Minister for Older People

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2012 Commons Chamber

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

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt) on securing this important debate, and I am glad to have an opportunity to raise the views of Blackpool here in the Chamber. Blackpool is in many respects a pensioners’ capital. We have just hosted the National Pensioners Convention, at which the Minister with responsibility for adult and social care, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), was due to speak. Unfortunately, however, he had to return to the Chamber to reply to an Opposition day debate. The NPC replaced him at the Winter Gardens with a cabbage. I am not sure what fruit or vegetable the pensions Minister might like to be represented by; he might tell us when he delivers his winding-up speech. I should warn him, however, that the banana has already been taken by the right hon. Member for South Shields (David Miliband), so it is off the menu.

My hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Mr Amess) told us that his constituency had the most pensioners. I am trying to compete with him in that regard. As with most coastal towns, both Blackpool and Southend have large populations of retirees.

[Mr Amess]

Has there been any reaction yet among older people in my hon. Friend’s constituency to his winning the very special charity champion award last night?

[Paul Maynard]

Modesty forbids me from commenting, so we will draw a veil over that.

My constituency has the most people who live in a household with someone with a long-term medical condition, so carers policy perhaps matters more there than in any other seat. I am therefore as aware as any Member about some of the issues raised today.

In order to access carer’s allowance, people have to apply for pension credit, to which they may not be entitled. People might know that that application will be rejected, but they still have to apply in order to access carer’s allowance—an obvious anomaly in accessing benefits. Although we all know that many pensioners do not claim everything that they are entitled to, they are still not getting what they should be getting.

I know from my postbag and my surgeries that there would be no shortage of work for a Minister for older people. Almost every Government Department has some policy issue that matters more to older people than to any other group.

The Service Personnel and Veterans Agency is located in my constituency. I will spend the next three days attending various Blackpool veterans week events, because I know that matters, not least to my older constituents. My hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North talked about the Arctic convoys medal, too.

Buses are another key issue, as in my constituency they are used predominantly by elderly residents. There are also complicated matters such as the past presence test, about which we are arguing with the European Union, as well as eligibility for benefits when abroad, and what happens when people return. There is a long list of such issues—and I have not yet mentioned long-term care for the elderly and the Dilnot report.

I am something of a nostalgia specialist. I like to look back at the first post-war Labour Government, and try to do so with a degree of fondness because they knew how to use royal commissions as a policy-making tool. They managed to secure all-party support, and produced some of our greatest welfare reforms. Sadly, the last Labour Government turned their back on royal commissions as a policy tool. I remember the royal commission on long-term care. It was a gargantuan exercise—voluminous, colourful, pretty—yet it was utterly ineffective because nothing ever happened after it. The journey to secure reform of long-term care has been long, arduous and, hitherto, fruitless, yet I retain some optimism that the current Government might find enough coins down the back of the sofa to get things right this time; I have my fingers crossed.

As well as the range of issues Members on both sides of the House have raised today, it should be stated that we face a demographic challenge, which we must overcome. It is time that we thought about setting up a royal commission on the consequences for this country of having an ageing population. It would cover a much wider remit than trying to solve a specific policy problem. It would assess what the challenges are and what they mean for every Government Department.

A key issue in this regard is the consequences of having a population that is—to put it crudely, perhaps—dying more slowly. We no longer die rapidly from heart attacks or other such conditions that might hit us in our prime. Now, the decline is much slower and gradual, and it is much more expensive for the taxpayer in providing appropriate care. That deserves some analysis.

The specific proposal to have a Cabinet Minister in this area is an interesting one. This question is not so much about policy towards the elderly, but about government architecture: how do we make things happen in government? As many have pointed out, we have Ministers for the disabled and for children. Both positions are at Minister of State level and both cross more than one Department. We also have a Minister for pensions—the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb), whom I am delighted to see on the Front Bench today—and a Minister for adult social care. Perhaps they could arm-wrestle each other for the title of being the Minister for older people. That Minister could sit across both the relevant Departments and perhaps could have the same effect that the Ministers for children and for the disabled are having. I do not think that someone needs to be in the Cabinet to achieve things. There is a grave danger of our being more concerned about the name and where this person sits than about what they can actually achieve. We have had a history of tsars—an entire palace of Romanovs was produced by the previous Government—all of varying effectiveness, which was often not related at all to where they sat or where their home was. What matters is what someone does.

It is worth looking at what is done abroad, because there are some instructive lessons. I do not normally take the French as a model of how to behave in any situation in life, but they have often had a ministry of solidarity between the generations, as they put it. That is an interesting concept. We often battle in this country, with some saying that the young are getting too many resources and others saying that the elderly are. That French Department tried to resolve the two, to bring them together and to work out how intergenerational solidarity is actually created. To be honest, I do not know whether it worked terribly well, but it is an interesting idea that is worth thinking about.

Australia has a Minister for Mental Health and Ageing, who is No. 2 in the health Department. So the Australians do have a Minister for older people, although some might quibble about the linking of those two things. In Ireland, Áine Brady, a Fianna Fáil Minister in the previous Government, was Minister for Older People and Health Promotion. Sadly that particular Government left office—it was not sad for the Irish people, as this is democracy—and the current Government decided not to retain that title.

I note that the Labour party has a Front-Bench spokesman on this specific issue. I can go as far as to welcome that, but I note that in opposition we had a shadow Minister for coastal towns and that role did not survive the transfer to office. It is far easier in opposition for people to create the architecture around what they want to campaign on, rather than around the architecture of the Government buildings that they then have to slot into. So that provides a good example, too.

The example I pray in aid in particular is that of New Zealand, which does have a Minister for older people, sited in its Ministry of Health. New Zealand also has an office for senior citizens, situated in its Ministry of Social Development. That is a particularly interesting combination. Before Conservative Front Benchers start to worry that I am proposing yet another quango, I can tell them that they need not fear as nothing could be further from my mind. None the less, what both Ireland and New Zealand had in common was that they had first developed what they called a “positive ageing strategy”. So before they appointed the Minister, they ensured that the Minister had something to do. One of my concerns is that if we have a general Minister whose objective is to proof all policies so that older people do not experience a disbenefit, we will end up getting a bit fluffy and soggy. I would far rather have a set of very specific areas that affect older people that the Government should be focusing on; these would be certain policy areas that should be driven through.

As much as I love the Deputy Prime Minister—I adore him, I swear I do—I know that he is burdened by trying to cope with the problems of social mobility, which are being discussed in Westminster Hall at the moment. I am not sure that I would wish to give him older people to deal with as well, because he has to fit in trips to Rio; one man cannot do everything, surely. Rather than simply nominating one Cabinet Minister and tacking older people on to the end of their responsibilities, I would far prefer it if we created a new role that had a very specific remit, that had a positive ageing strategy behind it and that had only a handful of specific policy proposals to see through. In this country, we do not define the remit of a Government Department closely enough. We have aspirations, but often they read to me as waffle. A good example is HS2. One of the Department for Transport’s goals is to introduce HS2, which is fine, but it never says why that is particularly important. It states the goal, not the reasons for it. I would far rather we had a much narrower focus.

I welcome the debate and think it is an opportunity to put dignity at the forefront of everything we do in government. Sometimes, I am disappointed that Ministers do not always have dignity at the forefront of their minds in every decision they take. We should not need a new Minister to achieve that, but if that is what it takes then so be it. Once again, I congratulate the hon. Member for Portsmouth North on securing this important debate.