Disability: Premature Deaths

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I warmly welcome this debate and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, for her excellent introduction. I also very much congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Fall, on her maiden speech. I hope that she will make up for her earlier enforced silence by speaking more often in your Lordships’ House. Perhaps she will also look a little more kindly on noble Lords in her current position than she did in her previous post.

What can one say about the late Lord Rix? What an extraordinary man and humanitarian he was. Above all, his passionate advocacy on behalf of people with learning disabilities is surely a beacon to us all. I hope that tonight constitutes a small tribute to him for all that he did for so many.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, was very telling when she talked about too many people in health and social care not listening to people with learning disabilities or those who know about people with learning disabilities. When one looks at the issues that have been raised—the statistics mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Rawlings, or the issue of the Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler—what is most striking is the failure of so many health and social care bodies to treat people with learning disabilities with a sense of equality and respect.

The Mazars report is shocking in relation to the Southern Health Foundation Trust. It identified the lack of leadership, focus and sufficient time in the trust spent on carefully reporting and investigating unexpected deaths. That was followed up by the Care Quality Commission, which found that the trust failed to mitigate the significant risks posed by some of the physical environments in which it delivered mental health and learning disability services. It did not operate effective governance arrangements to ensure robust investigation of incidents, including deaths.

Following those two reports, we had the saga of the former chief executive being offered an opportunity to stay on the staff, on the same salary. She has now left. I cannot help wondering whether underlying this was a board that did not accept those reports. I do not know whether the Minister is able to say a little more about that, but it seemed to me that it encapsulated the problem that the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, suggested. Although I am sure that many parts of health and social care do their very best by people with learning disabilities, the cold statistics would suggest that we have an awful long way to go before we can be satisfied that attitudes, policies and procedures are right for these vulnerable people.

In the time available, I do not want to say very much more, but I want to ask the Minister three questions. The first relates to the 18 key recommendations from the CIPOLD review of deaths. Of course she cannot go through all 18 recommendations tonight, but can the Minister write to noble Lords who have spoken in this debate to set out how the Government consider that the health and social care system—and the Government —are responding to those 18 recommendations? In particular, will she pick up the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, about whether the local action that NHS England has instituted, which is not mandatory, can be seen to be a response to the recommendation of a national learning disability mortality review body? I do not think that it can be unless there is a proper mandating of the NHS to take part in it.

The second question comes back to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, about a national strategy. Do we have a national strategy? If not, will the Minister say how the Government intend that there should be a proper national strategy, nationally led, that will ensure that the kind of changes that need to happen will take place?

Finally, I do not think that funding is the only problem: attitudes are much more important. But no one can deny the funding challenges in health and social care at the moment—nor that, despite the Government’s intention that more money should be spent on mental health, it is quite clear that clinical commissioning groups will not do that because they are under intense pressure to balance the books. It has become clear that balancing the books is trumping any other policy. So my final question for the Minister is, essentially, what will happen to protect the funding of those services, which impact directly on people with learning disabilities?