Tobacco Packaging

Penny Mordaunt Excerpts

Friday 12th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Anna Soubry]

We have a number of measures. For example, we have some of the toughest tax and duty measures in relation to tobacco. The “Stoptober” campaign was phenomenally successful last year. We have a TV campaign that is encouraging people not to smoke in cars, for example, as well as our other continuing work. With public health being devolved back to where it always should have been—to local authorities—a number of authorities, notably up in north-east England, have taken grave measures to tackle smoking by educating young people, in particular. This is all good work that will continue through Public Health England.

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

I can see the merits of standardised packaging. Companies have invested heavily in equipment to produce complex packet designs in order to make counterfeiting harder. Does the Minister agree that if standardised packaging is adopted, whatever the future designs are, the packaging should still be sufficiently complex and difficult to forge? These are just the sort of issues that she and her Department must now look at in depth.

[Anna Soubry]

Absolutely. One of the problems in this debate is that unfortunately it has been called plain packaging. It is far from plain. As, in effect, the Government would be in control of what goes on to the cigarette packet, there is provision to make it as complicated as possible, with a variety of colours, watermarks, holograms and so on. Far from being a counterfeiter’s dream, it would be a counterfeiter’s nightmare.

Sudden Adult Death Syndrome

Penny Mordaunt Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Steve Rotheram]

Again, I could not agree more. John Moores and other universities have done fantastic work. I looked at some of the material from the Football Association. It runs the association football medical screening programme for youth trainees, which involves the screening of 750 youth players. The International Olympic Committee has recommended that all countries screen their athletes to minimise the risk of SADS. That indicates the benefits of screening, so let us look at an early intervention strategy for at-risk groups as an initial step.

Even in the past week, it has been pleasing to see the Football Association and the British Heart Foundation form a £1.2 million fund to ensure that 900 defibrillators are made available to clubs in non-league football and the women’s super league. That is real action that will make a real difference, but although it is encouraging that sport has woken up to this condition and recognised what I would term its social and moral responsibility, there is more work for the medical profession to do and more support for the Government of this country and our partners across the developed world to give.

A simple ECG can expose whether a patient has irregular electrical or structural problems with their heart that can lead to SADS. Currently, however, standard cardiovascular risk assessment screening is not as precise as it needs to be in identifying symptoms relating to sudden cardiac arrest, which is why the British Heart Foundation is undertaking vital research into the genetics around SADS, on which it hopes to publish a report shortly. In the meantime, the Government can play a leading role in encouraging pathologists and coroners who determine that a person has died of SADS to inform immediate family members to ensure that they receive an ECG at the earliest possible opportunity. The Government should also support the medical industry’s work to improve the scientific precision of screening. Such Government measures should form part of the proposed new national strategy to improve heart safety and reduce preventable deaths from sudden cardiac arrest, as set out in the motion.

I hope that today’s debate and any subsequent debates will achieve a number of things, but it is pivotal that the imperative relationship between CPR and defibrillators is exposed: a defibrillator on its own cannot save a life; CPR on its own has an outside chance of saving a life, but the two together have a more than 50% chance of saving a life. How do we know? Ask people such as Fabrice Muamba. His collapse on a football pitch, in front of thousands of spectators at White Hart Lane and millions watching on television, was perhaps the most graphic illustration of SADS, and his recovery is the best example of what can be achieved with swift and targeted intervention.

Bystanders witness more than half the cardiac arrests that occur in public, but not enough people have the life-saving skills to help those heart attack victims. CPR is the first action in the chain of survival and is crucial in the first minutes after a cardiac arrest, because it helps keep oxygen moving around the body, including the brain, which is why the British Heart Foundation campaign tells us to phone 999 and press hard and fast to the beat of “Staying Alive”. It is a simple message, which works, and we have all seen it on television. CPR essentially buys a patient time. A defibrillator starts the heart, but cannot be used on a still heart, so unless CPR is administered, a defibrillator is effectively useless.

That point is crucial, and is at the heart of—forgive the pun—why colleagues and I, in consultation with my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh, chose to include first aid in today’s motion. Medical experts believe that CPR combined with a defibrillator shock can triple the survival chances of somebody who has suffered a cardiac arrest outside hospital. I shall repeat that: it can triple survival chances. That is extraordinary. CPR and a defibrillator shock can buy paramedics time to arrive, prevent serious brain damage and ultimately increase the chance of a full recovery. I am not sure that there is any need for further debate. If someone’s child or loved one had a cardiac arrest, would they not want to triple their chance of survival?

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate. I add my sentiments to those expressed already on the wonderful work that the OK Foundation and the King family have done. I pay tribute to South Central ambulance service, which does wonderful training in my constituency. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, although it is tremendous that community organisations have invested in equipment and training in their localities, a benefit of a national push, such as that that we had with digital hearing aids, is that it drives down the cost of equipment and training, no matter who pays for it? It is important to get across that message about why we should put more oomph behind such work.

[Steve Rotheram]

It is an excellent point, which I will mention later in my contribution. The hon. Lady is absolutely right. If we persuaded the Government, Government bodies, large organisations or a combination of people to purchase AEDs, the price would plummet because they would order in bulk. I think they are £1,200 to £1,500 per unit at the moment, but empirical evidence from other countries shows that, when they are purchased in large volumes, their price comes down to almost 40% of the original cost.

Finally, I shall address directly what the Government can do to help, and it is simple: legislation. It can be done in a controlled and progressive manner and, in the current economic conditions, it need not cost the earth. Legislate first in education: enshrine mandatory emergency life skills training in the curriculum; ensure that every child who walks out of school at 16 or 18 possesses life-saving skills, and ensure that this Parliament, here and now, commits to having a new generation of life savers. We have the support to do it. Will we need to come back with another 100,000 signatures to get the Government to act? According to a British Heart Foundation survey in 2011, 86% of school teachers agree that such skills should be part of the curriculum, 78% of children said that they wanted to be taught how to save someone’s life in an emergency, and 70% of parents thought that children should be taught emergency life skills in school. When we place emergency life skills education in the context of my earlier point about the relationship between CPR and defibrillators, we begin to see just how many lives we could save daily, monthly and yearly.

The Government, though the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, should introduce legislation such as the Canadian province of Manitoba’s Defibrillator Public Access Act. In Canada, public consultation and medical expertise identified the most likely places for a person to suffer a cardiac arrest—apart from in hospital, of course—and legislated to ensure that all those buildings, such as gyms, football stadiums, golf courses, schools and airports, had to have an AED fitted by January 2014.

There is also a financial argument: fitting AEDs could save the NHS millions of pounds, because survivors would not need the same degree of critical care or, potentially, aftercare. To discredit further the myth that it would be too expensive, let us once again put it into context: a defibrillator costs about the same as a PC and if we put AEDs in public buildings, that cost will come down, as the hon. Lady identified, as it does for other equipment ordered in bulk.

Health and Social Care Bill

Penny Mordaunt Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I refer the hon. Gentleman to the point I made about the mandate. Beyond the mandate, staff across the NHS have been clear for years that they want more clinical leadership and clinically led commissioning; they want local authorities to integrate health and social care services more effectively; and they support the transfer of leadership in health improvement into the hands of local authorities. The Bill achieves those principles. That is why all through last year, the Royal College of Nursing told me that it supported the Bill.

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

The Secretary of State is not the only one who has noticed a shift in the Opposition’s stance on independent sector provision. I have started to receive letters from constituents who are concerned that Labour will next call for much-loved NHS services that are currently provided by the independent and charitable sectors to be shut down. Will he assure me that if those calls are made, he will fight them?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about what would happen if we followed the apparent views of the Labour party. More than 11% of mental health services in this country are provided by the private and charitable sectors. Recently, I was in Northampton, where St Andrew’s Healthcare provides important services. I opened its new building, which will provide first-rate, state-of-the-art care for mental health patients. The attitude of the Labour party is that all that should be shut down.

NHS Risk Register

Penny Mordaunt Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

I once found myself in the happy circumstance of being in conversation with the former BBC director-general, Greg Dyke, who expounded on the lengths he had to go to in order to change the culture at the Beeb. He told me that one had to have a vision and show leadership, and that one could not be afraid to challenge the status quo. He then described how he was idly playing with the top drawer of his finance director’s desk while waiting for him to return to a meeting—he reassured me that this was absent-minded fumbling rather than a covert management technique—when the drawer happened to slide open to reveal a notepad emblazoned with the legend “Things that could go wrong!” Mr Dyke told me that he was puzzled at how differently that man’s mind worked from his own, but he knew that his ambitions for the corporation were more likely to be successful because his colleague—by himself, unlikely to set the world on fire—was thinking through the possibilities and consequences of his plans.

Vision, leadership and a preparedness to change are vital to improving the NHS, but reform plans must be subject to scrutiny and revision. This Government have welcomed debate on NHS reform because our motivation is to improve health care. We have not embarked upon this reform for its own sake. What a shame that some do not wish to debate, but rather to carp and criticise without offering anything constructive. It is a matter of regret that this debate is about the risk register. That decision should be in the hands of the tribunal. The commissioner has made a judgment and the Government have appealed, as anyone in their position would be entitled to do. I understand that the decision is being fast-tracked at the Government’s request. Good. That is the process, and I will be content with the outcome.

Apparently the Opposition support the Information Commissioner’s decision, so one assumes that they also support the process, which prompts one to ask why they have alighted on this subject for today’s debate. Why not instead set out a motion describing how they might improve the NHS? In choosing this motion the Opposition have ignored the long-term care of the elderly, the shocking amount of unmet need, the growing challenge of dementia and related conditions, opportunities to invest more in medical research and the clinical disengagement felt by many health care professionals. They have also ignored the Grey Pride campaign and the terrible divergence from National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence guidelines by NHS trusts that means that Members of this House, health care professionals and councillors have to write hundreds of letters of appeal in order to secure for patients the treatment “guaranteed” under the NHS constitution.

Do the Opposition have a vision to tackle those problems? No. For all they have said today, there has been no alternative vision and no constructive criticism—just a lot of opportunism, scaremongering and misinformation. What makes matters worse is that through all that bluster, the shadow health team know that less than two years ago the Government they supported were trying and failing to accomplish many of the things that the Health and Social Care Bill will bring about. During the Labour Administration I was a director of Diabetes UK—the largest patient organisation in Europe—and I worked with the Department of Health and people such as Professor Paul Corrigan, who was then based in Downing street. That is why I find the political opportunism on show today so nauseating. I hope it is in order, Madam Deputy Speaker, for me to suggest that the shadow health team have today invented and taken a new kind of “Hippocratic” oath.

However, for better or worse, we are still debating the risk register, so I will play ball and reluctantly turn away from issues that will actually impact on patients and health care workers across the nation and address myself to Labour’s lack of thought for the day. The risk register is an internal Department of Health document, the purpose of which is to enable Ministers robustly to test their ideas. Challenging and testing a Government’s ideas is part of the role of the civil service and, for obvious reasons, civil servants value the licence to be forthright that confidentiality bestows. One might have thought the Opposition could see the value of that approach, having had so many shocking ideas themselves, but perhaps it is because the Labour party no longer has any ideas that it is now so relaxed about the erosion of good civil service practices.

The risk register is a red herring. Its publication will add nothing to the scrutiny process, and could be detrimental to the good governance of this country. Today’s debate might have availed us of nothing so far as the improvement of the NHS is concerned, but we are now at least far better informed about the Opposition’s agenda—not that it took us six hours to learn that the Labour party has nothing to say. A casual glance at the motion tabled by the Opposition for today would have told us that.

Oral Answers to Questions

Penny Mordaunt Excerpts

Tuesday 21st February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Lady should know that we intend to enhance the powers of foundation trust governors, but I am simply taking what was her Government’s policy before the election—that all NHS trusts should become foundation trusts, with the freedoms that go with that, and the responsibilities and accountability. We are putting that into place where her Government failed.

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

5. What recourse patients have when denied facilities to which they are entitled under the NHS constitution.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Anne Milton)]

The patient may complain either to the local organisation that provides the service or to the primary care trust. If it proves impossible to resolve the complaint locally, the complainant has the right to ask the health service ombudsman to look into their case. They have the right also to make a claim for judicial review if they think that they have been directly affected by an unlawful act or decision of an NHS body.

[Penny Mordaunt]

In the short time that I have been a Member, I have had to challenge my local trust over its policies on cancer drugs, metabolic surgery, IVF and a raft of other issues in order to get my constituents the treatment that their doctors say they need. When will all NHS patients in Portsmouth and elsewhere be able to have treatment based on clinical need?

[Anne Milton]

My hon. Friend’s constituents are fortunate to have such a vigilant MP who has taken up their individual cases. Patients have the right to expect local decisions on the funding of drugs and treatments to be made rationally, following proper consideration of the evidence. I suggest that she, like many other Government Members, will not be going out to march to preserve the PCTs, which often make flawed decisions.

Care of the Dying

Penny Mordaunt Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

I became interested in end-of-life care in part from having been a hospital visitor at my local hospital for eight years, largely attending those who had no advocate, friends or family and who were nearing the end of their life. I continue to work on these issues with a number of organisations, including the Royal College of Nursing, Age UK and the NHS Confederation.

We have known for some time that older people, in particular, are poorly served in both a hospital and a community setting. To give a recent example, a constituent of mine, who had no continence problems but was bedbound following an operation in hospital, repeatedly asked for a bedpan and at the sixth time of asking was told to wet herself because it was nearly suppertime and no one was around to fetch the pan for her. By that time, she was so desperate for the loo that she did just that, despite how unnatural and unpleasant it felt, and she then had to sit in wet sheets until the meal was over. Only then did the nursing team come and change her whole bed—a procedure that took more staff and time than the simple act of fetching her a bedpan in the first place.

We have had a succession of reports, including from the Care Quality Commission and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, calling for the Government to act. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will today update us on progress. With my hospital visitor hat on, I would particularly like to know whether she believes that there are opportunities with the Centre for Social Justice “End Loneliness” campaign, which is focused on befriending and visiting, to consider the support and advocacy services that could be developed to support those who have no one else as they near the end of their life.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) on securing the debate. I am pleased that it has been focused on good-quality end-of-life care, rather than assisted dying, as that is the immediate issue. I am sorry that those two issues are often conflated or painted as an either/or. The Commission on Assisted Dying added its voice to the previous reports in relation to the patchy nature of good end-of-life care. It was highly critical of the practices at Dignitas and elsewhere, including Oregon. It highlighted the lack of research in the area that we are discussing. One of its key conclusions was that the Government must step up their drive to improve care in this area as a priority.

Poor-quality end-of-life care cannot be a reason for an assisted death. Indeed, one of the safeguards required by the commission’s model for assisted death in the UK would be verification that a terminally ill patient who requested an assisted death was receiving good care. However, the view that, if there were universal provision of good-quality care, there would be no demand for an assisted death is a false one. It assumes two things: good-quality end-of-life care can alleviate all pain and suffering, and the overriding motivation for seeking an assisted death is poor-quality care. Neither is true. Those who request an assisted death are often doing so because of issues about control and their identity, and we must recognise that even with very good care and advances in pain management, there will still be patients who are in considerable discomfort at the end of their life.

All in this place have great sympathy for those who wish to have an assisted death, whether or not we believe that they should be granted one. We have sympathy for the 400 people who commit suicide every year because of a terminal or chronic illness. We all know about the sale of suicide kits—those appalling suffocation devices, which often fail to kill and instead result in brain damage. I would like the Minister’s comments on whether we should be doing more to end that trade on the internet. We also know about the 160 people from the UK who have travelled to Dignitas. In my view and the view of the commission, that is a very unpleasant experience, and such people are often ending their lives very prematurely.

All of us have sympathy and compassion for the people to whom I have referred. Where we differ is in whether we think that measures to enable those people to have a good death, at the time of their choosing, come at too high a price for the rest of us. There are issues that are often discussed—safeguards, for example, are deemed too difficult and have not been thought through—and issues that are just as pressing but are not so often discussed, such as equality of access to such a death. Indeed, certain issues are barely debated at all. This is a difficult subject, but we should, as a Parliament, continue to discuss the plight of those people and their families, as their suffering is profound. I echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies); we should do that in the tone that he outlined.

Such suicides occur once or twice a day in the UK. These are a tiny minority of patients, a minuscale minority of Britons, but each of them, in my view, is entitled to a good and peaceful death.

Breast Implants

Penny Mordaunt Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that suggestion, and I will ask Sir Bruce’s group to consider it.

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

I welcome the statement. What has the Secretary of State learned from this episode about the quality and take-up of routine insurance products offered by private companies to protect both patients and providers when cosmetic surgery goes wrong?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her welcome for the statement. Those seeking cosmetic interventions must ask serious questions about not only the nature of the procedure but the quality and reputation of the provider organisation, and ask it how it would protect their interests if things went wrong.

Social Care Funding

Penny Mordaunt Excerpts

Thursday 10th November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson, as it will be to speak under Mr Bone’s chairmanship later. I thank hon. Members for coming along to the debate. Given the importance of the debate in the main Chamber on armed forces personnel, the level of support in this Chamber shows how important this topic is to our constituents and to people throughout the country.

The question of who pays for care has vexed politicians for decades. There has been no shortage of good ideas, based on evidence garnered from the many Government reviews and commissions over the years, but there has been a failure in political will, resulting in only limited action being taken. However, demographic change and its impact is now an issue moving rapidly up the political agenda. All parties have signalled a desire for a long-term, all-party solution to the care crisis. It is clear that now is the time for us to take action.

During the debates on the Health and Social Care Bill, there was little dissent from the view that the integration of health and social care is a good thing. In the Budget debate, there was no opposition to NHS money being given to councils to integrate services. The Care and Support Alliance, made up of more than 52 major organisations representing older and disabled people, those with long-term conditions and their families, has come together to support reform. Polling evidence from ICM last year showed that 62% of the public saw care reform as one of the most important issues for the Government to focus on, and more than 50% of people felt that political parties were not doing enough to work together to improve care for older people. There is therefore a clear mandate from the people whom we represent to work together to find solutions to the problems.

The coalition Government clearly understand, and are committed to reform. They set up the Commission on Funding of Care and Support under the leadership of Andrew Dilnot, who was supported by Lord Norman Warner and Dame Jo Williams. Their report, published in May, described the care funding system in England as “not fit for purpose” and needing “urgent and lasting reform”. From our constituency work, we all know that there is great uncertainty and that people are worried about the future, but most people are realistic. Just as they know that they should save for their old age, they know that they will need to make contributions to the cost of their care in later life. They crave a clear path, set out by the Government, that shows them how the costs will be fairly borne—how they will be divided fairly between themselves and the state. Above all, people want to be relieved of the fear and worry about the availability and quality of care as well as how they will pay for it should they need it.

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Does she think that our constituents are also ambitious about what they want care in the future to look like, and that the challenge for the Government is not just about finding ways to fund what currently goes on, but about considering how we meet the massive unmet need in dementia care, for example? I am thinking of bathing facilities and all the other things that we want our constituents to have but that too many of them do not have access to at all.

[Sarah Newton]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point about the fact that there is inconsistency across the country in the quality and type of care available. The best care, which some people experience, should be available for everyone. We all want that for our constituents. As people in their 50s grow older, they will have far greater demands, which will be different from those of the generation now in their 90s or over 100. They will be looking to technology and innovation to come up with a range of services that will support them in leading life to the full, and in living healthily and productively as part of society, for as long as possible, so I agree with my hon. Friend’s point.

We know from our debate in this Chamber last week on the quality of care that elderly people experience in some parts of the NHS and from other care providers that the vast majority of people of all ages want elderly people and people with disabilities to be shown far greater kindness and respect. The commission says that the main failings of the current system are that it is confusing, is perceived to be unfair and is unsustainable.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Newton]

The hon. Lady makes a fair point. We all understand that local authorities have had to make some major decisions about the allocation of resources and their priorities in serving their communities. I am proud of my council in Cornwall, which did not cut one penny from adult social care funding last year. In fact, this year, that funding could increase by £3 million or £4 million, although the council has not yet finalised its budget. It is very disappointing that some councils—although not all—have not used the money for such important purposes. It is estimated that approximately 7% has been cut from adult social care budgets across the country.

We have begun to see the effects of the withdrawal of the key services that the money should be funding, and which have been designated to prevent health problems among older people. The withdrawal is contributing to a far greater pressure on hospital beds. Delays in the discharge of people from hospitals are significantly higher than they were in the same months last year. Over 75% of delayed transfers for acute care are for people aged 75 and over. Research by Age UK and WRVS will be published in the next month or so, and it will provide evidence of the impact of councils not using the additional funds that they have been given by the Department effectively and of the additional pressures that that has put on hospitals and families.

[Penny Mordaunt]

Does my hon. Friend agree that whatever the size of a council’s budget, we need to ensure that it makes best use of the money? Some poor commissioning practices have gone on, discriminating against independent providers such as the Alzheimer’s Society and Age UK, which not only do a better job at a lower cost, but can rely on enormous amounts of volunteer and carer support and a whole raft of other stuff. We must ensure that there is a level playing field for those people.

[Sarah Newton]

I agree. My hon. Friend makes that important point extremely well. Local authorities and the NHS have had a silo mentality on commissioning. Undoubtedly, funds that could have driven up the quality and choice of care to support people have been wasted. I hope that the reforms that the Government are setting in train will overcome those issues. When the health and well-being boards come into play, if they link up properly all the providers in a community and set the agenda for commissioning services to improve health outcomes, they could have a powerful impact and achieve some of the things that my hon. Friend has highlighted.

In this debate, when we are talking about the budgets of the NHS and of local authorities, we must never forget that it is families who care for their grown-up children with disabilities or for elderly family members. Informal carers provide more support than any Government could ever afford to pay for. The most recent research from the charity, Carers UK, estimates that there are more than 6 million carers in the UK. The care and support that they provide to help people remain safely in their own home are valued at a staggering £119 billion per year, which is far more than the annual cost of all aspects of the NHS. Support to carers must be central to the future provision of services. It is informal carers, families and, in the majority of cases, women who worry most about cuts to services that enable them to help and care for their elderly and young family members.

Who pays for care is just one of the questions that the Government’s reforms of social care must address. There are issues of quality and regulation of services, training and pay for those working in this sector, as well as choice. The Government’s reforms need to look at finding solutions that work for different generations. Young people who will be saving for their old age and auto-enrolled into pension schemes could be incentivised to make an additional contribution each month to an insurance policy that will pay for their care later in life should they need it. The package of reforms developed by the commission has been welcomed by the financial services industry, which sees opportunities to develop new products to enable people to pay for their contributions towards the costs of their care.

The Dilnot commission’s package of reforms to support families in their caring responsibilities will require an extra £1.7 billion a year—a figure that will rise with an ageing population. Whether or not the commission’s reforms are implemented in part or in entirety, it is clear that more money needs to be found for social care and NHS integration. While I do not underestimate—I am sure none of my colleagues in the Chamber do—how difficult it will be to find that sum during this Parliament, constructive ideas have been given to the Treasury on how that spending commitment could be achieved without increasing taxation or borrowing more money. Consideration should also be given to removing the upper age limit on national insurance contributions, which could raise £3 billion a year, and to further reform to pension tax relief for higher-rate taxpayers.

Health and Social Care (Re-committed) Bill

Penny Mordaunt Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Nadine Dorries]

The amendments are grouped, but when I spoke to the Table Office last night, I was told that I would speak to amendment 1 and that amendment 1 would be pressed to the vote. I hope that the Clerks will clarify that. [Interruption.] I will take advice from the Clerks, but when I spoke to the Clerk last night, I was told that it was amendment 1. [Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) is going to find out for me now.

On the offer, the amendment would provide space and time to talk and think for women who are feeling confused—that is all.

I now come to the financial arrangements between abortion clinics and counselling providers. If anybody in this House were to take out a mortgage today, the person who sold them the mortgage would have to refer them elsewhere for independent advice. If it was a husband and a wife, I believe that they would have to go to separate advisers, because they cannot both take advice about taking out the mortgage from the same person. I wonder why we feel it is appropriate that organisations that take £60 million a year of taxpayers’ money and are paid to carry out abortions give advice on the procedure.

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

I am a former director of the largest patient organisation in Europe, which provides services on the commissioning side and the provider side through advice and support. It is a charity that deals with long-term conditions. We had to follow extremely strict rules to ensure that there was no conflict of interests and we could not provide commissioning services to an area of the country if we were also on the provider side. Why does she think that that situation has not existed for this particular area of health care?

[Nadine Dorries]

Because, unfortunately, abortion provision and counselling is never scrutinised thoroughly or legislated on. No legislation happens in this place to deal with abortion. It is an issue that can never be debated. People shy away from debating abortion because of the uproar that results so things do not happen that perhaps should happen. If one is to have cosmetic surgery and it is deemed that it might have a psychological effect, one would be offered independent counselling. That does not happen with abortion.

Care (Older People)

Penny Mordaunt Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2011 Westminster Hall

[Tracey Crouch]

That is precisely my point, and I hope that it will be the key theme to emerge from my speech. Homes must provide good-quality care for people who have to go into residential care, but we need to try to keep people in their own home for as long as possible. My late grandmother certainly believed, as do I, that if good-quality services can be provided people will have to rely less on expensive residential care, and we should therefore provide a greater choice of available private homes. Not many bungalows are being built, because their capital value is not that of a seven-storey apartment block on the same land, which poses a problem for our older people, who then have the choice of staying in their family home, which is incredibly expensive to heat and often impractical, or of moving into residential care.

We want to rely less on the state to fund our residential care, and it seems logical to put greater emphasis on ensuring that new developments have as much of a duty to provide for older people as for other younger sectors of society. The issue of choice extends into the social housing sector too. In my constituency, a few areas of social housing are allocated to the over-55s, but there is a huge difference in the lifestyles of 55-year-olds and 75-year-olds, which often leads to antisocial behaviour problems. I doubt that many people would consider 55 to be old, and therefore we perhaps ought to consider revising the age allocation up, to the over-65s.

I am pleased to say that Kent Housing Group, which is a partnership of developers and local authorities across the county, is looking precisely at housing for older people, and I look forward to seeing the outcomes of that work soon. However, I fundamentally believe that there is a role for the new homes bonus, which could incentivise authorities to build bungalows or complexes for older people and lead to much more housing choice for those who wish to stay out of residential care. That could be one policy that would have a positive impact on the welfare of older people, and it would also benefit the Treasury by keeping people out of the more expensive residential system.

The funding of social care might be the hardest single problem to overcome in this policy area, but we often forget that the services side is equally, if not more, important. Good delivery of services can prevent people from needing to enter residential care, or from staying in hospital longer than the average patient. We have some excellent charities and volunteers who provide an essential community service, and they can be vital to the health and well-being of the people they look after. As brilliant as individual schemes are, however, our overall community service for the elderly needs to be much better. I heard a heartbreaking story from the WRVS about a lady whose light bulbs broke. She was unable to fix them herself, and so for a month she sat in the dark. As she used her television for light, the electricity company noticed that her bills were unusually high, contacted her and discovered what the problem was. A WRVS buddy was sorted out, and her light bulbs were changed, but it took a month and a concerned utility worker to alert others before she was helped. In these modern days of instant connectivity, I find such isolation utterly unforgivable.

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Does she think that when we are considering Dilnot and the future funding of care, we need to look not just at the baseline and at our well-recognised ageing population, but at the unmet need to which she has just referred? In Portsmouth, for example, which is a fairly compact city, we have 1,000 people with dementia who have no access to services.

[Tracey Crouch]

We need to improve the services available for different people with different needs as they age. I am vice-chair of the all-party group on dementia, but I decided not to talk specifically about dementia today because I am hoping for a future opportunity to do so. There are, however, some very good services. They are very localised, but often people do not know about them. For example, the wife of a constituent of mine who happens to be a good friend, has just been diagnosed with dementia. He found out about the excellent Admiral Nurses service by word of mouth; there was no one there to signpost him to it. He could have been provided with a hugely valuable service at the outset of his wife’s diagnosis. We need fundamentally to improve services across the country.

The Centre for Social Justice has produced a report, which I highly commend and which is entitled “Age of Opportunity: Transforming the lives of older people in poverty”. The report states that more than 1 million people aged 65 and over feel lonely, and a similar number feel trapped in their home. Charities can do so much but, as the CSJ says, there is a fundamental role for the state in preventing such isolation. So many older people are already known to statutory bodies, so providing the link to charities is essential. The CSJ recommends a greater role for neighbourhood policing teams, in engaging with extremely isolated older people, and the extended use of the increasing number of health visitors. Those are sound recommendations, which would help to deliver a new relationship between the voluntary and public sectors, and also reduce social isolation.

The authorities and partnership organisations to which I speak are desperate to provide good services, but they are hampered by finances. Although we have to be realistic about the need to make efficiency savings across various services in the short term, that needs to be balanced by an understanding that good-quality services can benefit public finances in the long term. Keeping retired people active, for example, keeps them healthy and less in need of acute primary care. Helping those nearing retirement to plan financially prevents them from draining their assets before falling back on the state. Providing company for people in social isolation not only enriches their lives but improves mental and physical well-being. Good-quality housing designed for the older generation provides greater choice for people wishing to remain in their communities. All those areas are interlinked, and better delivery could save the state a significant amount of money in the long term, but for the people who need care we must ensure that it is of good quality and sustainable for our ageing population, but also fairly funded.

If we are to improve the standard and delivery of care and services for older people we need to deal with this issue today, and I urge the Minister not to let it get kicked into the medium or long grass, and to consult on and implement reform of the system as soon as possible, for the benefit of this and future generations of pensioners.