Education and Health

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

It is a very great pleasure to be here today. It has been quite a couple of weeks for the town of Blackpool. Not only did it elect me as a Member of Parliament, but we now have the delight of playing in the premiership next season, not just against Wolverhampton Wanderers, about whom we heard earlier, but against many other teams that I am sure we all support. I was thinking of buying a tangerine tie, which is our club colour, but I thought that that might push the politics of coalition that bit too far, as I do not own such a thing.

It was with great pleasure that in my acceptance speech on election night I paid tribute to Joan Humble. It was no problem for me at all and I am delighted to do so again. She was always courteous, unfailingly polite and gracious. I note that she is remembered with affection in all parts of the House. She was an excellent member of the Work and Pensions Committee. More important in my view was the work that she did with the all-party group on non-combat deaths in the military, particularly in the aftermath of the Deepcut inquiry. Her work on that group demonstrates to me what can be achieved as a Back Bencher. It is a useful lesson to all of us newer Members that we do not need to hanker after ministerial office to achieve in the House.

Joan was, of course, the Member for Blackpool, North and Fleetwood. There are people out there, beyond the Chamber, who take great interest in the nomenclature that attaches to constituencies. Cleveleys is a debutante in having a constituency named after it. It is an interesting town, partly because it does not really exist. There is another group of anoraks out there who know all about postcodes; they are obsessed with postal towns. Cleveleys is part of what is called Thornton Cleveleys. No one is quite sure where Thornton stops and Cleveleys starts or where the two merge.

Cleveleys has a distinct identity. It is attractive to day-trippers from across the north-west and beyond, as far south as Stoke, but it faces a number of challenges. I shall highlight one today that affects education and health: long-term care for the elderly and long-term medical conditions. At the time of the last census the Blackpool, North and Fleetwood constituency had the highest number of people living in a household where somebody had a long-term medical condition—some 42 per cent.

So I urge those on my Front Bench to bear in mind that what matters in health care is not just what occurs in an acute hospital. It is not just about what can be measured and put on a website as an indicator. It is about things such as quality, and perhaps most importantly—a word that I never hear often enough in political discourse—dignity. We cannot measure a patient’s dignity, but we know when they have lost it. Once again, I urge my Front-Bench team to put dignity at the heart of all they do in health care.

I pay tribute to Cleveleys first because I would hate it to feel overshadowed by its big brother to the south, Blackpool. I am sure all hon. Members know Blackpool. Many of them will have propped up the bar in the Imperial hotel in my constituency at many a conference. Everybody loves Blackpool, but I wonder whether they know much about the real Blackpool, the Blackpool behind the headlines. There are some extremely deprived parts of my constituency, and there are some real public health issues that we have to deal with as a Government. It is of great satisfaction to me that, as a party, the Conservatives started almost seven years ago working on improving public health policy. I pay tribute to the work that the Secretary of State has done in delivering an excellent public health document while in opposition. I hope we can build on that.

The other key issue that affects Blackpool, or the part that I represent, is educational aspiration. Sadly, we have some fairly underperforming schools that still have national challenge status. It is not easy running an education system in Blackpool. Deprivation does not make for easy pupils, and the staff in Blackpool do a tremendous job. Yes, results are slowly beginning to improve, but there is a poverty of aspiration within the town. Too many generations have not felt that education had any purpose for them; that there was any point in investing time in their studies so that they could build lives for themselves.

I feel passionately as a new Member that I want to introduce or try to reintroduce that culture of aspiration, because educational aspiration matters to me personally. As far as we can tell, I am the first Member of Parliament to be elected who attended a special school, and I particularly ask those on the Front Bench to pay special attention to needs of special schools, because they do matter. Had I not gone to that special school for the first few years of my education, I would not have been able to transfer to mainstream education. Without the speech therapy that I got at primary school, I might not have been able to stand here today and make a speech, so special needs education does matter.

Once again, as far as we can tell, I am also the first Member of Parliament to be elected who has cerebral palsy. I do not claim that that marks me out as anything special at all. I have never let it define my politics. Those who know me know that my interests are wide-ranging and far-reaching, and I will not let it define what I do in this Chamber—certainly not. I do not see myself as a role model for anyone. I have too many frailties, weaknesses and imperfections for that. I am but a weak and humble man after all.

None the less, I hope that I can be a role model to the many people out there who might feel that they want to play a role in public life, but may not quite have the confidence to do so. I know from experience that one needs a bit of courage, yes; a bit of self-deprecation, yes; and the humility to accept that sadly, yes, the bar is still that bit higher for some of us. I found that during my campaign, when my cerebral palsy was used against me by some. It surprised and shocked me, but on 29 April I picked up The Economist and read in an article about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget crisis in California that people with cerebral palsy and epilepsy—the combination I have—had “mental disabilities”. If a publication as august as The Economist cannot get it right, it shows that there is an awful lot of work to do.

Just last week, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of Lord Morris’s Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970, which introduced the basic concept of rights for disabled people, an Act without which I would not be here in the public sphere today, and I pay tribute to that. But it is abundantly clear to me that no matter how much we legislate, no matter how many laws we pass, we cannot legislate for what occurs in people’s minds. I hope, by my presence in the House over the coming years, not so much by what I say but by the very fact of being here, that I can challenge some of the misconceptions, prejudices, fears and suspicions that go with my conditions.