Mental Health Treatment and Support

Debate between Liz Twist and Neil O'Brien

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)]

The Minister is talking about the mental health strategy now being part of the major conditions strategy. Is he aware that many mental health organisations see it as a retrograde step that, having conducted an extensive consultation and invited views, the strategy will now be put back even further?

[Neil O’Brien]

I assure the hon. Lady that all contributions were fed into the major conditions strategy process. The reason why we are making the mental health strategy part of the major conditions strategy, and why we are looking at co-morbidities, is because, as the hon. Member for Tooting mentioned, people with mental health conditions have a shorter lifespan and, in general, the cause is typically a physical co-morbidity. It is essential that we look at these things together if we are to make progress on tackling disparities.

We have committed to publishing a new national suicide prevention strategy later this year, and we are engaging widely across the sector to understand what further action we can take to reduce cases of suicide. The new strategy will reflect new evidence and the national priority for preventing suicide across England, including action to tackle known risk factors and targeted action for groups of concern. We are also providing an extra £10 million over the next two years for a suicide prevention voluntary, community and social enterprise grant fund. This competitive grant fund will help to support the sector to deliver activity that can help to sustain services to help meet increased demand for support and to embed preventive activity that can help to prevent suicide and stem the flow into crisis services.

[Liz Twist]

Of course it is good that we will have a refreshed national suicide prevention strategy, and of course £10 million is welcome, but it is not out there yet. In the meantime, the £57 million that was earmarked for local work on suicide prevention has run out. Will the Minister consider making urgent interim arrangements to ensure that this vital work can continue until the strategy is published?

[Neil O’Brien]

I am conscious that we need to help the sector to maintain and grow its levels of service.

I finish by paying tribute to all those who do so much to support people’s mental health: frontline NHS staff, those working in the voluntary community and social enterprises, and all those who are quietly supporting a family member or loved one.

National No Smoking Day

Debate between Liz Twist and Neil O'Brien

Thursday 9th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Neil O’Brien)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for securing this important debate. He spoke brilliantly, marshalling his argument and speaking from terrible personal experience. I thank him for not just his speech, but his advice more generally. I thank other Members for their thoughtful contributions. The hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mary Glindon) made an important point about the huge potential of vaping to help people stop smoking because it is much safer, but we must balance that against the important point made by the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) about the need to prevent non-smokers, particularly children, from starting vaping. The hon. Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist) made an important point about the regional and local impact of smoking, and its negative impact on levelling up. She is quite right. I notice that the north-east is well represented here today, as well as north London. I thank all hon. Members for their contributions.

Yesterday was No Smoking Day, which presents a timely opportunity to have this conversation. Since I spoke at the last Commons debate on a smokefree 2030 in November, adult smoking rates in England have gone down to 13%, an all-time low. That continues the downward trajectory in smoking rates over the past few decades, moving from 45% in the 1970s to 20% in 2010 to 13% now. As several hon. Members have pointed out, our efforts to reduce smoking are a public health success story and are widely recognised as some of the most comprehensive in the world.

In 2021-22, we invested £68 million in local authority stop smoking services through the public health grant, and nearly 100,000 people quit with their support last year. I am proud to say that we have recorded more than 5 million successful quits since stop smoking services were established across England in 2000. That is 5 million lives that have been saved or improved as a result of quitting smoking.

Last year alone, the NHS invested £35 million in tobacco-dependency treatment. The NHS has committed to ensuring that all smokers admitted to hospital are offered NHS-funded tobacco treatment services. Pregnant women are routinely offered a carbon monoxide test, which is used to identify smokers and to refer them to support to quit. National campaigns, such as Stoptober, have helped 2.1 million people to quit since their inception in 2012.

We have introduced a range of impactful smoke-free legislation, such as that referred to by the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), including the ban on smoking in cars when children are present, plain packaging on cigarette packs and display bans, and raising the age for the sale of tobacco from 16 to 18. There are many more initiatives, and the legislation has been a cross-party effort. All those measures have contributed to reducing smoking rates overall, particularly among children. In 2021, just 1% of 11 to 15-year-olds were regular smokers, which is the lowest rate on record, although that is still, of course, much too high.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East said that we have to go further and faster, and he is absolutely right. Smoking is still the leading preventable cause of health disparities, premature disability and death. There is an economic cost to smoking that puts a huge direct drain on household finances, as hon. Members have pointed out, and has a wider impact on productivity taxation and our wider economy. Tragically, two out of three smokers will die from smoking unless they quit.

Smokers are 36% more likely to be admitted to hospital, and the cost to the NHS is huge. The average smoker needs social care 10 years before a non-smoker, so the cost to social care is huge, too. That is why tackling smoking is central to our forthcoming major conditions strategy, which takes the place of the previous strategy mentioned by the hon. Member for Blaydon. Smoking and other causes of preventable ill health will be central to that strategy.

[Liz Twist]

Will the Minister clarify whether the tobacco control plan will come within the major conditions strategy?

[Neil O'Brien]

I will hopefully reassure the hon. Lady on that point shortly. I was saying that tobacco and tobacco control will be threaded through the major conditions strategy, but I will come to our specific plans to control smoking in a moment.

The major conditions strategy will look at cancers, cardiovascular disease, stroke and diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, dementia—which has been mentioned several times today—and mental ill health. Smoking is a contributor to all those major conditions. Put simply, it makes all of them worse. It increases the risk of heart disease, heart attack and stroke, often disabling people for years. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East mentioned, the theme for No Smoking Day this year is dementia and how stopping smoking protects brain health.

If smoking disappeared, the great majority of cancers would disappear for a large proportion of our population. More than 70% of lung cancer cases in the UK are linked to exposure to tobacco smoke. There is even a connection between smoking and diabetes. Cigarette smoking is one of the most important modifiable risk factors for type 2 diabetes. All these risks, across all these different conditions, can be changed by one lifestyle modification.

As many hon. Members have highlighted, last year the Government asked Dr Javed Khan to undertake an independent review to help to meet the smokefree 2030 ambition and reduce the devastation that smoking causes. My hon. Friend asked when we will set out our response. In the coming weeks, I will unveil a set of proposals to realise the smokefree 2030 ambition and to respond to the Khan review’s recommendations.

I thank hon. Members for their patience. Although I cannot divulge the specifics of the proposals at this time, I assure hon. Members that they are grounded in the best evidence on reducing tobacco use and its associated harms. They are bold, innovative and ambitious, and we have carefully considered the Khan review’s recommendations as part of the process. I look forward to the opportunity to share more details with hon. Members very soon and to set out more details of our road map to a smokefree 2030.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Liz Twist and Neil O'Brien

Wednesday 29th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)]

There are five excellent bids from across Scotland for the two proposed green freeports. Each of the bids is of such high quality that it would be a great shame not to support the local economies in Inverness and Cromarty, Orkney, the Forth, the Clyde, and Aberdeen City and Peterhead. Will the Minister’s Department consider what support can be given to unsuccessful areas, and whether that support can be widened?

[Neil O'Brien]

We will certainly look at that. Of course there is intense competition for the freeports, which will create huge benefits not only for the local area, but for all of Scotland.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Liz Twist and Neil O'Brien

Monday 29th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. Yes, the Government are providing approximately £1.6 billion in additional grant funding in the LGDEL— local government departmental expenditure limit— each year. That follows year-on-year real-terms increases for local government since the 2019 spending review. It will allow councils to increase spending on vital public services such as social care. We will set out more details in the upcoming provisional local government finance settlement later this year.

[Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)]

16. What his Department’s timescale is for responding to the consultation on raising accessibility standards for new homes which closed in December 2020.