Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Stephen Metcalfe and Jo Churchill

Monday 18th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)]

10. What steps his Department is taking to help ensure that people are financially incentivised to work.

[The Minister for Employment (Jo Churchill)]

Universal credit is specifically designed to make work pay, with strong financial incentives such as the 55% earnings taper and work allowances. Working families can also get support with up to 85% of their childcare costs. The maximum amounts have been increased by 47%, up to £950 for one child and £1,630 for two or more children. Additionally, the rise in the national living wage from April means that some 2.7 million workers will be £1,800 better off, on average, as well as benefiting from national insurance cuts.

[Stephen Metcalfe]

I thank the Minister for her answer and welcome her back to the Front Bench. Basildon jobcentre recently hosted two health and social care recruitment events, which resulted in the filling of 20 vacancies, helping to reduce local unemployment. Does the Minister agree that work is the best route out of poverty and that it is this Government who are helping more people into work and aligning vacancies with employees?

[Jo Churchill]

First, I would just like to take a minute to thank Basildon jobcentre, and indeed all jobcentres, for the work they do, from Chorley to the west country and back to the east. Targeted recruitment fairs are a great way to work with specific sectors that have shortages, including health and social care, construction, manufacturing, and hospitality. My hon. Friend is right that getting more people into work is a top priority for the Department and across Government. We know that it is good for wellbeing, both personally and financially, and those in work are on average £6,000 better off a year.

Digital Records in the NHS

Debate between Stephen Metcalfe and Jo Churchill

Thursday 28th April 2016 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Metcalfe]

My hon. Friend is very kind and generous, as always. I congratulate him on securing this important debate.

As I said, I am just sitting in for someone in the hope that at some point I might need to be released into the wild and they will cover for me. However, one thing I have found in my time in Parliament is that there is a huge crossover. One area in which I am very interested and actively involved in Parliament is science and technology. In the previous Parliament, I sat on the Select Committee on Science and Technology. In this Parliament, I chair the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee, which, for those who do not know—this is a bit of a plug for it—is the oldest all-party parliamentary group, established in 1939 to help with the war effort, to bring Parliament and science together and to look at things such as how we can improve the public’s health and food security and what we can do to improve our defences. It strikes me that we are talking about things I looked at when I was a member of the Science and Technology Committee, particularly the use of big data and the use of stratified and individual, personalised medicines. This has been quite an eye-opener for me, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend.

My hon. Friend is entirely right that huge amounts of data are now being generated across all services, especially the health service, with more and more advances in what we can test for and how data are stored. The effective use of IT is important not only in storing data—obviously, we must store data accurately and associate them with the correct patient records—but in making them accessible to others in future and in ensuring that their integrity is maintained. It will also allow clinicians who are perhaps viewing those data from a different angle and not fully understanding where they were collected to understand their use.

My hon. Friend spoke of his constituent, Les, who is an inspiration—I am sure that is why my hon. Friend used him as an example—and of the Empower: Data4Health campaign to promote the better use of data, which would have wide benefits. The use of state-of-the-art IT and the analysis of data can be of huge benefit to the wider patient body. Data can be used to spot trends, patterns or crossover between certain circumstances, particularly in those with rare conditions. My hon. Friend brought that up in the case of Christina, who suffers from a rare cancer. She does not know why she is especially prone to that, but feels that by finding other sufferers, clinicians may be able to spot patterns and therefore be able to develop appropriate treatments or preventive measures.

It is only by examining huge databases for the smallest anomalies that we can start to have a real impact on people with such rare conditions. Where there is only a small sample of people, it is very difficult to put them together and analyse them as a whole, particularly with the barriers and the silo mentality that exist across many of our public health services. People are fearful of sharing data or do not even know that the data exist. Anything we can do to break that down, so that we can take a helicopter view—I think that is the current phrase—to see patterns must be good. The example that my hon. Friend gave showed what could be achieved through better use and analysis of data. On my behalf and the Minister’s—I have no authority to speak for the Minister; I am speaking entirely as a Back Bencher— I wish Christina well for the future.

As I have said, the future for individualised and stratified medicine is very bright, but it is only one part. That is why the data aspect is very important. Some think that the changes we will experience as a society in the next 30 years will be equal to those we have experienced as a society over the past 300 years, whether in transport, education, or the way we interact as nations. The greatest changes will probably be experienced in the healthcare system. I truly believe we are on the cusp of a major breakthrough, and the collection, analysis and use of data from a much wider base than has ever previously been available will play a huge part in that.

[Jo Churchill]

I would like to say what a sterling job my hon. Friend is doing; I agree with everything I have heard so far. Does he agree that there is a big opportunity to drill down and understand more about health inequalities, which are so important in our society? When the average life expectancy in certain areas is so much more than in other areas, the use of collective data to drill down on health equalities and understand why things happen and the concomitant effect on certain diseases is really important.

[Stephen Metcalfe]

I thank my hon. Friend for those remarks; she is absolutely right. We have been talking about people suffering with rare conditions and about putting them together and spotting patterns, but tackling health inequality by comparing data from different parts of the country and by comparing, perhaps, people’s longer term histories is equally important. It may also help policy makers to find a way of developing a geographically stratified approach to tackling some of these health inequalities. Just moving on slightly, I think that part of why clinical commissioning groups were established was that they would allow doctors and clinicians locally to identify what was in the interests of the people they represented. Of course, using data to do that is vital, so I could not agree with my hon. Friend more.