Health and Care Bill

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Thursday 13th January 2022 Lords Chamber

I look forward to the comments of my noble friend Lord Stevens of Birmingham on his Amendments 201 and 210, dealing with procurement and payment issues, to which I have added my name and which I support. Obviously, I look forward to contributions from the Committee and a response from the Minister, which I very much hope will be positive. I beg to move.

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and support all the amendments in this group in her name. I speak particularly to Amendments 201 and 210 which, as she said, refer specifically to using the purchasing power of the NHS to drive this agenda. Given how brilliantly she has set out the case, I shall be extremely concise.

There are two evidence-based reasons why these amendments are important. The first, as the noble Baroness said, is because the health consequences of the environmental crisis are increasingly clear. The Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences laid all of those out. Whether on heat-related deaths, the disruption to care through climate emergencies, the increased risk of vector-borne infectious diseases, or the fact that up to a third of preventable asthma cases may be linked to the consequences of air pollution, the health case for action is clear. The second evidence-based reason, again as we have just heard, is that unfortunately healthcare itself is not blameless. It is part of the problem as well as part of a solution. By one estimate, if all the health systems in the world were their own country, they would be the fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet. Therefore, the NHS must get its act together, given that it contributes 4% to 5% of our country’s emissions.

Those are the two evidence-based reasons. The NHS has stepped up in the way that the noble Baroness has set out. An expert panel led by the brilliant Dr Nick Watts made it the first health service in the world to charter a practical blueprint to net zero, but to do that, we must recognise that only about 28% of the carbon footprint of the NHS arises directly from care being provided. Another 10 percentage points are associated with travel on the part of patients, staff and visitors, but 62% of the carbon footprint arises from the supply chain—the medicines, the devices, the anaesthetic gases, the asthma inhalers, that the NHS uses, which it procures from 80,000-plus suppliers.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Prior of Brampton, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Young of Old Scone and Lady Hayman, for their support of my Amendments 201 and 210. Their purpose is simply to harness the £150 billion of purchasing power that will flow through either the new NHS payment system or the procurement rules to achieve the two evidence-based rationales that we have been discussing.

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, this is my first foray into this Bill. I have a sense of déjà vu, having deputised for the noble Earl, Lord Howe, on the 2012 Bill. Despite our absolute confidence at the time, it seems that some things need to be tweaked and rectified, though I now find myself on this side and the noble Earl on the other.

From these Benches, I support these amendments. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, put it very effectively. Climate change needs to run through to the very foundations of the Bill, as does addressing the health inequalities which were the subject of the previous debate. We have had such a long-standing debate about them over the years.

As the noble Baroness has said, at the moment, the UK is taking the lead internationally on combatting climate change through COP 26 and in the year after. We have been urging the world to take urgent, deep-rooted action if the enormously damaging effects of climate change are to be tackled and reversed. We know that the poorest will be hardest hit and can already see that effect, but no part of the globe will be spared. We can already see this as well.

As the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, said, we also know the effects on human health worldwide. We can see them already in developed countries: we saw the effect of that heat dome in Canada and the deaths that resulted from it. We know that climate change might have played a part in seeding the pandemic from which we have suffered during the last two years. We know all that. We also know that we cannot lead internationally without addressing climate change nationally. I pay tribute to the staff supporting Peers for the Planet, a group of which I am a member, for making sure that we address climate change at every stage, in every Bill.

We are rightly proud of the NHS. It is the major employer in the United Kingdom. The health and social care of our ageing population will play an ever more important role in our lives. It is therefore right that, in the Bill, as in every other area of life, tackling climate change must run as a thread through all we do. The Climate Change Committee makes this clear. It is not something for only Defra or the COP team. It requires fundamental change in everything we do and the scrutiny of every area of life.

The NHS has already made strides forward. Here, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, in making sure that that was the case. At COP 26, the NHS made a commitment to net zero. As we have heard, 14 other countries followed the NHS’s lead. More than 50 countries, representing more than a third of global healthcare emissions, have committed to developing sustainable, low-carbon health systems. This is incredibly encouraging. It is also encouraging that, at COP 26, a new international platform was set up—to be hosted in partnership with NHS England and the WHO—to bring together those in the healthcare systems, so that people can learn from each other.

Why does this matter? As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, has said, the healthcare sector is responsible for almost 5% of global emissions. Of course, public health is assisted by tackling climate change. Although we pay tribute to what the NHS has managed to do so far—and it is ahead of its requirements under the Climate Change Act—we need to make sure that this is built in and sustained for the future. This is what these amendments are about. Progress is being made, but we need to ensure that it is locked in and does not necessarily depend simply on who is leading these organisations at any particular time.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, has explained how her first amendment affects the overarching structure within NHS England. The other amendments put in place the necessary pragmatic steps to make sure that this is addressed. Thus, we have identified individuals for these particular responsibilities. This is obviously of key importance.

It is fundamental that, in addressing climate change, we do not just see this as hosting a major meeting or siloed in one department—whether Defra or BEIS. I am a member of the Select Committee on the Environment and Climate Change. When our committee asked the different departments to report on what they were doing in advance of COP what came back to us, in many regards, was a kind of surprise that they were relevant to it. They felt that it was something for Defra, for BEIS in particular, or for the COP unit. They did not see it as their responsibility. Some of the responses were superficial in the extreme. That is why it is important to make sure that we mainstream this issue, and this is another opportunity to do so. I strongly support the amendments that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and others have tabled.