Department of Health and Social Care
Neil Duncan-Jordan Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Neil Duncan-Jordan (Poole) (Lab)
I acknowledge the £25 billion of additional funding allocated to health and social care in the autumn Budget. We are already beginning to see improvements in waiting times, the number of dental appointments and access to treatment. That is absolutely what my Poole constituents wanted and needed to see from a Labour Government.
Neil Duncan-Jordan
I am afraid I will not.
Funding is more challenging in social care, and that is what I will focus my comments on. There is widespread acceptance that our social care system is neither sustainable nor fit for purpose. For far too long, it has been the Cinderella service of the welfare state, overlooked and underfunded, and it has suffered from a number of problems that started to emerge decades ago but have become critical as a result of severe cuts to funding and increasing demand.
Most people who have looked at the system recognise the huge cost to the NHS of keeping people in hospital when they could be discharged into the community. However, too often there are not the care packages in place to enable that discharge. That will be resolved only when we have a better understanding of the dynamics of social care and a more effective way of managing it. Addressing the crisis in the system requires us to reconsider the meaning of the term “social care,” and to abandon the false divisions between medical, nursing, personal and social care, and instead regard all those activities as part of a single care service.
A new national care service should seek to go further than the existing model of provision. As well as providing free domiciliary and residential care to all users who are self-funding, it should also have to: take account of the 2 million older people who have needs that are not being met by the system; improve terms and conditions for care staff; strengthen regulation and monitoring of services; and provide greater support for the country’s 5 million unpaid carers. There needs to be an immediate national debate about how a new national care service can be publicly funded and delivered, what it should include and who should be responsible for its delivery. The new Casey commission will only delay that debate further, in my view.
We have known about the problems for a long time. Over the last two decades, we have had at least 20 commissions, inquiries and reports analysing what is wrong with the system and what might be done to address the problems. However, successive Governments have all found the issue too difficult to tackle, and have instead favoured short-term answers that have largely left the system untouched. The issue that all politicians have avoided is the false division between health and social care, and the question of how such care should be funded.
No one should face personal costs simply because they are unlucky enough to suffer from conditions such as dementia. That undermines the very principle of our NHS. Society must share the burden, and those most able to contribute must pay their fair share. Our universalist principles must lead us to talk about correcting those inequalities and ensuring that wealth, resources and budgets are used to build a fairer and healthier society for all.
Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency
Neil Duncan-Jordan Excerpts(3 months ago)
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Neil Duncan-Jordan (Poole) (Lab)
I thank the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) for securing this important debate. My interest in the issue stems from the fact that one of my constituents, Barbara Manning, was affected by Primodos, and, along with the tireless campaigner Marie Lyon—who has already been mentioned today—has been seeking justice ever since.
For the benefit of Members who do not know this, let me explain that between 1958 and 1978, Primodos was a hormone pregnancy test that was given to about 1.5 million women in the form of pills. It was taken off the market in 1978 amid concerns about the effect on the unborn children of those who were pregnant, but the link has never been formally recognised by regulators or the manufacturer. Some research at the time suggested that there might be an association between the drug and miscarriages, and babies born with shortened limbs, abnormalities in their internal organs, brain damage and heart defects. Many of those children died before reaching adulthood, and of those still alive, some are blind, deaf and brain-damaged.
In 2017, a report from an expert working group of the Commission on Human Medicines concluded that there was no causal association between Primodos and severe disabilities in babies, but there are real concerns about the conflict of interests involving some of those on the expert working group and their connections to the big pharmaceutical companies involved in the scandal.
On 8 July 2020, Baroness Cumberlege published her in-depth findings on how the health system responds to reports from patients about harmful side effects from medicines and medical devices. On the MHRA, she said:
“A regulator must work both for patients and with them. This hasn’t been the case in the past. We are recommending that the regulator of medicines and medical devices… is overhauled. It needs to change and radically improve the way that concerns about medicines and devices are detected and acted upon. The regulation of devices in particular needs urgent change. The MHRA needs to engage more with patients and track how medicines and devices improve—or fail to improve—patients’ health and quality of life. It needs to raise public awareness of its role and it needs to ensure that patients have a core role in its work.”
The review also concluded that the state and manufacturers have a moral responsibility to provide ex gratia payments to those families who have experienced avoidable harm due to their failure to remove Primodos from the market.
The duty of the regulator was to protect women. It chose to protect the manufacturer instead. Thousands of women and unborn children were exposed to a risk that was widely acknowledged at the time. That should not have happened. It now falls to us to put right that injustice, to persuade the manufacturer to pay compensation to those affected families and to reform the regulatory system, so that it protects patients in the future.
Income Tax (Charge)
Neil Duncan-Jordan Excerpts(5 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Neil Duncan-Jordan (Poole) (Lab)
I should place on record that my wife is a hard-working NHS employee, and she will thank me for saying that. I have today met representatives of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which has raised serious concerns about the waiting times that children with conditions such as motor neurone disease face in accessing community services and hospital treatment. I am hopeful that children’s health will be targeted for additional resources in the Budget, because if we can tackle children’s health early, we can help to reduce poor health in later years.
I welcome the key point in the Budget, which is the recognition that increasing public spending—on health, for example—benefits those on lower incomes the most. Likewise, the Budget concentrates increases in tax on the households with the highest incomes, as it should. I have received representations from hospices in my constituency about the increase in national insurance contributions for employers, and I urge the Chancellor to consider granting hospices an exemption, in recognition of the difficult and much-needed work they do.
The announcement of £1 billion of additional funding for SEND is to be warmly welcomed, and I am keen to see how that funding will be distributed to benefit the children and families who have been struggling for so long. The announcement of compensation for victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal and the infected blood scandal is a welcome step in recognising those injustices, but I urge the Chancellor to see what similar support can be given to women born in the 1950s who were never properly informed about the changes to their state pension age. I also recognise the £600 million grant funding for social care for local authorities, but the entire sector urgently needs reform, especially if we are to realise the Government’s stated aim of moving healthcare from hospital to community.
Finally, I again express my concerns about the decision to means-test the winter fuel allowance. I am looking forward to meeting the Minister with responsibility for pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Emma Reynolds), tomorrow to discuss that further. I hope we can explore what further support we can give to those who are just above the pension credit threshold. There is much to welcome in this Budget, but those with the broadest shoulders need to carry the heaviest burden.