemeal protectionist carbon barriers by individual trading blocs, with us on the outside?