Health Inequalities (North-East)

Pat Glass Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

It is a genuine pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Riordan.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) on securing this debate. Also, I want to welcome to Westminster Hall the two Tanzanian women MPs who are shadowing me today. Whether they like it or not, they are finding out a great deal about health inequalities in the north-east of England.

I will be very quick; I am becoming good at truncating my speeches now. We have heard some excellent speeches that have been based on well researched statistics. I do not intend to use any statistics today. I will be unashamedly emotional and, like the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), I will start by talking about my own family, because I want to talk about the practicalities of health inequalities.

I attended a memorial service in the village of Esh Winning last summer, which was to remember the men—they were men—who had died in the three pits of the Deerness valley. There was a huge list of men who had died; there were 75 names on it. Those three pits had never had a major disaster, but over 100 years 75 men were killed in them, including my grandfather, Andrew Corrigan, who I think was 27 when he died, and his brother, Peter, who was 25 when he died. They were on my father’s side of the family. On my mother’s side of the family, however, Alix Wright, who was 25, and his brother, Jack, who was 22, died in the trenches of world war one within two months of each other.

I will not pretend that wartime deaths were unique to the north-east, but they came on top of all the health inequalities that existed in the north-east. If people survived the trenches and the pits, they were very likely to succumb to consumption, problems in childbirth or the diseases of poverty. That continued right through the two world wars, and through the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s and ’80s. We created tens of thousands of ships, we hewed coal and we made iron ore into steel. That industrialisation left us with a massive legacy in the north-east—a history of early deaths from cancers, emphysema, stroke and heart disease.

The Labour Government did something about that situation. For the very first time, they focused on the social causes of health inequalities and put together a planned and integrated system to level the playing field. What concerns me is that, although the current Government are saying that they are committed to tackling health inequalities, what we are seeing is a complete difference between the drivers that they have put in place to deliver their stated objectives and what actually happens. There is a real skew between what they say and what they do.

I sat through the debate yesterday in the main Chamber on food prices. I do not want to be rude but I must say that it was almost as though the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was handing out bouquets at a village fete. We are faced with people telling us that there have been massive increases in charitable food banks and in middle class poverty; a return of diseases such as rickets among children; and children being admitted to hospitals during school holidays with malnutrition, which shocked me. However, the Secretary of State said to us that she welcomed the increase in food banks as a sign of the success of the big society. I see that as being a massive skew between what the Government are saying and what they are actually delivering.

I will finish by saying that in the north-east we have things that we are rightly proud of. We have a proud history; we fired the industrial revolution. As I have already said, we built tens of thousands of ships and we provided the powerhouse for this country for many years. And we have things that we can still rely on: our community and kinship; our social cohesion; our stability; and our wonderful surroundings, of which we are rightly proud. But we are saying to the Government, “You have a duty to ensure that we live long enough to be able to enjoy these things.”