Health Bill

Debate between Lord Patel and Baroness Tyler of Enfield

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I strongly support the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Shawcross-Wolfson, and I have added my name to it. She spoke so eloquently and made her case so strongly that I have put aside what I have written down because it would have been a repetition of what she had already said. I am going to take a slightly different tack but make the same point.

The noble Baroness quite rightly linked education, training and workforce planning. You have to know what workforce you might require for the health service you plan to have. I guess one can say that the Government’s 10-year health plan and the 10-year cancer care plan outline the kind of health service that the Government wish to see develop over the next 10 years. If that is the case, we need to address what kind of training and education and what kind of people we will need to deliver that plan.

I am guessing now that the reason why the 10-year workforce plan is delayed is because the premise on which it was to be formulated was that technology such as AI and digital technology would free a lot of clinical time, and hence the headcount need not be so high. That is a false assumption. It is false because we need to train people to use AI and digital technologies. The assessment is that, if you use these technologies, you might free about 40 minutes a day for front-line clinicians. With the pressure that the NHS now faces and the needs of the workforce it now faces, that time will be used to deliver better care to patients, particularly as the 10-year health plan identifies that technologies such as genomics and personalised medicine will be the way healthcare will go. There is an ambition by 2040 to have 50% of patients with some idea of their genomics, and the treatment is therefore based on that.

If you add all these together, and the Secretary of State now has responsibility for education, training and workforce planning, you ask the question: why is the workforce plan delayed? It is delayed because maybe the penny has dropped that, if you do not count the numbers and do not present a case about how technologies will reduce front-line clinical time, then you cannot plan the workforce.

Furthermore, I wonder whether the Bailie review of productivity in the NHS is based on the premise that greater productivity will be delivered in the NHS because of using technologies such as AI and digital technologies. We do not know that that will happen, but we have to wait until the Bailie review comes out. I wonder whether that is another reason—the Minister might comment on that—why the workforce plan is delayed.

It might be political pressures, it might be fiscal pressures or it might be the pressures from not knowing how to get the workforce numbers that we would require to deliver the 10-year plan and the cancer care plan that are holding up workforce planning. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Shawcross-Wolfson, pointed out, if we do not have a plan, things will get worse. We will introduce technology, which will not be across the board, and we will then look for workforce that is not trained to deliver it. I hope the Minister will give us some answers about where we are going.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I was very pleased to add my name to the two amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, Amendments 92 and 252, regarding the mental health workforce. More generally, I was very taken by the way this important group of amendments was introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Shawcross-Wolfson, because she is right that all the things that we have been talking about in this Bill so far—all the things we all want to see to improve the health of this country, and all the things we want the NHS to be able to do with, yes, efficiency and increased productivity but also with great care and compassion—will none of them be achieved unless we have the right workforce with the right skills and the education and training in place. That is why I think this is such an important group of amendments.

As I said, I was very pleased to add my name to the two amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, on the mental health workforce. She set out the case clearly, so I do not need to do it again. I simply reiterate that, once we have the long-awaited NHS workforce plan, this will be vital. I would be grateful if the Minister could make some commitment here about how quickly we will see a follow-up mental health workforce plan. We need to see some detail about how the mental health workforce will be recruited and retained and will be able to meet the scale of the mental health demand, which we have debated so many times on so many occasions. That is critical. Both those amendments are important in that respect.

My final point is that, during the passage of the Mental Health Bill, in which many noble Lords here were involved, we all quite rightly thought how important it was that as many mental health services as possible should be located in the community. We all agreed with that; it was the premise, as it were, on which the rest of that legislation was built. As important as the consultants and psychiatrists and so on are—of course they are; it is a wide-ranging workforce and includes mental health nurses and others as well—unless we have that workforce in the right place, in the community, appropriately skilled, educated and trained, we will never be able to deliver those community mental health services, which are so vital. So I was very pleased to support these amendments.

Mental Health Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Patel and Baroness Tyler of Enfield

Committee stage
Monday 20th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I want briefly to make a couple of comments on this important group. As everyone has acknowledged, an absolutely vital change to the Bill is that, in the future, people with learning disabilities and autism will not be detained by the Bill and their needs are to be met in the community. I am sure we can all agree on and gather around that.

The noble Lord, Lord Beamish, made the point that, far too often in the past, people with learning disabilities and autism have been overlooked. I see the Bill as a real opportunity to do something substantive about that. That is why I note some of the amendments we have heard about in this group—certainly those in the names of my noble friends Lord Scriven and Lady Barker, and others—about the importance of having properly trained staff with up-to-date knowledge and expertise, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, has just mentioned.

For any of this to happen, it is important that there is a proper plan, that is costed; the resources need to be available, and properly trained staff with up-to-date expertise need to be available in the community. To ensure that there is some sort of accountability around all this, I reiterate the question that my noble friend Lord Scriven asked the Minister: when will we see new targets—we have not got any at the moment—to reduce the number of detentions of people with learning disabilities and autism? It would be helpful to know that those targets will be put in place and that there is some way of monitoring the progress on all the important things we have been talking about in this group.

[Lord Patel (CB)]

I agree with what has been said: we need a definitive plan for how things will work out. We cannot rely on it being in five or 10 years because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, said, it then just becomes an ambition rather than a target to achieve.

I support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, which strongly asks that the people who look after children with autism and learning disabilities are properly assessed by properly trained and accredited people. We know that, currently, children are ending up in detention inappropriately because they are assessed to have a psychiatric condition such as schizophrenia—as the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, said—when, although they might have some psychiatric sub-condition, they fundamentally have autism or learning disability problems.

I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, is not here to speak to his Amendment 150, which asks quite powerfully for a clear plan to be laid out, with resources tied to it, to achieve the ambitions there are in the Bill. I would have supported his amendment probing the Minister as to how resources will be allocated to achieve the ambitions for those targets to be met.