Health and Care Bill

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his introduction. I think he would be wise to reflect on what happened in 2012; he was not around, but there was a period of pausing to reflect before the Government decided to return to the work and move on. Given the problems we may encounter this winter, it is vital that health, not reorganisation, comes first, and the Government should be willing to delay if need be.

Changes to the Bill are needed. I am no expert on the overall structure of the NHS and its related bodies; my interest is primarily in welcoming in the Bill the mention of the narrow areas I work on, including public health related to obesity, diabetes, addictions, alcohol and so on. I welcome the movement on obesity, but more work needs to be done there. I give notice that I will raise some issues that were raised in the Commons concerning labelling, calories and alcohol.

The other big issue that I know a little about is the workforce. There is another angle from which we can try to approach this shortage of resources; we can look perhaps at the further development of social prescribing. As we all know, there is a considerable fund of support and enthusiasm for the NHS. Some 750,000 people volunteered to give service in the early part of the Covid pandemic, but nothing has really been done; from what I hear in speaking to some of them, they were not even contacted afterwards or given anything to do.

This is a major failing on our part, so I hope we might look beyond the NHS structure and see whether we can get greater resources there to help us. Matt Hancock’s idea of the National Academy for Social Prescribing is good. There is no reason why we should not endeavour to increase the number of people working in that area and have a faster rollout than presently planned. If we could do that, it would to a degree ease burdens on the staff in the NHS itself. We should look further to see how we can have greater public and patient involvement in the National Health Service. We have seen the great fund of good will there over the course of the past two years. I regret to say that we have not really built any kind of structure to pull more people in, one way or another.

I was interested in NHS charities. In 2018, I talked to the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, about creating a national charity for the NHS to which people like me could leave something in their wills. At present, I have nothing designated for the NHS, but I would like to give something. As I get older and have to have more and more treatment, I am sure I will feel even more grateful. There is a local charity in Chelsea and Westminster where I live, but it is not well known. Communications need to be reviewed to establish closer relationships between the charities and the public. There is a great fund there, with money and physical resources available for the NHS, if the authorities are prepared to look down more, rather than looking upwards all the time. That would be to the benefit of the country overall.