Support for Infants and Parents etc (Information) Bill [HL]

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 6th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to be able to congratulate my noble friend Lord Farmer and my friend, the right honourable Dame Andrea Leadsom, formerly of another place, on this proportionate and timely, but none the less hugely important, measure.

One thing that I have noticed throughout my adult life is a change in political vocabulary—a semantic shift—whereby the word “investment” has tended to lose its literal meaning of an outlay that produces some kind of return and has become a general euphemism for any kind of public spending. This, however, really is an example of investment in the most literal sense, where, for a tiny sum relative to what government spends, we are investing in the most important resource we have: human development.

There is a wealth of evidence, as my noble friend suggested, that the first years are the critical time. It is when the prefrontal cortex of the brain is forming and when all the neural pathways are being formed. Being able to reach parents and, particularly, more vulnerable children in that time is not only a monetary investment but of course an investment in human happiness. I will not repeat what the Bill will do, because the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and my noble friend Lord Farmer set that out very well, but the value of having one place, either physically in a hub or through the virtual side-effects of this, where you can learn about all these things—antenatal classes, midwives, breastfeeding, what is available for children with disabilities or special needs—is hugely important and valuable.

I say all this with feeling. I remember when our first child was on the way, 23 years ago, being very reluctant to go to antenatal classes; I thought there would be way too much information and that they would be talking about disgusting things that I really did not want to hear about. I said to my wife by way of compromise, “Look, I will come to one”. I had only recently been elected to the European Parliament and I thought that that would be my excuse: “I can’t be there on Monday nights, darling, but I’ll come to the first one”. In fact, I turned up to the first one and there, sitting in front of me and looking unusually glamorous, was the brilliant actress Cate Blanchett—this was 2001, when she was at the height of her fame with the first of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy having just come out. I told my wife that, actually, I had better support her through the rest and would turn up in future weeks. I am jolly glad that I did because, 14 years later, when our youngest child was born in our remote farmhouse, the midwife did not turn up on time—talk about “You had one job”— and I found myself falling back on a great deal of the information that I had picked up at those antenatal classes in order to take charge of a quite stressful situation. These things really do matter immensely.

I hope that there will be a measure of cross-party support for what I think is, just in terms of the ratio of investment to outcome, an extremely well put together proposal. Two principles have guided me all the way through politics: localism and political frugality or economy. Decisions should always be taken as close as possible to the people they affect, and we should try to get away from the culture that we sometimes have in both Houses of people airily demanding things without any talk of who is paying for them. This proposal, it seems to me, plainly passes both tests. It does not impose new, burdensome duties on local councils; all it does is require them to tell people what they are already doing and thereby, in some cases, enable people to shop around and go to neighbouring local authorities if a particular service is not available locally. We have seen already the huge success of some of these schemes, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, discussed earlier.

As for the cost, Dame Andrea tells me that the cost is something like £750,000. That is what the Government spend every 21 seconds. Indeed, in the time that I have been on my feet, the Government have spent something like £9.5 million—so I had better sit down.