Immunisation: Children

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Wednesday 8th May 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to address the decline in uptake of childhood immunisations.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Markham) (Con)]

NHS England’s 2023 vaccination strategy set a range of ambitions, including to improve uptake of children’s vaccines across the board. On mumps, measles and rubella in particular, between January and March the NHS and partners administered around four times as many MMR vaccinations to those aged five to 25 as last year and focused on engaging groups with historically lower vaccination rates. We intend to build on these experiences to further improve uptake.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

I thank the Minister for his reply and pay tribute to the NHS for its sterling work in this area. I have a couple of points. First, I wonder what consideration His Majesty’s Government have given to working with leaders of harder-to-reach groups, some of the smaller groups and some of the faith groups, where messaging can be more powerful when it is done by a local leader. Secondly, there is a worrying increase in the level of whooping cough. Indeed, I believe there has been a childhood death recently. Can the Minister update us on what is being done about this worrying development?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I thank the right reverend Prelate. First, I completely agree that using faith leaders is often a very good way to reach hard-to-reach communities, particularly as it is often ethnic-minority communities that have lower rates of vaccine uptake. Whooping cough has been a concern; we had about 850 cases in January 2024 compared with about 550 for the whole of 2023. We are deploying a number of strategies that have been proven to work in areas such as MMR: using outreach groups, having leaflets in 15 languages and having recall programmes. In the case of whooping cough, if we can get pregnant mothers vaccinated, that is 97% effective.

National Health Service: Key Targets

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Tuesday 16th January 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have in place to ensure the National Health Service meets its key targets.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Markham) (Con)]

The NHS has made progress against its targets, especially given the challenges of recovering from Covid-19, the changing demography and winter pressures. The Government recognise that there is still a way to go and are working non-stop to support the NHS to do better. I take this opportunity to thank all NHS staff for their hard work to improve performance this winter.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I would like to join in thanking NHS staff, who are doing a fantastic job. There are some structural problems here. In particular, I am concerned about ambulance response times, which are causing a great deal of concern despite the Government having increased the category 2 call response times from 18 minutes to 30 minutes. Category 2 calls deal with such life-threatening events as strokes and heart attacks, so this is deeply worrying. What are His Majesty’s Government doing to reduce the response time? Will they consider returning to the 18-minute response time for category 2 calls?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I agree with the basic point, as I am sure all noble Lords will, that ambulances are on the front line and are the most important service in all of this. That is why we have invested in 800 new ambulances, with over £200 million of funding. It is early days, but that is starting to take effect. Regarding the category 2 issue, we have managed to halve the time it takes since last year, but it is still too long and we absolutely need to make more progress in this area.

Mental Health: Children and Young People

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale, on her excellent maiden speech, and the noble Earl, Lord Russell, on securing this debate on an area of huge importance for all of us. As has been noted by many noble Lords already, and raised in the Question asked in the House by the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, on Tuesday, the omission of the mental health Bill from the King’s Speech has caused a great deal of worry and concern. It seems that we have time to debate pedicabs but not the urgent need for this review of our mental health provision.

With the number of children and young people being referred to mental health services increasing, alongside increasing waiting times for treatment, it is clear how urgent and pressing the reform of the Mental Health Act is. The Government have said that the Bill would be published when parliamentary time allows. I would argue that this is of the highest priority. Improved mental health in our young people and children—and the rest of the population, more broadly—would not only decrease the huge levels of suffering and anguish but bring immense economic benefits, saving taxpayers’ money and bringing more people into the workforce.

Mental Health Foundation research shows higher levels of unemployment and in-patient stays and a higher likelihood of contact with criminal justice for those with mental health problems. The annual mean cost to the public purse is 16 times greater for those with mental health problems. We on these Benches and Members in the other place can all agree that mental ill health is extremely costly for our nation. At the end of August 2023, 414,550 children and young people were in contact with children and young people’s mental health services and waiting times have increased, as have the number of children referred who do not end up ever receiving treatment. The scale of the problem is not the only concern. The quality of care, and the conditions under which our children and young people are being detained, urgently need to be rethought, according to the recommendations set out in the Health and Social Care Committee’s report, many of which the Government have accepted but which have not yet been implemented.

Given that over 50,000 people were detained under the Mental Health Act last year, there are clear arguments that reforming the Act needs to be a government priority. Concerns that the report raised included inappropriate use of restrictive practices and many children and young people facing long stays in adult wards, or, as we already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Allan, in wards far away from their homes where they are not being visited. I ask the Government to consider how traumatising these conditions must be for children and young people who are already mentally unwell enough to be admitted to a mental health care ward.

The Commons Health and Social Care Committee report comments:

“The use of restraint against children and young people can be humiliating and cause unnecessary distress”.


This is the case for any child or young person, let alone a child who is already extremely distressed and suffering from a mental health condition. I am sure that His Majesty’s Government are aware, having responded to this report, that the use of restrictive practices remains very high in children and young people’s mental health services, with the use of restraint on children and young people being on average five times the level of the adult equivalent. This is deeply worrying.

There are also deep injustices embedded in the implementation of the Mental Health Act, with black people four times more likely to be detained, and, in 2021-22, girls making up 71% of all children detained. We desperately need to address these problems to ensure that our staff and services are educated in trauma-informed practice and to ensure that we are not retraumatising these children and young people during their treatment.

Many of these issues could be addressed, as was recommended, by expanding the legal right to support from an independent mental health advocate to all children and young people. The Government accepted this recommendation in their 2021 mental health White Paper, but even then this was subject to future funding availability. Children’s rights expert, Kamena Dorling, highlights how serious these current conditions are. As it stands, we have mentally unwell children as in-patients who do not have the right to advocacy, and many of whom do not understand their rights and worry that they must do as they are told or they may end up being sectioned. She writes:

“There is a real question about whether we have a section of children who are unlawfully deprived of their liberty”.


This is a very serious and deeply worrying situation, and one that I hope the Minister will reflect on.

Finally, I will stray into a related area which no one has mentioned so far but on which I have been campaigning for a number of years. I want to comment briefly on some of the problems encountered due to the lack of regulation of online gambling and gaming. Some 60,000 to 62,000 young people in this country are classified as having a gambling disorder—according to law they should not even be gambling. If 60,000 to 62,000 young people have been diagnosed with these problems, how many are gambling? Presumably hundreds and hundreds of thousands, which shows the level of the problem that we are facing.

Of the 15 gambling clinics that have now been opened, funded by the NHS, at a time of huge financial constraints, 12 are facing huge waiting lists for people to get specialist treatment—they simply cannot access this treatment. Fortunately, the Government are now moving on the need for better regulation, but this really is needed to protect vulnerable young people. We have evidence that there are aspects of the gambling industry taking advice on how to produce games that are very addictive and encourage people to keep returning to them. If you talk to a family who have a teenager with a gambling addiction, they will tell you it can ruin the whole family. It is so compulsive that children can be stealing and lying to feed this devastating addiction.

I turn briefly to gaming. The WHO has classified gaming disorder as a mental health disorder. In 2019, the National Centre for Gaming Disorders opened a clinic in London, again funded by the very hard-pressed NHS, and 70% of the patients are under 18 years old. Noble Lords will have seen, as I have, a series of stories in the papers about the devastating damage that this is causing in families, where children really cannot tear themselves away from these, in some cases, highly addictive games. We need to support our world-leading, brilliant gaming industry—it brings a lot of pleasure which many people enjoy, so I am told—but there is, nevertheless, a downside, which urgently need regulation. Surely the gambling and gaming industry needs to pay a compulsory levy on the principle that the polluter pays. The industry has brilliantly privatised the profits and nationalised the costs. We as taxpayers are picking up the problem, and although this is a much smaller and niche problem, it is growing and we need to attend to it.

Polling shows that the population now ranks mental health as a more important issue than unemployment, industrial action and Brexit. Those under 40 rank it as more important even than climate change. I believe this shows that the public are telling the Government what their priorities are, and I hope His Majesty’s Government will listen. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply on many of these complex but deeply worrying issues.

Stroke Care

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I thank my noble friend. The NHS delivery plan set out in January 2023 was trying to set out the best practice in this area. It is then the job of the SQuIRe managers to make sure that that is implemented in each area. One example is that they are trialling having videos in ambulances in certain areas so that paramedics can speak to stroke experts. We all know that getting patients to the right place quickly is vital, so I hope that that is another example of best practice that we can roll out.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, these guidelines are very encouraging, and all who work on them should be congratulated. As we keep hearing, the essence is speed if we are to treat effectively, yet this is particularly difficult in rural areas, especially remote rural areas. What additional help is being given to integrated care boards’ care systems to ensure that our rural integrated care boards can deliver these guidelines, which are so vital?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

The job of each integrated care board and the regional SQuIRe managers within it is to make sure that they are catering for the needs of their area. Clearly, rural areas present more challenges in terms of speed of access to the relevant stroke services. At the same time, there has been a rollout of the integrated stroke networks that can perform the clot-busting treatments to make sure that we have more of them located in the right places.

Emergency Healthcare (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Thursday 20th July 2023 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, not only for chairing this committee and producing an excellent report but on now bringing it to your Lordships’ committee for us to debate. I declare my interest as president of the Rural Coalition and a vice-president of the LGA.

I associate myself with the noble Baroness’s concerns that a subject of such huge importance has so few people speaking on it. I understand the problems, but I encourage His Majesty’s Government, the Whips and so on to look at how we can give such topics the time they deserve.

I have long expressed my concern about healthcare in England, particularly in rural areas, so I read this report with great interest. I have seen the strain on emergency care in my own diocese of St Albans, which covers Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. In Hertfordshire, category 1 ambulance calls—those reserved for the most life-threatening injuries—were responded to in just under 12 minutes, on average, well above the national average of seven minutes.

Rural areas have always faced unique challenges in providing care and recruiting and retaining healthcare professionals to care for a predominantly older population. Of course, people who live in rural areas accept that geographical factors mean that it will be more difficult. However, a number of issues particularly associated with rurality make the problem more complex, not least connectivity. In many areas where people rely on mobile phones and there is no coverage, delivering emergency healthcare is even more challenging. I hope the Minister appreciates the profound emergency healthcare challenges faced by rural areas such as those in my diocese.

As the report highlights, it is important for us to recognise that pressures on emergency healthcare are both a cause and effect of the strain on health services across the board. They are a cause because we know that the longer people remain on waiting lists, the more likely they are to acquire co-morbidities that compound the original underlying health issue, often making treatment more complex; and they are an effect because patients often access emergency healthcare because they feel they now have no other avenues to treatment. The squeeze on healthcare services across the board, including preventive and community healthcare, manifests itself in the kind of pressures on emergency services outlined so accurately and precisely in this report.

The Government have rightly recognised the severity of the problem in the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan, which refers to the need to increase training and retention of staff rather than relying on international temporary recruitment. Statistics from the British Medical Association show that 40% of junior doctors are actively planning to leave the NHS as soon as they can find another job, and many are planning to work abroad within the next 12 months. We see a similar story for nurses: more than 40,000 left the NHS last year. With an ever-increasing workload and stagnating salaries, there is no doubting the reason why so many professionals are leaving our health service. We hear regular reports that British junior doctors are being offered packages in places such as Australia that pay more than double what they can achieve if they stay in this country.

Given the profoundly challenging circumstances in rural areas—an ageing population and problems such as connectivity for emergency workers—it is essential that the Government’s response helps to tackle them. Will the Minister assure us that the Government’s response will be properly and fully rural-proofed as we look at how we respond to it? The Government need to increase investment in people. The report rightly notes the immense difficulty and stress faced by those in the emergency care profession, compounded by shortages across the entire health service. If we cannot encourage our healthcare professionals to stay, then it seems that, unfortunately, they will vote with their feet, as so many are doing. How do the Government plan to compete with the generous packages being offered from overseas?

Then, there is the question of how we can do more joined-up thinking. I was particularly interested to hear what the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong, said about seeing through the whole process from start to finish and trying to work out how people move through the system, so that it can be done efficiently and effectively. Allied to that is the question of how the NHS and others are going to work with the third sector, with so many churches, community groups and medical charities being capable of offering non-urgent care support. We need to think about how we can relieve the pressure on emergency care described in the report, in order to ensure that patients get not just focused medical treatment but all the social support, friendship, follow-up and other things that add to the holistic approach to health. What discussions are His Majesty’s Government having with the third sector in this important area?

To conclude, I thank the noble Baroness and all those who worked on this committee and this report for this excellent and timely debate on emergency healthcare.

NHS: Allocation of Financial Resources

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Thursday 11th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

We are putting in record investment. Right now, we are spending about 12% of our GDP on health services; a few years ago, the figure was more like 7% or 8%, so there is record investment. I think the whole House would agree that how we use that investment is the most important thing. We have seen that certain hospitals have a 13% lower cost per patient treatment than others because of effective use of technology. That is where I want to see investment take place.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I welcome what His Majesty’s Government are doing to try to get on top of this very difficult problem. Will the Minister give us a little more information, particularly about ambulance services? In Hertfordshire, which is in my diocese, category 2 call-outs, for strokes and hearts attacks, should have an 18-minute response but the response is averaging two hours and six minutes at the moment. There is a great deal of anxiety among ordinary people when these things happen. When do we think that the money going to the ambulance service is going to bring response times down?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I am pleased to say that the figures announced today show that response times are coming down. For category 1, the most serious, we achieved the 15-minute target for 90% of calls. We are moving in the right direction, albeit there is a lot more that needs to happen in this space. That is what the investment in 800 new ambulances is about, as well as the £200 million of funding. Most importantly, it is about making sure we have the right services in place. Some 50% of ambulance calls do not result in a trip to the hospital. There are fall services, which are often best placed to help, which will pick people up in their home.

NHS: Gambling Treatment Services

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Monday 28th March 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the announcements that the NHS (1) will no longer accept money from GambleAware, and (2) is establishing two additional NHS gambling clinics to meet demand, what plans they have to agree a long-term independent funding settlement for NHS gambling treatment services.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Lord Kamall) (Con)]

In 2019, the NHS committed to establishing 15 specialist gambling clinics by 2023-24. Five clinics are now operational across England, with a further two to open by May. This rollout carries a budget of £15 million, including £6 million allocated for 2023-24. After this, NHS England will provide recurrent annual funding of £6 million. The Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England and NHS Improvement are currently undertaking a review to ensure there is a coherent pathway of advice and treatment for those experiencing gambling-related harm.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

I thank the Minister for his reply, but it is quite extraordinary that, at a time when the NHS is in such dire straits, with such financial pressures, we are picking up the costs incurred by an industry. This announcement has shown that far more resources are needed to deal with the outcome of problem gambling, and that the current voluntary levy is simply inadequate to provide the level of independent research, education and treatment that we need. Will the Government commit to introducing a compulsory levy of, say, 1% of gross gambling yield on the polluter pays principle, so that taxpayers are not picking up the huge bills being created by this problem that exists right across society?

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I thank the right reverend Prelate for his follow-up question and for raising the issue in the first place. He is absolutely right that we must think about this across government; DCMS leads the policy, but the Department of Health and Social Care is co-operating with it to look at the health issues. Gambling used to be considered a syndrome, but it is now recognised as an addiction. We are committing resources to it through our long-term plan, and will open 15 NHS specialist gambling clinics by 2023-24, with £15 million of funding over the period.

Integration White Paper

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her clarification and for notifying me earlier about the issue that she apologised for. One of the issues for us is that we want to make sure that if all the parts of the healthcare and social care systems are talking to each other, and there are accountable people, we hope that people will not fall through the cracks and that there is a multi-agency approach. It will be difficult to be overly prescriptive here, because what would work in one area might not work in another.

The point that the noble Baroness makes about training is critical. In many debates in this House, we have understood that we need to take the social care workforce seriously and give support to unpaid carers of whatever age, whether they are children or family members. Sometimes they are doing it because they do not want their loved ones to go into a home and sometimes they just need a bit of respite. We are looking at a number of issues around carers—first, unpaid carers but, secondly, making sure that being a carer is a rewarding career and is not seen as being at a lower level than, say, a nurse in the health service.

One reason for having a voluntary register, for example, is to understand the landscape and then put in place proper and different educational pathways, and other pathways, into care. Having national qualifications at levels 4, 5 and 6 and so on will show parity of esteem and that this is a worthwhile career. We have the Made with Care campaign to start to encourage more people back. We are looking at a number of different ways to make sure that carers are not just forgotten. If they work in care homes, that is fine, but we want to make sure that there is a real career structure for them, and also that they can move between health and social care, both ways. There may well be nurses or doctors who want to move across. We have to make sure that going from one place to another is not seen as disadvantageous in any way and that the system is truly joined up.

Of course, this is all top level and shows our ambition to integrate. We do not want to be overly prescriptive; decisions have to be made at place level.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and president of the Rural Coalition. I want to pick up very briefly on what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said about rural issues. It is disappointing that there are no explicit references to rural health. One of the concerns of the APPG on Rural Health and Social Care parliamentary inquiry was the way in which inappropriate data, metrics and funding formulas can disadvantage rural areas. National programmes are one thing, but when they are delegated to local areas how are we going to ensure that they are properly rural-proofed and will integrate both health and care?

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

It is important to stress once again that the key to this is that we cannot overly prescribe from here in Westminster and Whitehall. We must make sure that at whatever place, whether it is rural or urban, the people and patients who are cared for in the system are being understood. One reason why we want one person to be accountable, whether in urban or rural areas, is the fact that they must take responsibility for ensuring that all these things are joined up—not only health and social care as we understand them but technology, housing and all those other issues. I know that the right reverend Prelate and my noble friend Lady McIntosh have often raised this issue. We think that the proposal is flexible enough, whether in an urban or a rural area, to make sure that one person really understands the local area of integration.

Health and Care Bill

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Thursday 13th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to speak to this group of amendments, which I support; I am particularly delighted to speak to Amendment 156, as one of its co-sponsors. I very much support the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Young, who has highlighted the appalling health disparities faced by people who are the most socially excluded. I, too, ask the Government to recognise how amending the Bill in the way proposed would help them to realise their ambitions in this area.

We know that the level of ill health among people who would be considered under inclusion health is significant. We have heard the shamefully low average age of death for people experiencing homelessness in England and Wales. We also know that the life expectancy of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities is around 10 to 12 years fewer than that of the general population, although one study has found that this gap can be as high as 28 years. This disparity in life expectancy clearly demonstrates the devastating impact of extreme social exclusion.

It is clear to me that the health and social care system has a significant role to play in tackling the health inequalities experienced by these groups. These amendments would facilitate crucial progress towards that and encourage social enterprise involvement to reach the most socially excluded individuals. We have seen examples of this at the relatively new Plymouth dentistry school, where the training clinic has been set up as a social enterprise to serve some of the poorest people in Plymouth.

In relation to Amendment 156 in particular, we know that NHS services must be integrated with wider services to reflect how people’s lives work. A main aim of the Bill is integration, yet integration could not be more important for the groups that experience the most complex needs and require very effective, co-ordinated care. As I know from my time in nursing, there has been a historic lack of integration between housing, health and social care, yet housing is fundamental to reducing health inequalities. Without integration across these different systems, people will continue to develop acutely poor health.

People who experience social exclusion, and extreme health inequalities as a result, often fall through the gaps in the provision of primary and secondary care, mental health and substance misuse services, health and social care, and even health and wider systems, such as housing. For example, we know that people experiencing homelessness attend A&E six times as often as people with a home, are admitted to hospital four times as often, and stay three times as long. One study has found that homeless people attend A&E 60 times more than the general population. This has tragic results for the individual and also places incredible strain on our healthcare system.

We must act to alleviate the pressures on the NHS where we can. Severe and multiple disadvantage is conservatively estimated to cost society more than £10 billion a year. It is clear that the cost of doing nothing is too high, both to the individual suffering severe health inequalities and to the NHS. This amendment would help address these issues by ensuring that housing is considered by integrated care partnerships. It is non-mandatory, therefore speaking to the Government’s aims of enabling local decision-making and flexibility, but would ensure that partnerships think of the important role that housing plays by providing a stable place from which people can then engage with wider health services. A wide range of expert organisations are supportive of this amendment and related Amendments 152 and 157, including Crisis, Social Enterprise UK, Doctors of the World, and Friends, Families and Travellers.

The NHS must work effectively for all who are entitled to use it, including those who need it most. If we get access and outcomes right for the most marginalised in our society—those who experience the poorest health —we will likely get access and outcomes right for everyone. That is why I call on the Government to support the amendments in this group.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, Amendments 68 and 95 are in my name. I declare my role as president of the Rural Coalition. I support the broad drift of these amendments, which engage with the important issue of reducing inequalities.

Rural health and social care has often presented challenges in terms of proximity to services, the types of services available within a local area and the demographics of rural areas. It is complicated. Rural areas have a higher proportion of older residents, which is always a greater burden on healthcare services compared with areas with younger populations.

Furthermore, a variety of issues that feed into rural health and social care are beyond the remit of the Bill. In March 2017, Defra produced its Rural Proofing practical guidance to help policymakers assess the impact of policies on rural areas. At the time, this was a welcome initiative to ensure that rural interests were being adequately considered and, to quote the report, that

“these areas receive fair and equitable policy outcomes.”

Unfortunately, concerns have since grown among rural groups that this guidance has become a sort of bureaucratic box-ticking exercise in Whitehall that does not take into account the complexities of rural life.

Funding allocations are often the result of specific metrics or formulas, many of which disadvantage rural communities. For example, a 2021 report by the Rural Services Network, Towards the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, highlighted how many of the post-Brexit levelling-up funds disadvantaged poor rural areas due to way in which they measured poverty. The Department for Transport’s own 2017 statistics showed that, on average, travel from rural areas to either a GP or hospital was 40% longer by car and 94% longer via public transport when compared with travel in urban locations.

Further, 2017 figures from Rural England highlighted the higher rates of delayed transfer of care from hospitals in rural areas: 19.2 cases per 100,000 compared with 13 per 100,000 in urban locations. Analysis by the RSN has shown that, when compared with predominately urban areas, rural local authorities received significantly less grant funding per head to pay for services such as social care and public health responsibilities, in spite of the fact that they generally deal with older populations. Other problems include limited intensive care capacity in rural areas, the loss of local services through amalgamations, the relatively few specialist medical staff in rural areas, and the general staff shortage and retention issues facing rurality.

It is commendable that the Government have legislated in this Bill to introduce a duty on integrated care boards to reduce inequalities between patients with respect to their ability to access health services. My amendments would extend this principle and reduce those health inequalities with respect to where someone lives, whether it is an urban or rural area, and place a duty on ICBs to co-operate with each other for the purpose of reducing healthcare access inequalities. In effect, this is a statutory rural-proofing requirement.

This duty to consider rural access when reducing inequalities extends to co-operation between ICBs because rural areas often exist on the periphery of a large geographical region where patients in one area may reside closer to crucial services in a neighbouring board. Naturally, rural areas lack the economies of scale of urban areas, and greater cross-ICB co-operation will be required to utilise joint resources most effectively when delivering different services to rural areas that fall within border zones of ICBs.

One area where a collaborative approach between ICBs will be crucial for rural areas in the near future is the current reorganisation of non-emergency patient transport by NHS England, which will shift to ICBs shortly. Although rural areas undoubtedly are being considered as part of this re-organisation, patient transport is already a rural inequality that needs addressing. Putting rural proofing with respect to health care on a statutory footing presents a more concrete way to implement the existing rural-proofing guidance. The need for co-operation between administrative areas and for overall plans to be rural proofed will become more essential, particularly for secondary health services, if teams of specialist clinicians become increasingly consolidated in ever fewer locations.

Can the Minister outline how the Government intend to reduce the inequalities in healthcare access and funding that many rural areas face, and how they will effectively ensure that ICBs adequately rural proof their plans in line with the Government’s own guidance?

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow all noble Lords in supporting all the amendments in this group. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Thornton on the way in which she introduced the debate when moving Amendment 11. I will speak briefly to Amendment 66, which was tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and signed by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and me.

It was enjoyable listening to the noble Lord, Lord Young, taking a voyage down memory lane to more than 40 years ago, when he was a Health Minister. He could perhaps have added that we would have become a smoke-free country rather earlier, had his advice and proposals for tobacco control been accepted at the time, and had he not been removed from health on the instruction of Sir Denis Thatcher and given another role in government. He is and remains a pioneer, and I am delighted to be behind him with his amendments; we shall come to other smoking amendments later.

Amendment 66 would require integrated care boards to address the leading preventable causes of sickness and death, particularly smoking. The Bill as drafted fails to get to the root causes of health inequalities and will have only a limited effect. Our amendment would correct this oversight as far as smoking is concerned. In 2019, there were 5.7 million smokers in England, one in seven of the adult population. As the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said, in England smoking is the leading cause of premature death, killing over 70,000 people a year and leaving 30 times as many suffering from serious smoking-related disease and disability.

Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) (No. 2) Regulations 2021

Lord Bishop of St Albans Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Lords Chamber

What is the current recruitment and retention in care homes in particular, as so many in your Lordships’ House have raised concerns in that regard?

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, I think many of us are grateful for the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, about process and impact assessments, and I echo those.

I shall make one or two comments about the substantive issues. Incidentally, we have been thanking the Government and medics for the rollout, but I want to pay tribute to the people who are going to be sitting up half the night: the managers of GP practices—they are the ones who get people there to get the vaccine. Very often they are forgotten, so I want to make that point.

I want to make some points about the very real problems that there are with this way forward. I am very sympathetic and, on balance, I think this is the way forward, but for many decades we have taken very seriously those who have very real concerns about receiving a vaccination. Those are not concerns that I share personally, but there are those, for example, who are concerned about the use of aborted foetal cells or testing on animals. We—both myself and more widely in the Church of England—have always maintained the position that freedom of belief or religion should not be compromised by the introduction of any form of coercion or forced decree. This is difficult, because it is not just about someone’s right but about the effect that they have on someone else. Recently, I heard from someone who was jabbing—giving vaccinations—that someone came in without a mask on. They challenged him and he said, “I don’t get on very well with masks”, to which one of the nurses said, “Well, I hope you get on well with a ventilator.” That is the implication; we know what the medical science is.

The problem is that there is the danger of a subtle form of racial discrimination via the backdoor. Ethnic minorities comprise a much higher percentage of healthcare staff compared with the overall population. We know that they are more likely to be religious than the white British majority, and vaccine hesitancy is much higher among these communities. There is a whole range of complex issues to do with social trust and people’s position in society that I do not want to steamroller over without raising and putting on the record as we move forward with this programme. A worrying confluence of factors could leave those historically discriminated against being forced to choose between violating deeply held principles and unemployment. No one, whether white or from an ethnic-minority background, should be forced into that corner.

This raises the really important issue of how we are addressing vaccination hesitancy. I have been talking to the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, about how can we help with that more widely across the globe. This is a reminder to those of us who are in touch with—particularly if you are in my line of business—black churches and so on that we need to up our game in addressing the reasons for vaccination hesitancy. We need to do it urgently, because the more that we can win the argument, the more we will save ourselves a lot of unintended consequences of discrimination that may result from these regulations.

[Lord Cunningham of Felling (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Your Lordships will no doubt be delighted to know that, in January, I shall be leaving it—not by choice but because I have been cycled off.

At the heart of this dispute with the Department of Health and Social Care is the requirement, not option, that any department submitting secondary legislation—principally to this House, since it is almost never discussed at the other end of the Corridor in the House of Commons —should include an impact assessment. This is not an optional extra. It is not a take it or leave it. It is a requirement at the heart of the process. The committee is meeting at the moment—it may have concluded—and it has a Conservative chairman, who is very good. There is no predetermined disposition among its members to seek a confrontation with any government department. However, in this case, the Secretary of State and his department have point-blank refused to carry out an impact assessment. It is a challenge to Parliament and to the parliamentary process. That is what is taking place.

I agree with almost everything that the right reverend Prelate said about enforcing vaccination and I realise that there are some very serious problems to be resolved there. But that is not what the argument is about. It is about whether Parliament—in this case, your Lordships’ House—has the right to require any government department to produce an impact assessment about its proposals for legislation. It is quite a simple matter. It is not onerous in most cases. It is necessary for the committee to consider the impact assessment—along with other aspects of the legislation, of course—before reporting to your Lordships’ House. I did not hear in the Minister’s opening remarks a coherent explanation—and I have never received or seen one—of why that is not possible in this case.

As I said, your Lordships require their colleagues on the committee to analyse secondary legislation. That is our role and, if we do not have an impact assessment, we cannot fulfil it. That is the issue. I agree with what the right reverend Prelate said, but this is not about enforcing vaccination. It is about trying to learn to understand the impact, through an impact assessment, of this proposed secondary legislation. If committees are not allowed to take a stand on this, there is little purpose to them, because this is one of the fundamental issues of secondary legislation. That is our job and our responsibility and it is what we have been trying to do.