Health and Care Bill

Lord Sentamu Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 4th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I have been in this House for 22 years and I have been asking for this for at least 20 of them. It really is time that the Government got on with it. At the time, I was told that most wine comes from abroad and we cannot legislate for what is put on the labels, but it cannot be impossible to put information on the shelf labels or online. If people do not know what they are putting inside their bodies, they cannot moderate it.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I support this amendment. I will tell a true story of a teetotal preacher who harangued his congregation that nobody should be drinking because it is dangerous, damages our health and damages everything else. “Alcohol should be banned,” he said, “and the best thing to do is go and drown it in the river.” Unwittingly, he then said, “Our final hymn is ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ The beautiful, the beautiful river.” He did not see the contradiction in what he said. This amendment is full of clarity, clarifying areas that need to be put fairly clearly. The obligation that it puts on the Secretary of State and, incidentally, all of us is very clear. Because of the real danger in what overdrinking does to a lot of people, I say: no, we shall not gather at that river, that beautiful, beautiful river.

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble and right reverend Lord, who reminds us of our obligations to assist with alcohol-related ill health. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for putting these amendments before your Lordships’ House today. The first is a probing amendment about the need to report on the consultation on alcohol labelling. It is absolutely right to raise this: consumers have a right to know what is in their drinks, to make informed choices about what and how much they drink. Currently there are no legal requirements for alcohol products to include health warnings, drinking guidelines, calorie information or even ingredients. Research by the Alcohol Health Alliance found that over 70% of products did not include the low-risk drinking guidelines, and only 7% displayed full nutritional information including calories. I certainly add my voice to welcoming the forthcoming consultation on alcohol calorie labelling. When can we expect to see this, and what is the reason for the amount of time that it has taken to bring it forward?

Amendment 296 requires the Secretary of State to make a five-yearly statement on the cost efficacy of alcohol services. As we know, rigorous impact evaluation is absolutely key to good policy-making and improving the lives of those who use alcohol services. At present, the Government cannot say that they are meeting their responsibility to tackle alcohol harm with the requisite financial commitment and in the right places. Perhaps the Minister will tell your Lordships’ House what evaluation measures are already in place.

Of course, the background to all this is that, since 2012, there have been real-terms funding cuts to alcohol services of over £100 million. Pre pandemic, only one in five dependent drinkers was believed to be in treatment, leaving a shocking four out of five without help. The pandemic has only worsened the situation. I hope that the Minister will agree that there is a need to do better to ensure that we know how policies and services help or hinder the treatment of problem drinking, in order that efforts and resources can be targeted to where they work best.

[Earl Howe (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, for her work as chair of the Commission on Alcohol Harm. I thank her for this opportunity to set out the current state of play on the Government’s alcohol policy. I am the first to acknowledge the seriousness of the harms caused by the consumption of alcohol, which she pointed out.

Effective alcohol labelling is an important part of the Government’s overall work on reducing alcohol harm. I am pleased to tell the noble Baroness that the legal powers available to the Government are already sufficient to enable us to consult and report on alcohol labelling. The kind of power proposed in her probing amendment is highly prescriptive, and, from a purely practical point of view, would not allow for sufficient flexibility in the consultation process, which could make the process less effective.

As she knows, as part of the Government’s Tackling Obesity strategy, published in July 2020, the Government committed to consult on whether mandatory calorie labelling should be introduced on all pre-packed alcohol as well as alcoholic drinks sold in the out-of-home sector. I repeat that commitment today, and, as part of our public consultation, we will also seek views on whether provision of the UK Chief Medical Officers’ Low Risk Drinking Guidelines, which includes a warning on drinking during pregnancy, should be mandatory or continue on a voluntary basis. The noble Baroness, Lady Merron, asked when we might expect that consultation to be forthcoming. I am afraid I can say no more than “in due course” at this stage, which I realise is not wholly enlightening, but it is as far as I can go at the moment.

Turning to Amendment 296, which proposes additional reporting and government statements, we do not think a new reporting requirement is necessary. The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities already publishes annual data on estimated numbers of alcohol-dependent adults within local authorities in England. Health commissioners can use this data to estimate local need and appropriately plan their alcohol treatment services. Outcomes for local authority-funded alcohol treatment services are already published at local and national level via the national drug treatment monitoring system. The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities also provides a number of data tools to enable local areas to compare their performance against other areas and nationally, including the public health outcomes framework, local alcohol profiles for England and the spend and outcomes tool.

On funding, local authorities are currently required to report on their spend on alcohol services annually to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Through the “why invest?” online guidance, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities already produces data and information on the return on investment for alcohol and drug treatment. The guidance includes cost savings data on treatment interventions in primary and secondary care and on specialist and young people’s treatment services. There is a strong programme under way to address alcohol-related health harms and their impact on life chances, and to reduce the associated inequalities which the noble Baroness emphasised, including an ambitious programme to establish specialist alcohol care teams in hospitals and to support children of alcohol-dependent parents.

Throughout the Covid-19 outbreak, drug and alcohol treatment providers continued to support and treat people misusing drugs and alcohol. OHID supports local authorities in this work by providing advice, guidance and data. OHID is developing comprehensive UK guidelines for the clinical management of harmful drinking and alcohol dependence. These aim to develop a clear consensus on good practice and to improve the quality of service provision. The work is expected to be completed later this year.

Finally, we are currently developing a new commissioning standard for drug and alcohol treatment which aims to increase the transparency and accountability of local authorities on how funding is spent. It will include requirements to commission services—

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

I am sorry to disturb the Minister in mid-flow. He described this amendment as prescriptive. Seat belts became prescriptive, and most people now wear their seatbelt. There was no question of an in-between. Smoking was another, and the effect has been to improve our public life. Without clarity—and we still will not have options—how will the Government achieve what wearing seatbelts and not smoking have achieved in terms of health? Alcohol needs to have similar treatment.

[Earl Howe (Con)]

The noble and right reverend Lord makes an extremely cogent set of points. I criticised Amendment 259 only on the grounds that it was overprescriptive. Surely, what we want in any consultation is a broad enough question to put to the public and those who have expertise in this area. If we make it too narrow—I said “overprescriptive” rather than “prescriptive”—we are in danger of introducing a lack of flexibility. That was my only point there.

I was just mentioning the development of a new commissioning standard. It will include requirements to commission services to meet a wide range of individual needs, and services will be monitored against these. I hope that information provides the noble Baroness and the Committee with a useful update on where we are with this important agenda and will enable her to feel reasonably comfortable in withdrawing her amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

Well, I certainly was going to make my remarks brief, and I am sorry that I was detained for one minute. I just want to give my wholehearted support to these amendments. There is no more despicable trade than the trade in human organs and no more despicable practices than those that are going on in China at the moment, simultaneously with the opening of the shameful Games. I very much hope that my noble friend, who so politely interrupted me, will be able to give us a very supportive statement when he comes to wind up this debate.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I also stand to support Amendments 265 and 282. I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Hunt, Lord Ribeiro and Lord Alton, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Northover and Lady Finlay.

I declare an interest as, quite a number of years ago now, I was one of those who signed up to say that, at the moment of death, all my organs will be left to the National Health Service for any scientific work that may be required. I carry a card, but it says that my organs should be kept in this country and not exported anywhere else, because I have no trust that they would not be used for purposes for which they were not intended.

When I was doing philosophy in Cambridge, Professor Williams posed a question. He said “Surprising things happen—that they are no longer surprising. Comment.” Noble Lords who have done philosophy will know how complicated that question is.

In Uganda, Idi Amin was known for the people that he feared most. He would cut off their heads, put them in the fridge, and put their organs in another fridge. People did not believe this, and he was overthrown. His treating of the human body like something you simply dispose of was horrific. No wonder a lot of people died under that terrible Government of his when he was in power. What we are being asked is: should the standards in this country also be somehow given over to other countries so that they can learn? But we too have got to be very careful that our standards are as high as the tissue Act says.

We live in a world that is so perilous at times, and where some people may disappear and you never see them. In Uganda, quite a number of leading people disappeared and, up to today, we do not know where they went. The thing is, they would be put in drums of acid and their bodies would be dissolved. Surprising things happen—that they are no longer surprising. May we be so vigilant. These two amendments do the job, so I hope that the Minister when he responds will have heard the urgency in the speeches, but, most of all, in the amendments themselves.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, can I say how much I agree with my noble friend Lord Hunt, the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, and the noble Lords, Lord Ribeiro and Lord Alton? They know I have been with them on this journey throughout. I probably would go a bit further than my noble friend Lord Hunt’s Amendment 265, because I believe that this country should follow the example of France and ban the exhibition of plasticised cadavers and human body parts.

In 2019, we had an OQ on this, which many noble Lords here today took part in. I said at that time that there is an

“ethical issue at play here”

and that it seemed that the businesses that had

“the exhibitions which use plasticised cadavers and foetuses for supposedly educational purposes could use modern materials and production to create the same exhibits. That begs the question: why use cadavers and human body parts at all? If the answer is that people want to see such things and will pay to do so, I remind noble Lords that people used to flock … to see public executions until 1868.”

It is an ethical issue. I am afraid that the noble Baroness answering that debate at the time said that

“the ethical position is not one for government.”—[Official Report, 27/2/21; cols. 228-29.]

Well, I would say that this debate shows that the ethical position is absolutely one for government.