National Health Service: 75th Anniversary

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 30th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath for his—as expected—truly amazing speech. He is a man with great experience of the health service, both before he came into this House and, in particular, while he was serving here as a Minister. He is a man of great value; he is one of the few politicians around who resigned on principle on an issue. He resigned over Iraq. I was one of those who was on the wrong side and I admire him greatly for the work he has done and what he continues to do.

As he mentioned—as did the Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley—I also spoke on this way back in 2003. I also spoke in 2018, when we were celebrating 70 years. What particularly interested me then was that the standing of the NHS in the eyes of the public was very high. I thought it was a great opportunity for us to try to take this jewel. The NHS is something which binds us together. As the previous speaker just said, it is important that we go back to that and find ways in which the public attitude, as it presently stands, is reversed.

I suggested in 2018 that we ought to think about creating a national charity for people to participate in and leave gifts in their wills to, and so on. The Government said no, because some trusts already have their charities and that would undermine them. Well, some trusts do have them and they are very successful, but, if you examine it, you will find that the ones getting great amounts of money are in wealthy areas. In the dispossessed areas, where we have the worst health and growing rates of ill health, you will find that charities either do not exist or, if they do, not much money is going in. I would be prepared to put something in my will—not for Chelsea and Westminster, which I am close to, but for the NHS. The money would then be redirected to the areas of poverty where we need to be making the greatest changes.

If we look at what is happening, as my noble friend Lord Hunt pointed out, we are starting to see for the first time in near history that life expectancy is halting and going in the other direction. If you live in Westminster, your life expectancy is going to be of the order of 86 years, but if you are in Manchester it is down to 77 or 78—and this is happening against a background of general decline in many areas of the health service.

I hope the Minister might still give some thought to the idea that we should try to find ways of having far greater involvement of the public. The charity approach was one idea. When Alan Milburn was Secretary of State, he tried to find ways to get more people involved. They even explored the idea of shares in the NHS, so that people were making a personal commitment to it. I still believe there is merit in going back to some of those issues.

Covid has of course made a difference, and we should not deny that—the Minister will, without a doubt, labour this point in defending the state we are in. When we came into power in 1997, the health service was in a mess and, as was said, it is in a mess again. We have to find our way forward. Care in particular has to be addressed, and we have a plan there, but I believe that the way forward will be to try to involve more people in building a base for revising our approach to it. I appeal to the Minister: the Government made promises in 2019 but have not delivered on anything, so would they be prepared to consider working closely with the new Government, if Labour comes to power, to try to take care out of the Punch and Judy that we have had so much in the past—to come together and to shift care away from political disputes between the parties? I hope the Lib Dems might be willing to give their support to that entirely different approach to care, because it is so desperately needed.

I wonder why this review of Covid is going on until 2026. How much money will be spent on it before it is completed? Would it not be better spent on trying to address some of our current problems in the health service? With Covid, some underlying causes needed addressing. The first was age—and care is the way we start to address that properly. The second was the underlying cause of weight: 50% of the deaths attributed were attached, for a variety of reasons, to people being overweight. The Government have a number of proposals for change, but have fallen well short. They made a grave mistake in winding up Public Health England—at least it was seen as a focal point for campaigning, and it was coming out with strategies that were noticed. We have completely lost focus on where we go in campaigning on obesity, and I hope that, when my party comes to power, it will address that more than it has been addressed in the past. The third area that was identified in the Covid review was the disproportionate number of people of colour who suffered badly. As was mentioned, a recent report says that people of colour are still gravely disadvantaged in health terms compared with the white population. We need to find new policies to address that difficulty and to turn it around so that people start to feel that they are a better part of the community than they are now.

My appeal overall is to try to take certain areas where we are failing to make progress out of the Punch and Judy of politics, to develop new relationships that would move us forward on issues that we have all had policies on for years but have not made progress on. I hope the Minister spends some time, in responding, on the need to get the public more involved than they have been and to get some unity of purpose between the parties in the areas where we have still not made any movement but should have.