World AIDS Day

Tom Hayes Excerpts

Wednesday 27th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate secured by my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales). I wish to speak about the 1980s in Britain to reflect a perspective that may be more common in this place since the general election. I recently asked the Library what was the average age of Labour MPs first elected in 2024, and the answer is 43 years—it was quite a relief to hear I was below that.

For so many of us in this place, the 1980s made us who we are. For those of us who are gay, either we or the gay people we knew grew up with the legacy of stigma and a deficit of self-acceptance. Thankfully, where we lacked a political language, there were ways to weave together the grief, fear, shame, anger and regret that was forced upon gay people by homophobia, some of which was on the part of the state, some of society, and some of the tabloid press in the era defined by Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Too often the response of gay men was:

“Run away, turn away, run away, turn away”

because

“the answers you seek will never be found at home

The love that you need will never be found at home.”

For many young gay men, they were the smalltown boys who Jimmy Somerville sang about, and they ran away to places such as London, Manchester or Bournemouth.

One man who left for Bournemouth was John Eaddie. Until very recently, we have known very little about John. We know he was gay. We know he ran a guest hotel that was a haven to meet and drink in the late ’70s and early ’80s. We know he was charming and friendly. We know he was not the kind of guy to throw himself in front of the camera—in fact, he would be the one taking photographs. We know it was not in a big city but by the seaside where John presented doctors with the first signs of a mystery illness in 1981. We know he quickly deteriorated and ended up in hospital. We know that his carers in Bournemouth, baffled, sent him to the Royal Brompton in London, where his immune system was rapidly collapsing. And we know that he died in his tenth hospital day on October 29 1981. His cause of death, at the age of 49, was recorded as “pneumonia”.

John’s death is in fact the first recorded AIDS death in Britain. His story remained a mystery for 40 years, and we only know now because of a research team, which involved Paul Brand, Nathan Lee and Mark Jordan wading through thousands of death records. I want to thank that remarkable research team, as well as Paul Brand for his help with parts of this speech. As the Member of Parliament for Bournemouth East, I am honoured to put the name of John Eaddie, a former Bournemouth resident, into the official parliamentary record. No longer, I hope, will he be known as “Patient Zero” or the “Brompton Patient”. As a gay man whose generation was being born as John’s was being devastated, I am honoured to remember John and his story, and to help alongside others to contribute to the eradication of the stigma of HIV and AIDS.

Many of those who died of AIDS did not have children, and their older relatives are dying, so before this period passes into the past, we must tell their story. We must hold it here, thank the doctors and nurses in the LGBT community and allies who went far beyond every call of duty to care, and honour everyone who suffered and died, or anybody who lived in shame and died in secrecy. No longer will the last record of John Eaddie be in The Lancet medical journal, where even in that record there was no mention of AIDS as his cause of death, because it had not been invented as a term at that point. Known for much of my lifetime as “Patient Zero”, I believe we can now finally honour the man by his real name: John Eaddie. May he rest in peace.

NHS Dentistry: South-west

Tom Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

My constituent Jonathon Carr-Brown recently went to his dentist for a routine check-up. Dr King seated him in the dentist’s chair, as he had done many times before, and felt his throat, as he had done many times before. Unlike those other times, Dr King found something: he found a lump. After that visit to Bournemouth dental centre and further investigations, a tumour was identified.

I saw Jonathon at the weekend. He had just completed a course of chemotherapy, because his dentist had helped to spot cancer. He was doing well: he was a little tired following his treatment, but he was not too tired to talk passionately about the importance of dentistry within our wider healthcare and about how more lives could be saved with the right changes by our Labour Government.

Jonathon’s story shows the potential of so many things, including co-location, the promise of innovation and the possibilities of integration. Imagine if Jonathon had been able to go up the corridor to get diagnosed even faster and receive the right kind of support even faster. Jonathon’s story shows the power of prevention. There are so many people in Bournemouth East who are struggling to get the routine appointments that could spot problems and fix them sooner.

Of course we need more appointments and of course we need more workers, but we also need a rethink of who does what. In my constituency, as elsewhere, I know the potential for local hygienists and therapists to use the full scope of their practice, and indeed for Bournemouth to pilot a new model of therapy-led practices, with dentists covering only the work that sits outside scope.

I would welcome investment in the training and development of an oral health team who could learn by doing, providing clinical and preventive services to people who need them. Right now, Health Sciences University in Boscombe could help to increase local people’s access to oral health care by training even more professionals for the future and getting support to people who need it, bringing down the waiting list while also training people up and particularly providing outreach in areas of deprivation.

There are so many areas of policy that we could focus on. I would love to talk at length about the reform of the dental contract, but in the hope that colleagues will do so, I will focus instead on the importance of empowering people by giving them accurate and clear information about NHS dentistry.

The NHS app and the nhs.uk website are managed by NHS Digital and the NHS Business Services Authority—I said “NHS” quite a lot there. It is the responsibility of NHS contractors to update for their specific provision. That means that there is no kind of oversight or meaningful guarantee of accuracy of information.

In April, before the general election, my team rang around all the surgeries in Bournemouth that were offering spaces to new NHS patients. They discovered that many had not updated their details, sometimes for years. Since then, there have been a small number of updates, perhaps prompted by my team’s calls. However, most of the surgeries that were recently showing as not having updated their details were private. They were only offering private appointments and seemed baffled to be rung by somebody looking for NHS care.

It is not just that time-poor people who are desperate for dental care might be accessing incorrect information. It struck me and my team that people could be ringing surgeries listed on NHS platforms for NHS care—they are not listed as private dental providers. When those people are unable to access NHS care, they may be so desperate for any kind of care that they will buy into private dental provision.

When we checked it out with the NHS, it had no way of determining whether patients commit to private dental provision, or what service members of the public may be offered. We were told that although so many private surgeries were not listed as private on the website and digital platforms, the NHS could not comment on the advertising of private dental providers. In April, under the Conservative Government, we discovered that there were no new NHS places available in a dental surgery in Bournemouth. Things have improved slightly since then, but only slightly.

We need to improve the accuracy of the information that we provide to our public by putting in place the right mechanisms. We need to strengthen our digital platforms to ensure that citizens can book appointments, get personalised notifications to book routine check-ups and compare waiting times and patient satisfaction scores.

Lastly, we need a digital health record as a single source of truth about someone’s health. That information is fragmented across pharmacies, GP surgeries, dental practices, hospitals and people’s phones. How much better would it be to bring that information together so that someone’s medical record is in hand and complete when they are seen? That would allow them to be seen by the right person at the right time in the right setting.

Our NHS was founded on the principle that health should not depend on wealth. However, people who can pay are paying. The use of private healthcare will continue to rocket, perhaps even through unintended encouragement on NHS platforms, unless we co-locate, innovate and integrate.

A healthy population will unlock a stronger Britain. I look forward to supporting the Government in their efforts to change our NHS and our NHS dentistry, so that they can survive and serve our public.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate the hon. Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) on securing a debate on this important subject, starting at the significant time of two-thirty—I thought that was particularly skilled of him. [Laughter.] I thought you would like that one, Mr Vickers.

Nobody should have painful teeth and nobody should have difficulty accessing an NHS dentist. Lincolnshire, which is home to my constituency, suffers similar challenges with access to NHS dentistry; indeed, I led an Adjournment debate on the topic in October 2021. It has been pointed out that the number of dentists is not the issue; in fact, we have more dentists per capita than we did 10 years ago. Rather, dentists are either in the wrong place—concentrated in urban rather than rural and coastal areas—or they do not perform NHS work, for a variety of reasons. That leads to the underspend that has been described.

There has been some progress, with 500 more practices accepting NHS patients as a result of the dental recovery plan, and 6 million more dental treatment processes completed in 2023 than in 2021-22. One thing that helped with that was the patient premium for new patients, who are more likely than repeat patients to have a problem with their teeth that requires treatment. They are also more expensive for dentists to treat, so the current contract disincentivises the seeing of new patients. The patient premium is funded until April 2025. Will the Minister say whether he plans to continue it beyond that date? Another help has been the golden hello of up to £20,000 for dentists working in underserved areas, including the south-west, the midlands and East Anglia. Will the Minister say whether that scheme will continue?

A number of hon. Members have mentioned a long-term workforce plan. There are already additional dental training places in the south-west, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith) pointed out, there can be challenges in the way the training is organised, which means that people do not stay in the local area—although more do stay than if they had been trained elsewhere. Will the Minister look in detail at the problems my hon. Friend raised?

Ultimately, we have more dentists than ever before, but private dentistry is much more lucrative than NHS dentistry, and the NHS contract is complicated, offers disincentives and needs reform. The previous Government began reforming the 2006 contract by increasing the UDA rate to £28 as a minimum. The Labour party had a manifesto promise to negotiate with the BDA. Will the Minister confirm if negotiations have started and, if they have not, when he expects them to start?

[Tom Hayes]

I have just been rereading the 2010 Conservative manifesto—a delightful read. On page 47, it promises full dental contract reform. I then looked at comments by Conservative Ministers in 2024, when they promised to “consider” dental contract reform. Can the hon. Lady explain why no meaningful reform happened over those 14 years of Conservative government?

NHS Performance: Darzi Investigation

Tom Hayes Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

As the right hon. Gentleman knows, because I imagine he will have got exactly the same briefing I used to get when I was in his shoes and being advised by exactly the same civil servants—and I am having to let this flow back into my memory here—the average person in England is within walking distance of their pharmacy. He will know that in many high streets in our market towns, as well as in London and other urban areas, there is a density of pharmacies. We want to support those pharmacies to ensure they are able to provide the services that they can provide, and in fairness, to enable pharmacists to work at the top of their licences. He supported Pharmacy First when I introduced it, so I am a little surprised that he appears to be casting doubt on it, but I am grateful for his intervention.

The next point is that our women’s health strategy—it does not have the attention from his ministerial team that it should have at the moment, and I hope that will improve over the coming months—is seeing the roll-out of women’s health hubs across England into every integrated care board area by the end of this year, ensuring that women’s health issues receive the attention they deserve.

Of course, there are parts of the NHS that need to change and do much better. The NHS needs to reform for the future of healthcare, and our focus must be on improving outcomes for patients, not protecting structures, bureaucracy and vested interests in the NHS. As I have said repeatedly, we will scrutinise constructively and support any meaningful efforts to reform the NHS to improve outcomes and experiences for patients, because we all want the NHS to thrive.

However, after nearly 100 days, there has not been anything yet for us to scrutinise or indeed support from this Government. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State says he has just given me a list. Interestingly, I am pretty sure that three out of those four were started under my Government. [Interruption.] I am pretty sure that I was the Secretary of State who ordered the review of the Care Quality Commission, precisely because I was so concerned. He will be able to build on that report, and quite rightly so, but he should please be careful of his facts. Disappointingly, it is the right hon. Gentleman’s fondness for parties and concerts that has made the news recently, rather than his health policies. This Government need to sober up and start taking responsibility for their choices.

[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

On Saturday, I had a surgery appointment with a young lady who has struggled to access support for her eating disorder and mental health issues. She has gone through some of the most difficult experiences anybody can go through. She asked me a simple question: “Why have I been unable to access NHS support for my mental health?” What would the shadow Secretary of State say to my constituent, who, when she looks back at the reasons, frankly blames the previous Government?

[Victoria Atkins]

First, I am very sorry to hear that. Again, the way we were trying to deal with the enormous increase we have seen in mental ill health across our country was first of all to boost mental health services for children and young people. Indeed, the hon. Member may not be aware of this, but we rolled out mental health support teams across nearly 45% of schools. We wanted to complete that to 100% of schools by the end of the decade, and I very much hope that the Secretary of State will be taking up that policy and delivering it.

The hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) might know that there seems to have been a real increase in eating disorders since the pandemic. We know, for example, that the impact of social media sites, and the algorithms that sit behind them, can lead people who are already feeling very vulnerable into even darker places. So when the Secretary of State says that there should be a cross-Government piece of work, I very much agree with him—I hope he will achieve that through his mission board. But we really have to look at how we as a society can deal with some of these causes, because I do not think anyone is happy with seeing such a huge increase in anxiety and mental ill health among our young people since the pandemic.