Diabetes: Tailored Prevention Messaging
Debate between Karen Buck and Keith Vaz(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Ms Karen Buck (in the Chair)
Order. I gently encourage the right hon. Gentleman to stay within the topic.
Keith Vaz
I will. I hope that was not related to my mentioning George Osborne. We want to thank him for introducing the sugar tax, which has made a huge difference. Sugar in soft drinks has gone down by 28.8%, which is a huge achievement.
We have all praised the great Jonathan Valabhji, but I also want to mention the work of Partha Kar, who only this morning set right the statement by Mr Paul Hollywood on “The Great British Bake Off”, who said that one of the dishes looked like “diabetes on a plate”. I am sure he meant it as a joke, but for type 1s it was a real surprise that someone should speak like that. We desperately need structured education. We have all talked about the three hours of care, but there are 8,757 other hours.
In a few days’ time, we will be launching in Leicester the diabetes log book by the Leicester physician Dr Domine McConnell. I hope the Minister will spare some time to come and read it and perhaps launch it with us. It will give patients a better understanding of how they can record and monitor information. They can keep it with them and take all their readings wherever they go. Far too often, when I visit my GP I cannot remember my last HbA1c reading, and I need to make sure that is done. I realise that it can be done on a phone, but not everyone is able to do that.
My last plug for Leicester before I end is about the pilot that has been put together by the chair of the clinical commissioning group, Dr Azhar Farooqui, and Sue Lock, its retiring chief executive. It allows, on a Thursday, all diabetics to go to the Merlyn Vaz Health and Social Care Centre in Leicester. It is a very important initiative. People can have their feet looked at, their eyes looked at, their blood tested, their lifestyle dealt with—all the things they need to do, on one morning in one place. The opportunity to put that together makes a great difference.
Ms Karen Buck (in the Chair)
Earlier, I was advising the right hon. Gentleman not to stray in terms of breadth, not in terms of length.
Keith Vaz
Well, I will go on longer, then—excellent! That makes me feel much better.
I hope the Minister will come and visit the Merlyn Vaz Health and Social Care Centre. People like me and the hon. Member for Strangford have to go to eight different professionals to have our diabetes checked. In one visit on one morning in Leicester, people can have it all done, from the top of their head to their feet and everything in between—they can get it all tested.
I will end with an anecdote; I was going to end, Ms Buck, because the House has heard enough from me. I recently saw a film—the hon. Member for Strangford will like this, because it was about the Beatles, and people of our general age will remember them—called “Yesterday”, directed by Danny Boyle. It was about how the internet went down on a particular day, and references to the Beatles disappeared, so nobody knew about them. Nobody knew their songs or who they were. When they typed in “Beatles”, they just got a beetle on the screen.
There is a scene in that film when somebody turns to another person and says, “I’m going outside to have a cigarette.” The person says, “What’s a cigarette?” because the cigarette had disappeared from the internet along with the Beatles. No one could remember it. When we introduced the smoking ban, it had a profound effect on cancer issues. We want to ensure that diabetes is reversed for type 2s and that we are able to manage and help those with type 1. We start that with a war on sugar and changing the way we live. Working together, I think the House can achieve that.
Gangs and Serious Youth Violence
Debate between Karen Buck and Keith Vaz(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Ms Buck
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. I do not want to go into the causes because they have been well set out and time is pressing, but she is right about the lack of understanding of the consequences of violent behaviour. A community group in my constituency ran a campaign called “fear and fashion”, which encapsulates the story perfectly. People are frightened, and “fashion” refers to people knowing that these things are going on in the community and considering them to be normal.
Every single incident, even non-fatal ones, is a tragedy that has ramifications and an impact on communities.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
My hon. Friend will know, as a former member of the Home Affairs Committee, that the Committee conducted an inquiry into this—I think she was a member at the time. Given the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), is it not important to revisit some of the conclusions because some of the knowledge is already there and just needs to be revisited and acted on?
Ms Buck
My right hon. Friend is right. As we have heard, there are changes in the way in which gang and serious youth violence is working itself out, but constants remain, and we need to learn from that experience.
Some positive things are going on in the work that community organisations do. I do not often praise Westminster council, but I do when it deserves it, and it has a gangs unit that includes excellent staff, who work intensively with young people. Redthread community organisation works out of four accident and emergency units and tries to catch young people at what it describes as a “teachable moment”, when injury has been inflicted and young people can learn from it.
There is therefore much that is good, but I am going to break a little with consensus by saying how much we are in danger of losing at the very point when we need to gain. I am deeply worried about the crisis in our youth offending institutes, which are ridden with extreme gang violence. The more the cost pressures bite in the youth justice sector, and the more the overcrowding in our prisons and youth offending institutes, the more dangerous the situation becomes. That is at a time when we are spending £138,000 a year in Medway to keep a young person in one of those units. In Feltham, we are spending £69,000 a year. That is kind of money we spend to lock up a young person—obviously not only for gang and serious youth violence—yet we are doing something dreadful: we are removing the investment that is necessary to prevent that behaviour.
I am horrified by my local council, which is not alone, because it is withdrawing all funding from its youth service. If we are talking about intervention and catching young people at a teachable moment, the youth service is critical. My hon. Friend the Member for Streatham made a point about youth workers and the continuity and expertise that they provide in the community. They are critical and we are losing them.