Social Care Reform

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

I would not want to upset the Chancellor by talking about tax policy at the Dispatch Box, but, as I have said to colleagues—and, in fact, as the Prime Minister has said—one of the things that we are committed to as part of our social care reforms is ensuring that nobody should have to sell their home to pay for their care.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

People across our country will have breathed a huge sigh of relief when the Prime Minister stood on the steps of Downing Street and exclaimed that he had a “clear” and “prepared” plan to solve the social care crisis, but almost two years have passed and there is still no plan in sight. Indeed, the Minister has said today that the Government are still working on a plan. What is the hold-up? Who is obstructing the Prime Minister—or was he simply misleading the nation as usual?

[Helen Whately]

The hon. Member asks about the hold-up. As I have said quite clearly, we have had a pandemic, which has been an unprecedented challenge for our country, our Government and our social care system. In fact, all those working on social care in the Department have been focused on our pandemic response for most of the past 18 months— perfectly rightly, I think the House would say. Thankfully, as we emerge from the pandemic—thanks to the fantastic vaccination efforts across the country, meaning that a huge number of those in care homes and care workers have been vaccinated against covid—we are now able to focus our attention on social care reform. That is why we will be able to bring forward our proposals for reform later this year.

Covid-19

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Tuesday 25th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

We are considering a range of evidence around covid status certification and whether it may have a role in opening up higher-risk settings, so it would be remiss of a Government Minister or a Government not to look at technologies around the world that would allow us to open up not 20% of Wembley stadium but the whole of Wembley stadium for the FA cup final. No final decisions have been made, and we are of course committed to setting out our conclusions on the review ahead of step 4.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

Some people have been making a lot of money from Government-approved quarantine hotels, but many of my Slough constituents are continuing to suffer during their stays. Their long list of angry complaints includes a lack of water, with people being told to drink from the bathroom tap; poor food standards often not meeting dietary or religious requirements, with people having to fork out for takeaways; poor ventilation with no chance of opening a window; and I have not even started yet on the shambolic state of mixing in hours-long airport queues so that even if somebody does not have coronavirus, they soon will have. Why are the Government failing to get a grip of the situation, despite repeated requests from right hon. and hon. Members of this House?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I do not recognise the hon. Gentleman’s description of the way the system is working. There were some distressing videos posted online of people in airports, but we work with the airports and require them to ensure that social distancing protocols are followed. Indeed, at Heathrow, we recently looked at people from red list countries arriving at a particular terminal. I will take away his point about particular hotels, and if he lets me have the exact details I can look at what is happening, because it is wrong and distressing if people cannot have fresh drinking water.

Covid-19 Update

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Monday 19th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I will look into that question, which has not been raised before. Generally, the use of a primary care network—a group of GP practices—to come together to offer one centre has worked really well. That is the first I have heard of that concern, so I will take it away and ensure that it is looked at properly.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister today cancelled his planned trip to India this week, and the Health Secretary has just announced that India has been placed on the Government’s travel red list amid a devastating surge in coronavirus cases, with well over 200,000 detected on a daily basis. A new double-mutation variant is reportedly more potent, and dozens of cases have been detected here in the UK, too. To assuage community concerns, will the Health Secretary clarify that our vaccines are effective against this new variant?

[Matt Hancock]

We simply do not know that. We are acting on a precautionary basis. I cannot give the hon. Gentleman that assurance, but we are looking into that question as fast as possible. The core of my concern about the variant first found in India is that the vaccines may be less effective in terms of transmission and of reducing hospitalisation and death. It is the same concern that we have with the variant first found in South Africa and is the core reason why we took the decision today.

Vaccine Roll-out

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

Absolutely. We will pilot that approach and see how much demand there is for overnight vaccination. As my hon. Friend says, it could be particularly appropriate for shift workers, and of course the NHS runs shifts in every hospital because of the need to care for patients overnight, so that is a very important point that he raises. Let me also say how glad I am that we have been able to open the Imaan pharmacy in Bewsey in Warrington, further expanding the vaccine roll-out in his area.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab) [V]]

I commend everybody involved in the vaccine roll-out programme, as they have ensured that all care home residents in Slough have received their first dose. I also thank the Health and Social Care Secretary and his team for agreeing to site one of the mass-vaccination centres in my Slough constituency, which has been particularly hard-hit by the pandemic. Can the Secretary of State advise when detailed data will be published on the vaccine roll-out, so that local public health teams and others can identify issues, and will that data be by age, ethnicity, region and level of deprivation?

[Matt Hancock]

This afternoon, we will be publishing much more detailed local information, so that will be available, and as the roll-out continues, we will publish more and more granular information. The hon. Member is quite right about Slough—it has had a tough time in this pandemic—but it will get the vaccination centre, which is great. It was a real pleasure earlier in the week to have a Zoom with members of the Slough NHS team who have delivered this, with every single resident of a care home in Slough being vaccinated and getting their first jab. It is an absolutely terrific performance by the team in Slough, and I am glad that he is as proud of them as I am. They are a model that all can look to.

Mental Health Act Reform

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I do not have the exact figure on the last question, not least because it goes up every day, I am glad to say, but the total number of NHS staff who have had the vaccination is now in the hundreds of thousands.

I am grateful for the broader point that my hon. Friend makes. There are NHS staff on the frontline who have supported people through very traumatic experiences over these past few months, during 2020 in the first peak, and then even more intensively, in some cases, over the past few weeks—and it is even harder this time round, because it has happened after a whole year of dealing with this pandemic. Making sure that we support the mental health of those working on the frontline in emergency departments and in intensive care units is incredibly important.

We have put extra resources into making sure that people get these services. Often with the NHS it is about encouraging people to come forward to access the services. Of course, Sir Simon Wessely first came to prominence working with the Army in supporting it on dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. We have to make sure that we put in all possible support for frontline NHS staff who have suffered trauma because of what they have seen and what they have had to do in looking after us all in this covid pandemic. We have to make sure that they are looked after, and I make a personal commitment today that we will do all we can to look after them.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab) [V]]

Sadly, one in eight LGBT+ young people aged 18 to 24 have said that they were tempted to take their own lives within the past year. Will the Secretary of State highlight how the Government intend to address this shocking statistic and ensure that every young person within the LGBT+ community has access to mental health crisis support?

[Matt Hancock]

One of the things that we have tried to do, which has been made more important because of the pandemic, is to ensure that access to IAPT therapies is available and that mental health support is as widely available as possible. We have managed to bring down some of the waiting times even while the pandemic is on, although it is more difficult in lockdown. This is an area of a huge amount of focus for us, particularly for the Minister for Patient Safety, Suicide Prevention and Mental Health. It is a very important subject on which we are working very hard.

Ockenden Review

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Ms Dorries]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his question. As he is aware, I have visited the trust. We have a chief executive in place now who I personally, and the Department and NHS England, have been working closely with, as well as with the team in the hospital. The trust has accepted the findings of the report and will take each of the recommendations forward, so that we learn from these tragic cases of the past and can give patients the safe and high-quality care that they deserve. My right hon. Friend was a Minister himself, I think possibly in my role, in the Department when this report was commissioned, so he has been involved with it right from the beginning.

We want the NHS to be the safest place in the world to give birth—I know I say that often at the Dispatch Box—and this report makes a valuable and important contribution towards that goal. That starts in Shrewsbury and Telford, where as I stand here now the recommendations are being discussed within the trust, and ways found both to deliver and to implement the recommendations that have been made, so that from today onwards Shrewsbury and Telford will be a safe place—as it has been for some time, while it has been on our radar and in special measures—for women to give birth.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

We are discussing today the traumatic findings thus far of the Ockenden review about the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, and our hearts go out to the grieving parents and families. Until recently, the travesty of Morecambe Bay was considered the worst maternity scandal in the NHS, so why have there since been others, and what steps are the Government taking to implement findings of successive inquiries into maternity services across our country?

[Ms Dorries]

As I said, the vast majority of the recommendations on Morecambe Bay have been implemented. Of those that were for wider NHS consideration, 14 have been implemented and 11 have not. However, this is not a case of us overnight going out and saying, “Right, this is how you change”—it takes a vast amount of work in policy, process and delivery. Those 11 recommendations are being worked on and have been worked on since the report on Morecambe Bay happened. The hon. Gentleman is right to highlight the fact that we do not have consistency across the NHS in terms of care or delivery. That is what we are working towards. We are currently developing a core curriculum of training that will be multi-disciplinary and we hope will rolled out next year. It will be undertaken by midwives, doctors, obstetricians and everybody working in the maternity unit so that they are all at a certain point of skill in terms of consistency, they are all aware of the lessons to be learned from the past in terms of safety, and they implement the recommendations that go across the UK in maternity units. Most maternity units in the UK operate well and deliver babies safely. We have fantastic maternity services in the UK. However, we do have difficult trusts. As in all disciplines, they are not all the same. This is about the outliers—the hospitals that we are working to identify early. With the core curriculum, we are making sure that everybody working in maternity units across the UK has the same standard and level of training.

Local Contact Tracing

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

For months, the Labour party has been calling on the Prime Minister to get a grip of the crisis, yet, characteristically for his Government, all we have seen is dither and delay, U-turn after U-turn and a failure to provide effective testing and tracing of this deadly virus. Back in February, the World Health Organisation advised nations that a key component of their pandemic response should be “test, test, test”, but despite spending over £12 billion of taxpayers’ money, this Government have failed spectacularly to deliver even a functioning test and trace system, never mind the Prime Minister’s self-avowed “world-beating” programme. Instead, they have blamed the public for wanting too many tests, misplaced records for 16,000 positive cases, and launched their app months late.

While Ministers continue to bore us ad nauseum with their soundbites about world-beating capacity, they ignore the reality that the system is broken and, in the words of SAGE, is having only “a marginal impact” on controlling the virus. They continue to hand over billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to private companies—many with Conservative party connections—trying to paper over the cracks without addressing the failures of a privatised and centralised model. Just last week, only 68% of contacts of those who had tested positive for coronavirus were reached by the Government’s central system. That is the worst weekly figure since test and trace began, while cases are among the highest. In comparison, 97.1% were reached by local protection teams, so the picture is pretty clear.

In my constituency of Slough, because of Government failures the council was compelled to set up its own tracing system to protect our local community. This came after the Department of Health and Social Care significantly curtailed the working of our local testing centre, causing absolute chaos. I have been contacted by constituents who were directed to drive hundreds of miles, or even to catch a ferry to the Isle of Wight, just to get a test; by parents unable to send their children to school after waiting an entire week for test results; and by key workers simply unable to book test appointments. One of my own staff, a key worker helping me provide support to the more than 1,400 constituents currently requiring my assistance, had to self-isolate for two weeks because one of her relatives at home was taken to hospital by ambulance with a high temperature and struggling to breathe. No test was offered, either to my colleague or her relative; instead, they were instructed to self-isolate for two weeks. It is just not good enough.

Without effective and timely testing, contact tracing is rendered useless, and this is part of a pattern. Local councils have been failed at every turn; there is diminished national testing capacity; there has been no blanket additional support to set up local track and trace systems; and only limited financial support has been offered, with all this coming after a decade of austerity that has stripped much-valued public services to the bone. How can they effectively respond without adequate Government support?

Whenever the likes of me ask basic questions that are of serious concern to our anxious constituents, the Health and Social Care Secretary decides to gaslight or even wag his finger around, accusing us of using divisive language. Given that he does not seem to know the answer, perhaps the Minister can advise us and the good people of Slough as to when our test centre will go back to being a drive-through and walk-in facility, so that locals can actually access a test when they desperately need one.

The British people want to do the right thing—get tested and follow Government advice—but they are being badly let down by a Government whose dithering and incompetence has resulted in our Slough now sadly having seen the largest unemployment increase in the whole of the UK since the start of this outbreak. It is incredible that while some nations prioritised their public health, and others their economy, this Conservative Government have managed ineptly to sacrifice both.

Covid-19 Update and Hospitality Curfew

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Thursday 1st October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I am always happy to look at, as my right hon. and learned Friend calls them, imaginative ideas like that. He will know that there is a tension between the clarity of the rules and bringing additional nuances into the rules. He will have seen how, as a society, we have struggled with that balance all the way through this, because we are in novel circumstances. I am happy to talk to him about his proposal.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

The imposition of a 10 pm curfew on the hospitality industry was entirely avoidable, but became an inevitability because of the Government’s shambolic handling of their privatised test and trace system. Last month, I highlighted to the Health Secretary that locals in Slough were being forced to drive hundreds of miles, including catching a ferry to the Isle of Wight, just to access a test, but he retorted:

“On the contrary, the fact is that we are working hard with the local authority in Slough”.—[Official Report, 17 September 2020; Vol. 680, c. 520.]

Well, Mr Speaker, the council has informed me that it has not heard a dickie bird from either the Health Secretary or his team, so perhaps he can advise us this time when the test centre in Slough will go back to being a drive-through and walk-in test centre, so that locals can actually access a test when they desperately need one.

[Matt Hancock]

We have got this record testing capacity and I am incredibly grateful for all the people who work to deliver it. I will not have this divisive language; I just won’t have it.

Covid-19 Update

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Thursday 17th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The situation in Bolton is very serious, and all four of the requests from my hon. Friend are rightly made. He is pressing the case, as he should, and perhaps I should meet him to see what progress we can make on all these cases.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

Despite the likes of me warning last month about test lab capacity problems, the Government could not get a grip of their supposedly world-beating system and have now instructed our testing centre in Slough to become appointment-only. The only slight snag is that, instead of being able to use the Slough site, local people are being asked to travel for hundreds of miles, including getting a ferry to the Isle of Wight. This debacle is dangerous because Slough has already had too many fatalities and has only recently come off the Government’s covid watchlist. Given that we all know that test, track and trace is the best weapon to tackle coronavirus, how does the Secretary of State for Health expect local communities to continue their hard work in overcoming this virus if his Government are failing to provide vital resources?

[Matt Hancock]

On the contrary, the fact is that we are working hard with the local authority in Slough, where just in the last week over 1,900 tests have been done. I think it would be better to work together—don’t you?

Covid-19 Update

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

That measure is specifically in Bolton, which has brought into place at a council level the guidance that people should not socialise outside their households. We will be turning that into law in Bolton. Of course, we keep all those sorts of things under review nationally, but to be absolutely clear, the measure that I announced today was specifically with respect to Bolton. I also thank my right hon. Friend for her kind words—I do my best.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

We are still not fully over the Dominic Cummings cross-country drive farcical fiasco, yet day after day, we are faced with a string of embarrassing Government U-turns, which not only demonstrate incompetence, but further erode public trust and confidence in the Government at a time when we most need it to overcome the virus. To get on message, what discussions is the Secretary of State having with the Prime Minister to ensure that the next time he makes a public statement, it will not be followed by yet another excruciating and embarrassing U-turn?

[Matt Hancock]

The hon. Gentleman does better when he does not take the Labour party handout notes.