Financial Education

Debate between Justin Tomlinson and Claire Perry

Thursday 15th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution. Let me be clear. Everyone has individual circumstances, priorities and challenges, and what one member of the public thinks is the right thing to do might be different to what the next person thinks. For me, the driving force is the idea that we have a duty to equip people to make informed decisions so that they can understand the implications of what they are doing and therefore do the very best according to their own priorities and circumstances. As we find in our debates, however, all too often people are not in a position to do that. MPs often end up referring to our casework because time and again we see people who have made wrong decisions not necessarily through any fault of their own, but because they did not have the skills to make the right decisions. Indeed, Citizens Advice has highlighted that 60% of its work is finance-related.

We have a competitive market and the Government have been encouraging people to take advantage of competition within the energy market. We say to people, “Go and shop around and look at energy tariffs,” but the market is incredibly complex and people need to be clued up if they are to be savvy consumers. I recently attempted to look at energy tariffs, but they are not all like for like, so consumers need a good level of skills to unravel that complicated market and seek out the best deal.

Another reason why I am passionate about this subject is that my generation could be pretty rubbish at handling money. We could go to university, drum up huge amounts of debt, including expensive debt on credit cards, and then secure our first graduate jobs—in my time that was relatively easy to do—get on to the housing ladder with a 100% or 100%-plus mortgage and watch house prices increase. When we had learned the error of our ways, we could reconsolidate our mortgage, pay off all our expensive debts and carry on, but that option will not be available to the next generation. As things stand, it is very difficult to get into the housing market and there is no guarantee that house prices will rise so that one could take advantage of that should one get on to the housing ladder. It is harder for young people to get credit and harder for people to correct any mistakes they may have made.

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

I commend my hon. Friend, who is a near neighbour, and all the MPs involved in this issue—this is the House of Commons working at its best. Does he agree that this is a big issue for women and girls, who are often the particular target of very expensive consumer demands, such as, “You must have this big handbag,” or “You must buy these incredible clothes”? I think we do our young women and girls a real disservice in this area. Not only do we not educate them about finance but we encourage them to borrow and spend as much as possible.

[Justin Tomlinson]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point. This is part of the problem. We want people to be equipped to make informed choices and also to be savvy consumers who understand how to get the best for their money.

I want to say a little about how we got to today’s debate. Just over a year ago, I innocently asked a parliamentary question calling for greater financial education within our schools. I was then contacted by the national charity, the Personal Finance Education Group, which told me when we met that it had been campaigning on this subject for 10 years. Its representatives said, “That was a very good question. Would you like another 30 to ask?” for which I was very grateful. I submitted those questions, which made me look very intelligent. I was then contacted by Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert.com, who said, “Can I come and meet you? I’m very impressed by the 31 questions you’ve now asked on this subject. You sound very knowledgeable and I’d like to get behind you.” We decided between us that I alone could not champion this cause and that we should launch an all-party parliamentary group. Following a little gentle persuasion from the 6 million subscribers to MoneySavingExpert.com, MPs keenly queued into a very busy Jubilee room. We clocked up a staggering 225 Members from different parties, making us the largest such group.

At that point, we were tempted to go and knock on the Minister’s door, offer him a cup of tea and some biscuits and talk about how overwhelmingly we were supported by people, but we knew that the Minister is often contacted by people championing worthy causes. I have called for basic cookery and life-saving skills to be taught in schools so I have been guilty of making lots of requests of the national curriculum. We thought that instead we would be patient and launch a constructive and positive eight-month inquiry so that when we met the Minister and said, “This is our worthy cause,” we would have answers to all the questions that could be raised.

The inquiry was chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole who, despite having been called a supply teacher by the Prime Minister, has an extensive knowledge of a variety of roles within schools. We conducted a significant amount of research. More than 900 teachers responded, telling us what is happening, and what they think could and should happen. More than 50 relevant organisations met us, face to face, in oral sessions. We set ourselves up as a mini-Select Committee. We heard from organisations from the banking sector, financial institutions, teachers unions, financial education providers, the Financial Services Authority and the Money Advice Service. We heard from mathematicians so intelligent that the lights in the room started to flicker. We are extremely grateful for the support given by Carol Vorderman, who had previously been commissioned by the Conservative party when it was in opposition to look into mathematics standards. She was ably supported by Roger Porkess and Stella Dudzic, who wrote the mathematical example questions in our report.

We met representatives of the personal, social and health education sector, and we also talked to young people themselves because if we championed this cause but young people did not wish to engage, it would be a flawed campaign. We were overwhelmed by their support. In particular, I thank Katie Emms and Alex Harman, who took part in the oral sessions, but who on Monday, promoting our launch, got banned by Twitter for tweeting rather too enthusiastically about how good our 52-page report is.

Minor Injuries Services (Devizes)

Debate between Justin Tomlinson and Claire Perry

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Westminster Hall

[Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)]

I am grateful to you, Mr Streeter, for chairing the debate. I believe that your constituency is also devoid of minor injuries units, so you might pay particular attention to the debate. I am also grateful to colleagues, including my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), for taking time out of their hectic schedules to attend. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), who, as many will know, worked selflessly on the judicial review that resulted from the shutdown of services at Savernake hospital. If I had a pound for every time I was told during my selection campaign, “If Guy Opperman was standing, you would not stand a chance,” I would be a very rich woman today. Thankfully, we have both made it to this place and can campaign together on this and other important topics.

I am also especially grateful to the Minister for attending, as I know that the launch of his team’s momentous proposals yesterday means that he must have an extremely long “to do” list. I would also like to mention briefly my local paper, the Gazette and Herald, which is a tireless campaigner against the loss of our local health services, as well as the hundreds of other individuals in the constituency who have protested, petitioned, written letters, held meetings and tried their best to roll back the tide of closure and service erosion.

I want to mention briefly the DASH2 group—Devizes Action to Save Our Hospital—and the new Devizes health matters forum, which was set up only this month to try to resolve the impasse we have reached. I will also mention the CASH group—Community Action for Savernake Hospital—which fought long and hard to keep open the day hospital and the minor injuries unit at Savernake hospital in Marlborough. That hospital was completely rebuilt in 2005 under a PFI contract that will cost taxpayers almost £70 million over 25 years, but the services at its core—the day hospital and the minor injuries unit—closed less than a year after it reopened. The hospital now hosts a multitude of services completely unrelated to local health care, such as the eating disorders clinic for patients of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire mental health partnership, while Wiltshire primary care trust scrambles to pay its unitary charges.

For my constituency, which is the 25th largest in England by land area and home to more than 91,000 people, the past 13 years of NHS management has meant multiple top-down initiatives, a continual reshuffling of priorities and the management of local health services by quangos. The result is clear: a slow and steady erosion of our local health services, despite the protests of clinicians, patients and politicians. Let me refresh people’s memories of what we have lost. In the Devizes hospital, the UNICEF award-winning maternity unit, the in-patients’ facilities, the minor injuries services and now the X-ray department have all gone. In Marlborough, the day hospital, the maternity unit, the minor injuries facilities and now 50% of in-patient beds have also gone. That pattern has been replicated throughout the rest of Wiltshire as services have been farmed out to neighbourhood or community teams—they can deliver good outcomes in some cases, but not all—or concentrated in larger hospitals in Swindon, Bath and Salisbury.

In January 2007, Wiltshire PCT set out its vision for services in the now infamous document “Reforming community services in Wiltshire”, which announced the closure of minor injuries units in Devizes and Marlborough and the axing of a host of other services, which was driven in large part by the burgeoning financial deficit that the PCT had inherited after the merger of three other organisations. In my view, the loss of reliable local minor injuries services was the most keenly felt of all the changes. My constituents literally have nowhere to go locally if they suffer a fall, cut, wound or some type of minor trauma. Nurse practitioner-led minor injuries units had served the constituency well for years. They were well used, cost-effective in comparison with sending patients to far more high-spec accident and emergency departments, and extremely popular. Indeed, with the exception of the head of the PCT, I could find no one—literally not one person—who though that it was a good decision to close those minor injuries units and ask people to travel instead to Trowbridge, Chippenham, the Great Western hospital or a walk-in centre in Swindon, the Royal United hospital in Bath or Salisbury district hospital.

My constituency ranks among the 20 lowest by population density in England, with only 20 people per hectare. Members who have visited Devizes—I hope that many will—will know that there are almost no dual carriageways, no railway connections between our major towns and few direct bus services. As a result, there are extended journey times, which is particularly problematic for families or individuals without full-time access to private transport, who account for 25% of the people in Devizes.

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way in this crucial debate that she has secured for Wiltshire residents. I want to highlight a concern that supports her specific point about public transport. When the Great Western hospital in Swindon was set up in my constituency, there was an emphasis on green travel, so there was a limit on parking provision. The residents of Devizes who are sent to Swindon almost invariable come by car, and there simply is not adequate parking provision.

[Claire Perry]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important point. We have built hospitals following the sound principle of encouraging local travel and walk-ins, but the major service review forgot that most bus services do not run to the existing services from the places where minor injuries services used to be provided. In fact, it is impossible to take a bus from Marlborough to any of the six suggested units for minor injuries services.

I was interested to learn what the current PCT guidance recommends, so last night I phoned NHS Direct and asked what I was to do if I had a bad cut and lived in Pewsey, which, as many will know, is in the centre of my constituency and, as home to around 4,000 people, one of the largest villages in the area. I was advised to go to Swindon hospital’s A and E unit, which is considered to be a journey of only 16 miles. However, as we know, the concept of “as the crow flies” does not give a good indication of distance in rural constituencies. In fact, a simple search on Google maps reveals that that journey takes between 38 and 46 minutes by private car, which is far too long for a mother of a child with a bleeding head wound, or the carer of an older person with a fracture that needs immediate attention.

Let us consider the journey that the residents of Honeystreet, a lovely village in the heart of my constituency, would be advised to take to get to the nearest service. By private car, it would take them 37 minutes to get to Chippenham hospital, or 40 minutes to Trowbridge hospital. In fact, there is only one other constituency with a lower population density and no minor injuries provision: South West Norfolk. Most of the other spread-out rural constituencies are blessed with more than one such unit. Indeed, they trumpet their facilities as being appropriate for populations in a rural area. North Devon has four units, Rutland and Melton has three, and the nearby constituency of The Cotswolds also has three units. Those constituencies all have population densities that are similar to or slightly lower than that of Devizes.

We might all be asking how the situation has arisen. I submit that it is because decisions about our local health care have been taken by decision makers who were unelected and unaccountable, and often uninterested in the local consequences of their actions. It was not because they were bad, malicious or unintelligent—there are many good and dedicated health care professionals in the PCT—but because the whole system rewarded top-down compliance with central Government diktat and ignored the needs and wishes of the population. Indeed, when I went to see the head of Wiltshire PCT only last week about the proposals in the White Paper that we have heard about, he said that he had no intention of reopening the minor injuries units that we have lost and that there was no case for doing so. I would like the Minister’s opinion of whether a case can be made for those services.

I would like to cite four facts to frame the debate. The population in my constituency, as is the case across much of rural Britain, continues to grow. There is a population flow from the cities to the villages and hamlets of the UK. The population in my constituency has increased by 5% since the turn of the decade. Indeed, part of the support for the redevelopment of Savernake hospital resulted from the prediction of 20% population growth in the Swindon area.

The Alberti report “Emergency Access”, which was published by the NHS in 2006, suggested that it was better clinically and more cost-effective to send patients out of A and E departments and into local urgent care centres where more nurses, paramedics and nurse-led emergency care practitioners could be used to treat them. I am grateful to the PCT for providing data showing that, in the past year, there have been 17,086 attendances by patients registered in my constituency at the minor injuries units in Trowbridge and Chippenham, and the A and E departments in Salisbury and Bath. As I have already stated, the journeys that people have to take to access those facilities are unacceptable. The cost of providing the services at the current tariff is £1.352 million.

With our new localism agenda, and given the cost that the PCT is paying for minor injury services for my constituents, surely a business case could be made for restarting a minor injury service in the constituency, as long as the total cost was below the current tariff. Some doctors in Devizes and Marlborough have expressed an interest in restarting the service and having it delivered by nurse practitioners located in their practices. Premises are certainly available in which the service could be located, including the half-empty and shuttered Savernake hospital.

Will the Minister tell us how, in the light of our NHS reforms, we can move the process forward? The current PCT, which will be in existence for at least another two and a half years, has no interest in recommissioning the service, so can we go around it in the interim period and use sustainable communities legislation, for example, to get back those services that we so desperately need?