National Health Service Commissioning Board and Clinical Commissioning Groups (Responsibilities and Standing Rules) (Amendment) Regulations 2020

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness and I support her very powerful plea. I also support the Motion, and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for bringing it forward.

Before I address the Motion, I want to make a remark about participating physically in the Chamber. I have no inherited wealth, nor do I come from a political family. I do not live on a pension and I am not a salaried Member. I live in Scotland. I and others with a similar background continue to receive no support for staying in London if we participate physically in the Chamber. Meanwhile, salaried Ministers, the Lord Speaker, the Senior Deputy Speaker, the Labour Leader and the Chief Whip have continued to receive support for living in London since 21 April, when it was stopped for all other Members. This House should not just be for the rich, the retired or those who live in London. The Deputy Speaker said that in this debate all Members were equal. Well, the system adopted by the House administration and the commission should afford us equality, too.

I support the call for a long-term plan, for the very powerful reasons given by my noble friend Lady Jolly. The way in which our country has not supported our care home sector during this crisis has been shocking—north and south of the border. In Scotland, on 31 May the chairman and founder of the Balhousie Care Group, which operates 26 homes with 940 residents, wrote in the Herald that there had been:

“Three months of mixed messages, mismanagement and missed opportunities”


—that is, north of the border. On 21 May, the Health Secretary, Jeane Freeman, said that more than 900 patients had been released from hospitals into Scotland’s care homes. That was three times the number that the Scottish Government had said was the reality only weeks before. They were sent to care homes with no testing but only a risk assessment, and, depending on that assessment, with only seven days’ isolation. By then, 1,749 people in Scotland’s care homes had lost their lives to Covid-19.

In England, I read with a breaking heart the soul-destroying evidence to the Commons Health and Social Care Committee in which a comparison was made of how England and Wales and Germany had approached the issue. Isabell Halletz, chief executive of the German care homes employers’ association, gave the stark comparison of 12,500 deaths in England and Wales and 3,000 deaths in Germany, with patients in Germany not being able to go into a care home unless they had tested negative or had gone into isolation or quarantine for 14 days in separate institutions. She also gave a figure which should always be borne in mind when we clap what we term our “heroes working”. She said that Germany has nearly 1.1 million people working in the long-term care sector. Of those, how many have tragically died? The answer is just 42, which compares starkly with the record in England and Wales.

If we are to learn serious lessons about this crisis, we have to make sure that we do not forget that other countries have performed better. We should learn from them how they have handled this crisis.