Homecare Medicines Services (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Evans of Rainow Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to participate in this important debate, and I regret that it is tail-end Charlie today when the report deserves much greater prominence. The only credit I can take for this excellent report is that I suggested the topic. I pay tribute to our brilliant chair and her devastating summary today, and to colleagues on the committee and to the officials, who did all the probing and heavy lifting and concluded that this is a major opportunity lost.

My personal interest is that I get two different medicines for multiple sclerosis delivered to my home. The one which sparked this inquiry is called fampridine. Most people with MS cannot lift their feet and they drag on the floor; I can trip over a dead fly on the carpet. Fampridine enables us to lift our feet by as much as 5 millimetres—that is all—but it is the difference between walking and not walking at all. To me and others, that little fact makes it a miracle drug, and I was lucky enough to get in on the trials when they started. As an aside, NICE will no longer approve it for new patients, but all those of us in the trials can keep getting it. That is grossly unjust—like many other NICE decisions.

I had excellent service until 2017, when the delivery contract was allocated to a new company; it is named in the report and I will not name it again, but it began to fail abysmally in getting the deliveries to me before the last pills ran out. I complained on many occasions and it came to a head in July 2021, when I had no delivery and no pills for 10 days. I was unable to walk—or stagger, in my case—from where I park my Ferrari at the Bar of the House even to get to this Front Bench here.

I looked up the company in Companies House, found the names of the main directors, tracked down their addresses and sent them a stinking note with my full rank and titles and a draft of my letter to Sajid Javid, the then Secretary of State, calling for the company’s contract to be terminated. The net result was that, two days later, some poor chap was dispatched on a 500-mile round trip to deliver on a Saturday my fampridine to Penrith in Cumbria.

I looked further into this company and found that the Care Quality Commission—a thoroughly useless body if ever there was one—had just published a report in May 2021 showing that over 9,885 patients had also failed to get deliveries of their drugs, and some had to be hospitalised. The CQC report gave the company an overall rating of “inadequate”. On patient safety it rated it “inadequate”, and on “Are services well led?”, it rated it “inadequate”. Therefore, with all these negative ratings, what did the CQC do? It listed all the regulatory breaches and asked the company to kindly send it a report on how it would behave better in future. As Bob Geldof might have said, “Is that it?”

That is one reason why I say that the CQC is a useless regulator, which our report also suggests—or hints at, in very strong terms. By the way, a month after the scathing CQC report, the company changed its name and pretended to be a completely different supplier altogether.

I wrote to the Secretary of State calling for the contract to be removed, but that did not happen because he was not properly in charge of it and he was not sure quite who was. I now get Rolls-Royce service from this company because of who I am and because I created a big stink, but the other 9,884 victims, who have conditions far worse than mine, might not be so well served.

When I joined the Public Services Committee, colleagues were looking for a short-term inquiry to fill a gap as we looked at suggestions for a longer inquiry. I suggested investigating the delivery of medicines at home and supplied details of my own experience. I think that initially my colleagues thought that I was perhaps exaggerating the shambles I had described, but when our excellent clerk, Samantha Kenny, looked at it, she thought that it deserved a deeper look.

My colleagues thought that there may be a bit of a mess here, and then the evidence started to come in from various patient groups such as Crohn’s & Colitis UK, and the superb report from the British Society for Rheumatology which suggested that the system was a complete shambles and cited countless examples of failure to deliver medicines on time. I think colleagues then concluded that old Blencathra was not so barking after all.

We have called the report An Opportunity Lost and that is true, but we could easily have called it “A Complete Shambles”. Those are not just our words; the Chief Pharmaceutical Officer for England told us that our inquiry had unearthed,

“a complicated picture that is quite hard to understand even when you are working in the area”.

That is a nice way of saying “a complete shambles”.

The then Minister for Health and Secondary Care, Will Quince MP, stated:

“It is certainly complicated. That is an understatement”.


That is, again, a nice euphemism for “a complete shambles”. As the noble Baroness said, the NHS has not a clue how much it costs. The National Clinical Homecare Association told us that the Treasury spends £4.1 billion per annum on homecare medicines, but the NHS told us it is only £3.2 billion. We asked the Minister—he said it was £2.9 billion. As we say, it is utterly shocking that no one in the NHS can give us an accurate figure for the billions spent on home deliveries, but then the NHS does not have a clue about how bad it is and how many patients have suffered. KPIs are a mess, as the noble Baroness explained.

We said in our report:

“Different sets of performance data are available to manufacturers and the NHS. This creates confusion and prevents effective monitoring … NHS England must develop and implement one consistent set of performance metrics”.


Performance data must be published.

The National Clinical Homecare Association told us that

“98.8% of deliveries were delivered on the day they were intended to be delivered on”.

That is a very clever form of words but quite misleading. Yes, 98.8% were delivered on the dates that the delivery company decided they were to be delivered on, but those were not the dates the doctors prescribed, which were always much earlier and before the medication for patients ran out. Part of these failures are delays in the NHS prescribing system and delays by the delivery company.

Chapter after chapter of our report highlights the failings of the system. Thus we say:

“No one—not the Government, not NHS England, not patient groups, not regulators—knows how often, nor how seriously patients suffer harm from service failures in homecare”.


Let no one misconstrue our conclusions as an attack on the private provision in the NHS. While we found myriad flaws in the provision at all levels, God help us if the NHS tried to run a courier delivery service, since that would be infinitely worse. Delivering medicines at home by couriers is eminently sensible but has to be better managed at all levels. The problems that we identified all relate to the fact that there is not one single person or NHS body in charge. Different people and organisations negotiate different contracts. There is no quality control or negotiating competence, there are no consistent KPIs to measure performance and the various regulators are all fairly useless. It seems there is no one with the power to sanction failure or cancel contracts. Worst of all, I got the feeling that the NHS rather likes it this way because when things go wrong there is no one individual or organisation to blame. They can all carry on presiding over a shambles but carry no personal responsibility for it.

I get exceptionally good medical care from the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square, the Royal Marsden and the Lakes Medical Practice up in Penrith, but if you want to see the general bureaucratic incompetence of the NHS and why it is failing so badly in so many areas, the bureaucratic shambles that we are reporting on here is a perfect microcosm example.

However, in the report we did not just criticise but offered solutions. Theoretically, there is a Minister in charge, but he or she has no say in the running of the system, which is delegated to the NHS. The Minister should be charge and have a very senior person reporting to them. We say:

“NHS England should designate a senior, named person with responsibility for the homecare system. That person should be given sufficient powers and resources to discharge that responsibility”.


That person’s responsibilities should include:

“Setting clear national KPIs for organisations commissioning and providing homecare medicines services … Collecting data on those KPIs, and publishing data on those KPIs in a way which supports public scrutiny of the homecare medicines system … Holding relevant bodies such as individual providers, Chief Pharmacists, the National Medical Homecare Committee and pharmacy teams to account for work on homecare medicines services … Responsibly using new powers to issue appropriate penalties to under-performing providers”.


That is essential; there must be sanctions.

The fifth recommendation is:

“Ensuring trusts or hubs procuring homecare medicines services have access to sufficient financial and expert procurement advice and information, including template legal agreement frameworks, so they are able to effectively deliver value for money services and influence the homecare medicines services market”.


As in every government department I have served in and witnessed over 40 years in Parliament, the lawyers employed by the outside commercial contractors are infinitely better than government lawyers trying to negotiate contracts; they outwit and outmanoeuvre us every time.

Finally, we said that:

“Achieving value for money and increasing transparency on homecare funding”


should be another part of their individual duties.

As the noble Baroness said, the government response accepted about 90% of what we say—that is jolly good. On that basis, let us have urgent action to implement those proposals and the remaining 10% as well.

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I remind the House that there is an advisory speaking time of nine minutes.

NHS: Long-term Sustainability

Lord Evans of Rainow Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for providing the opportunity to consider this challenging but vital issue. I look forward to the maiden speech of my colleague, my noble friend Lady Ramsey of Wall Heath.

I shall focus my remarks on care needs, highlighting the crucial interdependence of care and the NHS. I will draw on my experience as a member of this House’s Select Committee on Adult Social Care, so ably and empathetically chaired by my noble friend Lady Andrews, whose report, A “Gloriously Ordinary Life”, was published at the end of 2022.

It is clear to me that, if we are to ensure the long-term ability of the NHS to deliver comprehensive healthcare for all, adult social care is crucial. Fundamental changes to social care funding and provision, in the form of a national long-term plan for adult social care, are a national imperative. We engage with the NHS at all points in our lives, but adult social care is often invisible and off the public agenda until we have a sudden need for it. Yet as our report noted, 10 million of us are affected by it at any one time, either because we receive care and support or because we provide paid or unpaid care. Because we are living longer and with more complex conditions, we are all increasingly likely to be one day included in that number.

Noble Lords will be aware that there is no national government budget for adult social care in England. Services are financed primarily through local authorities, bolstered by large numbers of people who fully or partly fund their own care. As the APPG on Adult Social Care highlights in its recent report Future of Care 5, this piecemeal approach means that social care is particularly vulnerable and will often be the first to lose out when—I say that advisedly—the NHS or local authorities have their budgets cut. The 29% cut in local government funding since 2010 has led to an estimated 12% drop in spending per person on adult social care services.

If we are looking at new models and systems of care and funding within the NHS, we have to change short-term emergency funding. Social care needs a long-term funding plan. As our Select Committee highlighted, improving adult social care should be seen not only as an investment in the NHS but in ourselves, as a resilient and caring society. As the quality and consistency of services has suffered, so has the pressure and demand on unpaid carers risen. Estimates suggest that there are more than 6 million unpaid carers in the UK, and the actual figure is likely to be much higher. Estimates of the value of unpaid care provided by family and friends vary between £100 billion and £132 billion a year. That is an extraordinary contribution to the health of this country and it really needs to be seen to be valued. However, as one carer who gave evidence to our report told us:

“Unpaid carers are often not even considered to be a part of the health sector and yet without them the sector would collapse”.


Despite their numbers, carers feel invisible and many are at financial, emotional and physical breaking point. Hearing the lived experiences of those who gave evidence to the Select Committee was sobering, at times even harrowing. Time and again, they told us of being unaware of what help was available, not knowing who to ask or how to access help, or of not being listened to and being put through tick-box exercises that bore no relation to their actual circumstances or needs. Time and again, these carers were falling between the gaps of a broken system, often over many years.

One parent carer told us that, while her daughter was under the age of 18, she had a central point of contact within the NHS, a paediatrician, who could project manage the different strands of specialism her daughter needed. Once she turned 18, all this fell off a cliff. The distinction made between a health need and a social care need means that unpaid carers, often family members, are on their own, battling to get information and help.

In the Select Committee report, we urged the Government to establish a commissioner for care and support who would be able to raise the profile of social care, act as a champion for older adults, disabled people and unpaid carers and accelerate a more accessible adult social care system. Sadly, this recommendation gained no traction with the Government, but, in light of the overwhelming body of evidence on the need to improve adult social care and advocate for those at the heart of adult social care of all ages, can the Minister give us any assurance that this will be revisited?

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for finishing just before five minutes were up, but she has been the only one. The excellent speech of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, finished two minutes before his allotted time. I gently remind all noble Lords to keep to their allotted time of five minutes. I know that the next speaker will keep to it because he is a perfect timekeeper.

Children’s Health: Ultra-processed Foods

Lord Evans of Rainow Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, for securing this short debate and for her excellent introduction. Since very soon after I came into your Lordships’ House, I have been working on a project: to get a Minister to say “ultra-processed foods”. I have hope that we may see that project delivered today, as that is the subject of the whole debate.

I have thrown out a large amount of what I was going to say, because I want to directly respond to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for whom I have the greatest respect. However, I entirely disagree with a large part of what the noble Lord said. We know that there are significant problems with the peer-reviewed research process. We know this from what happened with big tobacco and pesticide companies. We have a huge problem with commercial interests in the research process. If you look behind where most of the attempts to challenge and question the NOVA classification system comes from, you do not have to look very far to find commercial interests.

As one of example of that, just last month in London the Science Media Centre hosted an event questioning whether there was any problem with ultra-processed foods and if they are all absolutely fine. The Guardian looked into this and discovered that three of the five participants on the panel had either received financial support from UPF manufacturers or hold key positions in organisations funded by them. They include companies such as Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Unilever.

I point the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, to a specific recent study. The noble Lord suggested that we were talking about either the nutritional content or whether food was ultra-processed. This is a study that covers both areas. The study is by Julia et al in the European Journal of Nutrition. It is based on the French NutriNet-Santé cohort study, so it is an observational study. The conclusions say that

“nutritional quality and ultra-processing should be considered as two correlated but distinct and complementary dimensions of the diet”.

So, yes, the amount of fat, lack of micronutrients and nutritional quality is a problem, but ultra-processing is a problem too. This is a very solid 2023 study demonstrating that.

Very briefly, I want to focus on young children, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, has pointed us to. We have a huge problem with the diet of young children in the UK. That is now demonstrably obvious in all the health dimensions, whether obesity or height. We are not giving children the chance to develop in the way they should.

I will pick out one deeply shocking figure. Think about the size of child between a year and a half and three years old—quite small. Some 65% of one and a half to three year-olds in the UK drink, on average, one adult-sized can of soft drink a day. One of the things that has not been focused on enough is that, as has been said, this is nutritionally attractive and, arguably, addictive—the paper is strong on that. But you are filling a child up with empty calories or, if the drink is low calorie, with no calories at all, and there is no space for the child to eat the vegetables and fruit that they should.

As others have said—I was going to major on this more—look at all the products in supermarkets directed at children, with cartoon characters all over them, and with messages about health directed at the adults. We are profoundly misleading parents about what their children should be eating—by “we” I mean the multi- national food companies, which are making massive profits from making our children ill.

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I ask noble Lords to keep note of the four-minute speaking time, please. We still have to hear from the Front Benches and the Minister.