G8 Summit on Dementia

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

I welcome you to the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, as this is the first time I have spoken since you were elected. I also warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch), my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) and the right hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow) on securing this really important debate. I am sorry that some Members have not had more of a chance to speak, because I know that they feel passionately about the subject.

Like other hon. Members, I welcome the G8 summit on dementia. It is important to be hosting the first summit dedicated to dementia when countries are facing so many other issues. It is also right because the ageing population, which includes an increasing number of people with dementia, is one of the biggest immediate and long-term challenges facing both this country and the world. Dementia already affects more than 800,000 people in the UK and that figure is set to rise to 2 million by 2050. It is estimated that more than 115 million people worldwide will be living with dementia in 40 years’ time.

Anyone whose family has experience of dementia will know how devastating the condition can be. It is therefore right that the G8 summit and the Prime Minister’s dementia challenge seek to boost national and international efforts on clinical research. Developing effective drugs and treatments is essential if we are to offer hope to people that something can be done about this terrible disease.

If we are going to address the challenge of dementia, we must face up to the equally important challenge of improving the quality of dementia care. We need to ensure that we do not neglect research into the support and services that aim to prevent the onset of dementia in the first place, which was something that many hon. Members spoke about. Although there is no certain way to prevent dementia, we know that a healthy lifestyle can lower people’s risk of getting not only dementia, but lots of other diseases, when they get older. Eating well, exercising regularly and stopping smoking may not grab the headlines in the same way as discovering a new job, nor attract research funding from institutions and companies, but ultimately they will be key to meeting the dementia challenge in the future. I hope that we will one day have a G8 summit on precisely those issues.

I want to focus my brief comments on the crucial matter of the quality of dementia care because, for my constituents and for people in my family and my friends’ families, the quality of care they receive, and the problems they have with it, represent the biggest challenge. People with dementia and their family carers are clear about what makes good dementia care. They want joined-up services and support so that they do not have to battle different parts of the system. They want care that is personalised to their individual needs. The vast majority of people with dementia want to stay living independently in their own homes for as long as possible, and families want to help to look after their loved ones as long as they get the right help and support.

Like many hon. Members, I have seen lots of inspiring examples of people working to improve care for people with dementia: day centres that provide stimulating activities such as gardening, cooking, singing and music; care homes that understand that they have to ask the families of people with severe dementia what kind of care and support they need, because those people’s memory has been taken from them; hospitals that involve families by asking them what food and activities their relative wants and needs; and, crucially, higher education institutions such as the university of Worcester, which I recently visited and is transforming staff training by getting patients to interview people who want to be student nurses, and then to develop and actually give the course, because how can NHS and social care staff know what dementia patients really need if they have not been trained in the first place?

Our loved ones will not get the quality of care we all want for them within a malnourished and depleted social care system. In fact, I think that the growing crisis in social care is the biggest threat to people suffering from dementia and the largest challenge we face. Council budgets have been under pressure for many years, but almost £2 billion has been cut from local authority budgets for older people’s social care since the Government came to power. Fewer people are getting the up-front care that they need to stay living at home. Home care visits have been shortened to barely 15 minutes, which is not enough time to get a vulnerable person with dementia up, washed, dressed and fed.

Care workers do an incredibly important job, but they are struggling. They are not paid even the minimum wage, let alone the living wage, and they are employed on zero-hours contracts. That is bad not just for people with dementia, but for taxpayers, because if those with dementia do not get the help and care they need so that they can live at home, they end up in residential or hospital care, which costs taxpayers more.

I want to ask about the Government’s plans because it is important that we are clear about them. I am sure that the Minister will talk about their plan to integrate services, but I want to echo a point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles. The integration transformation fund is not new money, but existing resources of £1.9 billion from clinical commission groups, with the rest coming from existing local council budgets. I think that £3.8 billion is a really unambitious amount of funding in the context of a total NHS and social care budget of £120 billion. We need the far bigger and bolder response of the full integration of NHS and social care budgets if we are to meet the challenge of our ageing population and dementia.

The G8 summit and the Prime Minister’s dementia challenge are welcome—they build on the previous Government’s approach—but the challenge needs to focus on improving the quality of care and research into prevention. I echo the important point made by hon. Members about the need for a commitment to renew the previous Government’s national dementia challenge, which expires at the end of next year, and the Prime Minister’s dementia challenge, which ends in 2015. I hope that the Minister will give such a commitment so that we can have the long-term strategy across all areas that we desperately need.