Long Covid
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Thornton not just for making this debate available to us but for her having demonstrated stamina beyond the normal in the way that she has fronted for this side of the House—indeed, I think she has spoken for Members across the House—during the entire troubles that we have been through with Covid. Covid may have a long form, but those who speak about it and remind us of its importance can also have a long form, and I thank her for that. I also pay tribute to our friends in the Library for their briefing note, which is truly extraordinary and has been mined by many of us in the speeches that have been made.
The noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, has drawn attention to the way that ME played out through chapters of misapprehension and wicked neglect through its course, until we got on to more certain ground. I might add dyslexia as another condition that suffered from not having adequate analysis or forensic understanding, which led to its own misapprehensions.
All that leads me to focus my intervention on the first of my noble friend Lady Thornton’s points: the need for data—the need for an adequate basis from which to draw empirical and helpful conclusions. In pressing the Government, and my noble friend is certainly not the only one who has done this, we must almost insist, if that is within the bounds of the conventions of this House, that the Government really give us an answer on that one: how do we get the evidential basis upon which we can draw reasonable conclusions? I heard from the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, who is not in his place at the moment, a suggestion that concrete ways of responding were available, although they might need to be enriched and all the rest of it. It is urgent that we have that evidential base, for this is something that we must know more about scientifically.
I have a son who went down with all the symptoms that my noble friend Lord Stansgate mentioned, and was laid flat out for months. He has made a good recovery so that is a possibility, but I have to say that his family live with the possibility that it may recur. Again, that emphasises the need to understand this disease better than we do currently. I have to say—and a father would only want to do this—that in my son’s recovery he played a key role in the way that the funeral of the late Queen played out. He works for Westminster City Council, responsible for their street management. He resourced the queues and cleaned the streets once the horses had left their hallmark, and did all the things that were unseen.
However, I have another son who has not had Covid but Covid has had him. He has a small business that collapsed the day that lockdown started, and he is reinventing himself all the time. Long Covid, in an economic and personal way, is not related to the disease in the bloodstream or whatever it is but is playing itself out in as insidious a way, and the economic outcomes have to be borne in mind. Meanwhile the marriage of my daughter—who lives in France—did not manage to survive lockdown. Once again, those things happened as a result of Covid, and there is an ongoing realisation that we have to cope and deal with it as best we can. Long Covid in its clinical phase of operation and understanding, together with its outcomes in personal and economic life, all need to be held together.
One thing is certain in my mind as I draw my remarks to a close. The noble Baroness began by saying that Covid is still with us, and the worry is that it might recur when we thought we had cracked it. On a lighter note, I have to say that I went down with it once. The symptoms were mild but it was on my significant birthday when I could not finish my salmon steak or my glass of wine. So I have a real grudge against Covid, and I hope that will be taken into consideration.
Social Care Funding: Intergenerational Impact
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)
My Lords, I am very happy to follow that intervention. I recognise its accuracy and pointedness, but I cannot feel—yet anyway —that this is an either/or, although certainly the question of poverty runs through our society and needs to be addressed radically. However, “intergenerational” clearly means a lot more to me than it does to the noble Lord who preceded me. It raises a lot of questions that demand to be answered. I am most grateful for the report from the committee, which I found very helpful. I hope that the Minister can reassure all of us that it has been taken into consideration by the Government in reaching their conclusions.
Knowing that experts in this field were speaking in this debate, I decided to do something a little different. I had a little seminar with two young people, aged about 20, who are not far from entering the jobs market and are quite intelligent. They wanted to discuss how they face the future that is being posited by these rises in national insurance to pay for social care. Of course, I was the third participant in that seminar—the baby boomer, locked up three times in a prison cell and enjoying benefits that seem to be unchallengeable.
It was interesting that the two young men, Tim and Oliver, picked on a sentence that said, “We would argue that fully funded free social care through income tax or national insurance contributions in the near future, before a fund to help pay for it has been established, fails to meet the test of intergenerational fairness because the burden for paying for social care would then fall only on the working-age population, while retired people would contribute nothing.” A little later, another sentence they picked up on was: “We would argue that older people should also make a contribution to the cost of social care”—of course, we must all agree with this.
From other sources, they plucked out comments like: the proposals currently before us would lead to
“the breakdown of families and deter companies from hiring new staff and increasing wages”.
That source also quoted another leading figure as saying that the proposals would worsen social care by making private providers pay more national insurance. Finally, there was a newspaper editorial that said:
“Coming after a year of lockdown, with its catastrophic economic and psychological impact, to inflict yet more pain on the public is senseless and intolerable.
It said that the NHS has an intolerable backlog to clear and that
“We were … promised a once-in-a-generation fix of social care, but the sum earmarked … is paltry”.
Before the Minister comes to the conclusion that this is another rant from the Labour Party Benches, I will say that this was in fact from the Tory chair of the Local Government Association. This is the first time in my entire life that I have quoted from an editorial in the Daily Telegraph—from last Sunday. I hope that the Minister will answer these points seriously.
Suicide
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Bethell (Con)
The noble Lord is entirely right to raise the issue of veterans, who have an incredible and alarmingly high rate of suicide, one that I regret enormously. We are working closely with veterans’ charities to provide the kind of mental health support that veterans need but, all too often, that does not prove enough. His request for greater data from coroners is an idea I will take back to the department, chase down and write to him about.
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab) [V]
My Lords, these are unpropitious times for ordinary people. Lockdown has increased the incidence of loneliness and we are hearing more tales about domestic abuse. With the furlough scheme ending soon, we have worries about the world of work and joblessness. There are increased referrals for mental health problems, and the National Union of Students tells us about the well-being of students, in these uncertain times, as they face a new university session. These all bring their own worries and pressures. All these factors might create a climate in which we see, tragically, the rate of suicides climbing.
Meanwhile, the Government are beset on all sides by energy-sapping programmes to do with the economy, health and education—and Brexit looms. We heard of the loss of a senior law officer just this morning. We have heard about the ambitious programmes of the Government, as outlined by the Minister. Can he assure us that keeping them running and in proper focus will be manageable, given all the other things the Government are being dragged down by, largely as a result of their own ineptitude?
Queen’s Speech
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)
My Lords, I express my gratitude to the noble Baroness for the wide-ranging announcements in the speech she just delivered. I rise with some trepidation and no little sense of honour and privilege as I introduce our side of this debate.
We have a new Prime Minister. He has certainly earned the right to sit in the driving seat—we cannot deny that—but our job on these Benches is to remind him to fasten his seatbelt. We are all passengers on board now and must remain vigilant.
So many subjects crop up in this compendium agenda item, but I will limit myself to just three. My noble friends will no doubt pick up on others, and expert interventions from around the House will deal with a great deal. I will concentrate on education, the internet and transport.
I have been a school governor, a trustee and, for the last 10 years—and here I declare an interest; it is all in the register—chairman of the board of the Central Foundation Schools. I want to say that, because I believe it has given me a front-row seat, allowing me to see and be part of the reinvigoration of failing schools that have risen to take their place among the best schools in the country through initiatives such as Teach First, City Challenge and the establishment of academies in their first iteration.
We must also acknowledge the contribution made by the Liberal Democrats through the introduction of the pupil premium in their time in the coalition Government and thank them for this. In London and other cities I know, those initiatives and items have turned schools that were at a loose tether and in measures into front-ranking and high-achieving schools. It has been an honour for me to put in the spadework to achieve those objectives.
In doing so, we have been able to define a model for education that works. We do not have to invent anything de novo. Just as much as a rail system, an airport terminal, broadband accessibility or other things mentioned in the Minister’s speech, I believe that education simply has to be viewed as part of our national infrastructure. It is not just roads and bridges; if you have an infrastructure strategy, it must include education.
From my own personal involvement in education over the decades, I can attest that investing in education yields measurable and immeasurable outcomes of the first order: skills, efficiency, culture, productivity, aspiration, mobility, personal development, well-being and citizenship. All this and more can be directly attributable to a properly focused and functioning education system. Alas, we have lived through 10 years when a lot of the progress looks to be coming towards disintegration. I have heard the measures proposed. The proposal to
“ensure every child has access to a high-quality education”
was clearly stated, with some figures put on it by the Minister. But the promise to
“increase levels of funding per pupil in every school”
while being welcome will leave us by 2022-23 only just at the levels that the Labour Government left as per-pupil expenditure in 2009-10. We have to recognise that what seem like alarming increases are increases of a relative nature.
At the same time, school budgets are having to pick up extra costs such as national insurance and pension increases. Pupil premium inputs have not increased with inflation and changes to the benefit system have diminished the number of people premiums without significantly compensating the families concerned. While we acknowledge the proper demands and expectations of Ofsted—of course we do—schools are telling me that they do not have the financial resources to implement them. Budgets for schools in the maintained sector are set in April, but in September for academies, while changes in teachers’ pay are decided in the summer. A simple thing could bring both budgeting exercises in line with each other, which would be an achievement in its own right. So budgeting becomes very hazardous for maintained schools, which have to take a guess at what the salaries are going to be later in the year.
“Education, education, education” is a mantra that we do not have to attribute to its source, but from an interview in the current number of the New Statesman I can add another sophism:
“Social mobility is something I care passionately about”,
says the subject,
“and the key to social mobility is education.”
All I can say is that that can be attributed to someone who I want to call my noble friend, although he usually sits on the opposite Benches: the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne. We were at school together and know the advantage in mobility that education can provide.
All of us want education to improve. Can the Minister who replies let us know, I wonder, whether he is aware of the factors that have led to the success of London schools? Will he be prepared, instead of levelling things down from an admittedly unequal distribution of resource so that everybody gets the lowest common denominator, to level up to the success levels that we can now quantify and recognise from good practice over the last 10 years?
It was spelled out in the manifesto or the Queen’s Speech that
“We will legislate to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online—protecting children … and … the most vulnerable … and ensuring there is no safe space for terrorists to hide online”.
The duty of care has been well delineated in the online harms White Paper; of course we welcome these commitments and will do our best to support them. But we are not best assured by the turnover of those holding office as Secretary of State for this part of the Government’s work. It seems to be a launching pad for people with aspirations beyond DCMS—but what am I? I do not know anything about politics.
Nor do we feel able to continue the fruitful conversation already begun in this area until we have sight of the results of the consultation which, let us remind ourselves, ended in July last year. I attended seminars and conferences. I have held discussions with various interested parties throughout the period and since. We are told that more detailed discussion between the Government and unnamed “stakeholders” has been going on. This is a matter that demands cross-party, non-partisan collaboration. It is too important an area of our national life for it to become prey to the goings-on of party politics. I do not like being kept out of the loop. I hope that the promised pre-legislative opportunity will materialise before a final shape emerges in the form of a Bill. We need to get this provision right, or as right as we can make it, and it is vital for us not to cut corners as we find our way forward. I must plead with the Minister to give us some timetabling precision on this point.
The Government have pledged
“to bring full fibre and gigabit-capable broadband to every home and business across the UK by 2025”.
I thought that I had a good vocabulary; it has been enriched since people put me in charge of this brief. We ought all of us to gasp with astonishment at this seemingly simple promise for two reasons. First, the Government have brought forward their previous commitment from 2033 to 2025—by eight years. That means that if the target stated is to be reached—while I am not very good at internet gigabit stuff, I got 100% in arithmetic at O-level, so I can do this bit—BT’s current rate of progress, at 80,000 homes per month, will have to be increased fivefold to 400,000 homes per month. Have the Government received the nod from BT Openreach that this is achievable? Has it been costed? Will the £5 billion mentioned in the Conservatives’ manifesto be enough to do the job? There is so much more that needs to be said on these matters that I leave it to other noble Lords who will surely follow on later.
I come finally to transport, and I am not going into the aeroplane side of things. The proposed railway minimum service legislation sets a dangerous precedent on the right to strike. Nobody likes to be inconvenienced by strikes, especially on the railways. I am a regular user of Southern Railway and have been as frustrated as many others in this House by these actions, but this Government’s attempt to restrict the collective bargaining of rail workers, to scapegoat them, is reprehensible. Surely it is time to sort out the mess of underfunding and franchising that has characterised the entire history of our railway system since its privatisation in the early 1990s. Here is another Tory mess, I am afraid to say, that needs to be looked at in the round rather than dealt with by populist measures aimed against the workforce. Can the Government assure the House that we will not see a race to the bottom of deregulation and a slashing of workers’ rights in this and other areas, especially in the post-Brexit era?
The arguments for and against the continuation of the HS2 project have been very much in the news, and I commend the dissentient report made public earlier this week by my noble friend Lord Berkeley. However that project turns out and whatever decision is made—high speed, high cost; that is what it seems like—it should not be at the expense of the vast improvements needed in the commuter and inter-regional networks around our major cities in the Midlands and north of England. This is a time for joined-up thinking to produce joined-up transport systems. There can be no serious regeneration without adequate infrastructure of this kind. The House will welcome some reassurance and commitment on these points.
I look forward to sitting through the next endless number of hours as I listen to other people’s more splintered views, as I have been able to luxuriate in a few extra minutes. With that, I take my leave.