Health and Care Bill

Lord Bichard Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard (CB)]

My Lords, I begin by welcoming, with others, the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, and congratulate him on his maiden speech. To use an analogy that I think he will understand, in my experience maiden speeches are like kidney stones: they are much better when you pass by them.

I too welcome the emphasis that the Bill belatedly places on collaboration, integration and partnerships, which is something that many of us have been seeking for a very long time and that I was personally associated with when leading the Total Place initiative more than a decade ago. We have been seeking this because none of the major issues that afflicts us can be resolved by a single public service—even one as large as the NHS. As your Lordships’ own Public Services Committee has stressed in its recent reports, better collaboration is critical to successfully addressing challenges such as obesity, diabetes and child safety. It is not just collaboration within the health service and between health and social care; it goes beyond that.

Let us be clear: we cannot legislate for collaboration, we cannot structure it into an organisation, we cannot impose it from the top down—as we have so often tried to do—and it does not happen with the flick of a switch. Ultimately, it depends upon the culture of the organisation. I have to say that, while so much about the NHS is positive, it has never in my experience been an exemplar of collaborative working, so turning the collaborative thrust of the Bill into reality will take a real effort. I hope that, as it progresses through the House, noble Lords will be able to make some amendments that make that more likely.

In other respects, I am afraid that I am less positive about the Bill as it stands simply because, as others have said, it seems to me to ignore so many of the health-related problems that we need to address urgently —whatever “urgently” now means. It does not, for example, tackle health inequalities, which have almost certainly worsened during the pandemic. The extent of these inequalities is a stain on our society—I am not exaggerating for effect—and others have mentioned Professor Michael Marmot, who has long sought to evidence this. Could we not at least incorporate this into the new triple aim, as the King’s Fund and others here today have suggested? We have heard a lot about levelling up, but, to be honest, it means nothing to me unless the health inequalities that we are experiencing are addressed.

While the Bill was described as a health and social care Bill, there is little of real substance about social care, and the proposed changes to the social care cap are regressive, as I think most people now accept. I shudder to think how my parents would have responded to these proposals. One of their proudest achievements was to own their own home, and they would have been devastated by the threat of losing that as a result of provisions like this. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, that this should be taken out of the Bill.

There is also nothing in the Bill to suggest that the importance of prevention and early intervention has been recognised—the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, touched upon this. The truth is that we are spending ever greater public resources on crises and ever less on prevention, not least in the way that we seek to improve the life chances of vulnerable children, for which the NHS has a major responsibility.

The extensive new powers given to the Secretary of State to intervene in local service reconfigurations, as drafted at the moment, fly in the face of the stated intent to give local places and communities greater power over local priorities. Surely there needs to be at least some stronger requirement in the Bill for local communities to be involved before such interventions are made.

There is nothing in the Bill to suggest, to me at least, that there is a real strategy for tackling current chronic staff shortages—or, indeed, for ensuring that users have a real say in the way that services are designed. We hear a lot about patient-centred care—the only way that you can achieve it is if patients and users are involved in the design of the services in the first place.

Finally, could we not resolve one of the greatest practical barriers to collaboration: the failure to share data effectively? Whenever you mention data, people switch off. It is really important. Part 2 of the Bill begins to address data sharing between adult social care and health, but, for reasons that I simply do not understand, it does not address the same issue where children are concerned.

As your Lordships’ Public Services Committee identified in its recent report on vulnerable children, this is a serious practical problem. I know that it has been at the heart of many of the most tragic child abuse cases over the last 50 years. Perhaps the Minister can say in replying why we have not taken this opportunity to address that practical barrier and whether he would be sympathetic to amendments which did. It is something which the DHSC and the DfE need to do together, and I hope they will.