Health and Social Care

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford). I think the House would want to know that around 1991 she served for a year and a half as a medical volunteer at the United Nations hospital in Gaza, so she has not had an easy life in serving others and she may find looking after her constituents easier than that. I hope that she will join the United Nations parliamentary group and I look forward to co-operating with her in trying to get effective family functioning, so that parents have not just the resources but the confidence and the competence to be good enough parents to give their children a good start in life. It is also a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston).

I want to talk about professional regulation, in part because of my interest in the leasehold field, where there are 6 million homes, a great minority of which, sadly, are exploited by managing agents and by freeholders. At present, on the other side of Parliament Square, at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, a man called Benjamin Mire is involved in a hearing over whether he can continue to be a member. He resigned from his judicial office at the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal days before being sacked. The investigation by the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office was made available in part to the RICS. I wanted it to be made available to me. I also want to know that the Rip-Off Britain website, which reports on some of the bad things he has done, gets attention from professional regulators.

Still on the subject of leasehold property, there are people like the Tchenguiz brothers, or at least one of them, who bought the Charter Quay freehold in Kingston, roughly trebled its value, and got professionals—auditors, accountants, bankers and surveyors—to go along with his trebling of the valuation. When the property court dropped the valuation by two thirds, nobody paid much attention. For too long we have allowed professionals to get away with going along with people who are acting badly, unprofessionally and in some cases criminally.

On health, I have the case of Dr David Barnett, a good dentist in my constituency, who was reported to the dental regulators on trumped-up charges and has not been able to practise for over six months. I am going to take that up with them, but I hope that the Health Committee, without taking up individual cases, will look at a collection of cases and ask, “Is there a pattern where there could be change?” On the same theme, I want to mention the case of a surgeon, Mr Aditya Agrawal. He is not a constituent but is one of the doctors of black and ethnic minority origin who seem to be treated differently from people who are white. I am not saying that in his case it is purely racial discrimination. However, there is an issue if a good doctor is considered for too long by the General Medical Council as to whether particular index cases are right or wrong, when the trust knew perfectly well that at least one of the charges involved the discharging of a patient that he had not been involved with, as it had already suspended him.

How did the Queen’s counsel, Mr Mark Sutton, at the judicial review last week, and how did the solicitors, DAC Beachcroft, allow the skeleton argument to contain items that were false? Did they get an assurance from the trust that everything that they were putting forward was accurate, and if not, why not? And if they did not, and there is a pattern there, I hope that the regulators for barristers and for solicitors will start paying attention as well.

I will not go on about those cases at the moment, but I want to put it on the record that I am not going to tolerate trusts using their steamroller powers to treat good doctors badly. I illustrate that by saying that Mr Agrawal’s grievance started three years ago, and was allowed five minutes at a hearing last week—five minutes in a day’s hearing. The principal officer who suspended him, and who is still, apparently, the responsible officer and will not give him a positive reference, could not turn up because apparently she was doing something else. If a trust says, “We set this appointment two months ago” and their principal person cannot be there, there is something very fishy and wrong going on.

That leads me on to a point raised by the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire, about how we can help people’s lives to be healthier and better. In 1986, I was made responsible for what was then called road safety—I prefer to call it casualty reduction—when we were killing 5,600 people a year on our roads. We now kill 1,700 with virtually no change of law. We killed 1,200 with over-limit drink-driving. The figure is now fewer than 300 with no change of law. Those who argued, “Lower the limit, increase the police, increase the penalties” were not right. What we need is to have hosts who will provide alcohol-free drink within reach, not just for those who are driving but for the 10% who are alcoholic, the 10% who are teetotal, for those who are pregnant, for those who want to be pregnant, for those who are on a diet—all sorts of reasons. So we need hosts who provide alcohol-free drink without being asked, passengers to pick alcohol-free drivers, and people like me who both drink and drive to decide, “Am I drinking today or am I driving today?” Those are the three things that work. As far as I know, there has been no academic study or research—no masters, no PhD, no ESRC, no work by a chronologist or anthropologist; nothing—into that.

I believe that the same kind of approach would cut the number of teenagers taking up smoking each week dramatically. I believe that we could make so much difference to people’s lives. At present, 45% of people in this country will contribute to a conception that ends in a termination, all because people here advocate saying, “No” as if celibacy could be inherited from one’s parents, or we say, “Think about family planning or birth control.” We should be saying, “Which embarrassment do you want? Do you want to say, ‘Cripes, we’ve conceived again. We’ve already got five children,’ or ‘What did you say your name was?’” We should be talking about conception, choice and fertility control when people are going to be intimate.

There are so many ways we can make a difference, in addition to diabetes prevention that was mentioned by the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire. I hope we will do so because we can reduce avoidable disadvantage, distress and handicap. We can improve wellbeing with a mixture of health and welfare, and I hope often we can do it across the Chamber.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

Labour’s friend, David Babbs’s 38 Degrees, although it says it is not party political, was also pushing that claim to 2 million people on its website list. Would it not be a good idea to ask 38 Degrees why it did not make a single bleat about the Labour party’s failure to meet the NHS’s request for money in future?

[Jane Ellison]

That is a very good question, and I think that all Members who found campaigns of that sort in their constituencies were asking the same thing. I am glad that my hon. Friend raised that point.

As many Government Members have stressed, we have an opportunity to put the political football back in the locker. We have an opportunity in this Parliament to provide that all-important political stability and support to our health and care staff. They have a really big challenge to rise to. My hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent made the point very well that the things we say here echo beyond the Chamber and have a big impact on the people of whom we ask so much. It is important that we try really hard to learn the lessons of the election and stop making health a political football. As our health and care staff rise to the challenges of the next few years, just as they have done in the past, we on the Government side will back them all the way, because our nation’s health depends on it.