Women’s Health Outcomes

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I join others in expressing my gratitude to the noble Baroness. She is a great campaigner and is prepared to reach out across all Benches. That is much required with the problems we face.

I think I am probably the first to mention football, but I mention Denmark and congratulate it on the work it does with women. Denmark ranks the highest in the whole world in presenting a community in which women have equality; it respects and does not abuse women. Women are treated as well as men at work and in health terms. It is a great country and should be proud of what it has done.

We could learn a lot from Scandinavia about how we treat each other, and in particular how we treat women. Look at what Denmark does with justice—restorative rather than punitive justice, which we engage in so much in this country. Do noble Lords know that Denmark does not fill its prisons? In fact, it invites neighbouring countries with a surplus of prisoners to send them to Denmark. That is because of the way it approaches its problems.

Similarly, we find that Denmark deals with issues we have here, where women are abused because of alcohol—that and a whole range of other topics were mentioned earlier—in a quite different way. We really ought to learn that we should visit others and invite them here to try to help us with some of our problems. Basically, I think it does so well because, as in other Scandinavian countries, the inequality in wealth is so minimal by comparison with what we experience. We cannot run away from that.

My noble friend Lord Rooker and the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, raised Sir Michael Marmot’s continuing work on inequality and the need to get incomes and salaries closer together, in the way that we had 30 or 40 years ago. This is fundamental to health and so many aspects of what happens in society. I look to the Minister to see whether the Government are doing work on it.

This morning I listened to Nadine Dorries talk on a Zoom exercise about the coming review. There have been 112,000 responses to the strategy. Like others, I look forward to seeing whether something positive comes out of it and that we have attached to it a firm action programme.

Like others, I spoke on the great report from the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, but when is the action coming? What are the Government going to do with that? When will we see the action programme presented to the House?