Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Will Quince

Tuesday 23rd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

The hon. Lady raises an important point, and I ask her to write to me, please, so that we can look into it.

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

Given the importance of the UK’s life sciences sector, could my right hon. Friend update the House on commercial clinical trial recruitment?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Will Quince

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

No doctor wants to be on strike, so I welcome the new deal with the consultant unions. It shows that by being reasonable, pragmatic and acting in good faith, unions can deliver for their members. Does my right hon. Friend agree?

[Victoria Atkins]

My hon. Friend knows only too well the importance of industrial action and the impact it can have on patients and on the NHS as a whole. I am pleased that the BMA has announced today, following the previous settlement that was narrowly rejected in its ballot, that it has been able to get back around the table with my officials and me. We have been able to find a fair and reasonable settlement that the BMA will advocate for and recommend to its members. We hope that that shows those who are choosing to strike that constructive negotiations, and trying to sort out some of the concerns that we know clinicians have, can be dealt with in a reasonable manner, which is of benefit not just to staff, but to patients.

NHS Winter Update

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Will Quince

Monday 8th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I hope the hon. Gentleman will be interested to know that we have made cancer treatment waiting times a key focus of our elective recovery plan, which has been backed by an additional £8 billion in revenue funding across the spending review period. We have made progress by delivering record numbers of urgent cancer checks, with more than 2.9 million people seen in the 12 months to October last year. Of course there is more to do, and I would be very happy to meet him and colleagues across the House to discuss the practical ways by which treatment can reach our constituents. He will not be surprised to know that cancer is a priority not just for me personally, but for the Government as a whole.

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement; there is a lot in it to welcome, but I particularly welcome the additional 11,000 virtual ward beds. Hospital at home is hugely popular and we know it takes pressure off our hospital. I thank all of the clinicians who helped to make that possible. Can she confirm that it is her intention now to go further and roll it out to more hospitals and more specialties, so that more patients can recover at home?

[Victoria Atkins]

I thank my hon. Friend for all his work in making that happen. He worked very hard on virtual wards when he was a Health Minister, and they represent a real step change in how we treat people with long-term conditions who can be monitored safely at home. They mean that people do not have to spend time in hospital, with all the pressures that can mean for us as individuals. Importantly, that also frees up beds for other patients who need them. I am keen to roll the scheme out further. Indeed, we have not just met but exceeded our initial ambition, which is why I can confirm that we have delivered 11,000 places in the virtual bed ward category.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Will Quince

Thursday 14th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on her private Member’s Bill. The Government will not be supporting it, but we welcome the focus she is bringing to this important issue. In the 21st century, things like social media will help to get the message out to manufacturers and businesses that they simply cannot rip women off. The work uncovered on Friday in the Rose review of access to finance, which female entrepreneurs are sadly not getting at the moment, is precisely why the Government are looking to help female entrepreneurs to set up businesses that will not rip women off.

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

Will the Minister kindly provide an update on the projects being supported by the tampon tax fund?

[Victoria Atkins]

I regret to say that I do not have that list to hand at the moment, not least because I was preparing answers on the pink charge on female products, but I will endeavour to write to my hon. Friend with a list. I know the work he has done on this vital topic. I am sure that, like me, he was delighted at the Chancellor’s announcement yesterday that we will be providing free sanitary products to secondary schools.

Knife Crime Prevention Orders

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Will Quince

Monday 4th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I note in passing that the reserves of Leicestershire police have risen by £3.8 million since 2011, so just a fraction of the £27.6 million currently in reserves may go a very long way. I hope the hon. Lady will vote with the Government tomorrow to give Leicestershire police and other police forces up to a further £970 million on top of last year’s increases, with the help of police and crime commissioners.

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

I welcome this initiative, which I think will make a difference, but we must go further. The Minister knows that since entering this House I have campaigned for both first aid education and weapons awareness education to be on the national curriculum. We are halfway there, with first aid entering the curriculum. What steps can she take to ensure that weapons awareness appears on our national curriculum?

[Victoria Atkins]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who has indeed campaigned so much, not just on serious violence in general, but on county lines in particular, representing as he does an important town in Essex. The Government’s work through the serious violence taskforce has included sending out lesson plans before last year’s summer holidays, because we listened to youth workers who said to us, “Before children go off on their summer holidays, please can we help teachers teach them about the risks of carrying a knife?” We also support the work of charities such as the St Giles Trust, which goes a very long way to helping children. The Department for Education plan to introduce relationship education in schools will, of course, help, because it is about ensuring that children are not exploited and know what behaviour they should expect from their friends and older mentors. That is all part of a joined-up package.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Will Quince

Monday 21st January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

21. Will the Minister join me in welcoming the £664,000 allocated to Essex from the Home Office early intervention youth fund? Will the Secretary of State keep the situation under review while ensuring that Essex police have the resources required to continue to tackle this issue?

[Victoria Atkins]

I am delighted that Essex is one of 29 projects across the country that have received money under the early intervention youth fund. The project in Essex will help to support the violence and vulnerability project. As we know, it is the vulnerability of young people that often places them so starkly in the path of those gangsters who want to exploit them.

Baby Loss

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Will Quince

Thursday 13th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince]

The hon. Gentleman raises an incredibly good point. In the run-up to birth, people can go to groups such as NCT and prenatal classes, so I totally agree. We have made friends who have gone through similar experiences. You feel that you can talk openly with them, because they have gone through very similar experiences and are feeling the same things as you. That is very powerful. There may be a role that charities and the NHS can play in putting parents—where they feel able—in touch with other parents who may want to talk about their experience.

I shall speak briefly about Government targets. I know that the Government sometimes get a hard time on the NHS, but they have accepted the premise of our argument. I remember first meeting my right hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich as Minister responsible for care quality—it was like pushing at an open door. We now have firm commitments to a reduction of 20% by the end of this Parliament and 50% by 2030. It is our job as an all-party parliamentary group to hold the Government’s feet to the fire and to make sure that they are working towards those targets and that we start to see results.

I could not let this debate go by without talking about some of the issues that charities have raised with me. I shall touch on prevention and then talk about bereavement. Research in this area is vital. As my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury said, around 50%—in fact, the figure is 46%—of stillbirths and 5% of neonatal deaths are unexplained. We need to look, for example, at ethnicity and ask why south Asian women are 60% more likely to have a stillbirth, and why black women are twice as likely to do so. Why is there a geographical disparity across the UK? I know that part of the answer is social inequality, but why is the figure 4.9% in some parts of the UK and 7.1% in others? That is around a 25% variation. It is not acceptable and we need to understand why it exists.

We need to look at multiple pregnancies, as the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) mentioned from the Scottish National party Front Bench, and at lower income families. We need to study our European counterparts and see why they are getting it so right and whether we can implement similar measures in the UK.

Some right hon. and hon. Members have mentioned public health and they are right to do so. Maternal age, nutrition and diet, drugs, alcohol and smoking are all relevant. We could achieve a 7% reduction if no woman smoked during pregnancy. That is a huge target to achieve and we could do a lot of work on smoking cessation, especially during pregnancy. Studies show that we could achieve a 12% reduction if no mothers were overweight or obese.

There is a huge piece of work that we could do on empowering women and mothers-to-be. Initiatives such as Count the Kicks are important. Nobody knows their body as well as a mother. If she feels that there is something wrong, there is a good chance that something is wrong. When she picks up the phone to the hospital or to her GP and her concern is dismissed with the words, “Don’t worry, it’s not important,” she needs to get it checked out. If there is nothing to worry about, great, but on the occasions when we do not get a concern checked out and then something terrible happens, we have to hold ourselves responsible.

There are various initiatives to empower women. Teddy’s Wish is currently sponsoring fantastic folders—as anybody who has had a baby will know, mothers-to-be get purple maternity notes which they carry around religiously just in case the baby comes early. The wonderful plastic folders that the maternity notes go in inform mothers—and fathers—what to look out for, what are the signs if something is not right, when to pick up the phone, when to go and see their GP and when to go to the hospital. Such innovation is exactly what is needed.

Investigation and reporting are important so that we learn the lessons of every stillbirth and neonatal death. Covering things up and dismissing them with comments such as, “That’s unexplained. These things happen. I’m terribly sorry,” are unacceptable. We have to learn from every case. I am pleased that the Government have put a significant amount of money into setting up a system of reporting to enable us to investigate and learn from every stillbirth and neonatal death.

The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) rightly mentioned post-mortems. So many parents are not offered a post-mortem. One might wonder what parent would want that opportunity, but parents who lose children often want to know why. They want to understand how and why it happened and how they can make sure that it does not happen again. Offered the opportunity, many parents opt for a post-mortem because they know that that research can help others, but clinicians may not be asking the question—often with good intentions, because it is not an easy question to ask. We must ask the question if we are to get post-mortem rates up, which will feed into the research that will allow us to cut our stillbirth rate.

An hon. Member—I apologise, I cannot remember who it was—mentioned late-stage pregnancy scanning. In this country we do not scan past 20 weeks. We scan at 12 weeks and we scan routinely at 20 weeks, but there is no routine scanning past that. I find it bizarre that the abnormality scan takes place halfway through the pregnancy, but after that the mother-to-be is not seen again for a scan until she arrives at the hospital when she is in labour. Other countries across the world and particularly our counterparts in Europe do scans at 36 weeks or Doppler scans. There are huge improvements that we could make in that area.

I want to clarify one point in relation to prevention. The NHS is brilliant, and where we get it right in this country, we really get it right. The problem is the inconsistency across the NHS. I know that the Secretary of State and the Minister of State will agree when I say that we have some of the best care in the world, but it is important that that is replicated in every hospital and every maternity unit in the country, so that whatever hospital a woman goes into and whatever GP she sees, she will get the same level of care and consistent advice.

Even if we manage to achieve our target, even if we match our European counterparts and reduce our stillbirth and neonatal death rates by 50%, that will still mean between 1,500 and 2,500 parents going through that personal tragedy every year. That is why it is important that the APPG puts an equal emphasis on bereavement. I have talked about consistency of care across the NHS, and there should also be consistency of bereavement pathway and bereavement care across the NHS. It is important that we consider aspects such as training for staff. I know that Ministers have put huge amounts of funding into training as part of the plan to achieve a significant reduction in the stillbirth rate.

[Victoria Atkins]

I am extremely grateful, as I said, to my hon. Friend for his part in securing this debate. I mentioned my constituents who had the nightmare of losing their baby boy. I asked the mother to write to me to set out precisely what had happened. Perhaps one of the most harrowing parts of an already harrowing story was when she told me that at the hospital she and her husband were not allowed to stay with the little boy for long. They were pressured to leave and when she was leaving the baby boy, she wanted to go back to say her last goodbye. She was refused. She collapsed to the floor and the officials around her said that if she did not get up, she would have to leave in a wheelchair or a stretcher, as it was time to go. Does my hon. Friend agree that kindness costs nothing, and that there is a duty on everyone, whether in the NHS or in the police, to make sure that when they are dealing with parents in such a situation, kindness is very much part of the way that they behave?

[Will Quince]

Yes, and my hon. Friend raises a good point. I only wish that the disgraceful behaviour and story that she has just related was unique, but sadly it is not. Reports from across the country and personal testimonies that I have read, sadly, echo such experiences. That is exactly what we need to address, and it is why training in this area is so important. Midwives and clinicians should be trained to deal with bereavement, including what language to use and what not to say. I will not repeat some of the things that I have heard said to parents who are grieving.

In our case, a stillbirth did not come as a huge shock, but let us not forget that many parents have no idea that such an experience, of stillbirth or neonatal death, is coming. It is one of the most emotionally sensitive periods of their lives and they are at their most fragile. My hon. Friend is right: it costs nothing to act with kindness, empathy and compassion. I would like to think that we can reach a point where those themes run through every maternity unit in the country. I know that that is the case in the vast majority of maternity units, but where we have instances such as my hon. Friend describes, they have to be ironed out.

I know that I am pushing your patience with regard to time, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I think that the bereavement point is so important. We must have bereavement suites and bereavement-trained midwives in every hospital in the country, and we need gynaecology-trained counsellors in every maternity unit. We also need ongoing mental health support, because the time a bereaved parent leaves the hospital is the not the end of their grief; for many it is just the start. Indeed, future pregnancies can be the most traumatic periods, because from the day they find out they are pregnant to the day they have a crying baby in their arms, they are thinking, “Is this going to happen again?” What mental health support is available? In some parts of the country it is fantastic, but in others it simply is not.

I want to make two final points. One relates to relationship support. We know that between 80% and 90% of relationships break down after the loss of a child, and that has a huge social cost. That is why mental health support is so important. I also think—this is one of the reasons I co-chair the APPG—that the voice of fathers must be heard. Fathers feel that they have to act as a rock, but in many cases we were there too. In my view, there is no worse experience than seeing your wife give birth to a lifeless baby. It is something that never leaves you. Every single day I think about my son. I think about what he would have been like yesterday, on what would have been his second birthday. I imagine a small boy running around our house, causing havoc and winding up his sisters. It is not to be, but every single day we live with that grief. Fathers need support too, as indeed do the wider family.

I want to end on a positive note. This is a hugely exciting time for us, because the opportunity for change is enormous. The APPG has made enormous progress since publishing our vision document, and I encourage those Members who have not yet seen it to find a copy—it is available online and in paper copy. What we have achieved since February, working with magnificent charities across the country, and with individuals feeding in their personal experiences, has been absolutely incredible. This is just the beginning of the journey, because we have just set out our aspirations and our vision of what we want to achieve. I know that we are pushing at an open door, because the Government want to achieve these targets too.

I want to send one final message to every parent who is bereaved up and down this country: we care; we are going to keep talking about it; and we are not going to stop talking about it until we reduce the stillbirth rate and, most importantly, we have the best quality bereavement care in the world.

Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Will Quince

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

The primary duty of any Government is the security of its people. Above all, we need to ensure that those tasked with keeping us safe have the powers to do so. I congratulate the Secretary of State for listening to concerns about the draft Bill and taking steps to improve it before bringing it to Parliament. It is a better Bill than before. However, I am afraid I still have some concerns that prevent me from wholeheartedly supporting it.

First, everyone in this House wants the police and security services to have the necessary powers to intercept communications data, but the Bill goes further than that. It extends those powers to public and local authorities. Clause 64 states that a designated senior officer may grant an authorisation for obtaining telephone data to detect or prevent crime and disorder. A designated senior officer is defined as anyone at a local council with the

“position of director, head of service or service manager”.

I would suggest that there are no circumstances under which the head of waste services at my local council should be able to authorise an application for telephone data to prevent crime or disorder.

The Bill should not give councils these powers in the first place. We have seen what happens when we extend these sorts of powers to local councils: they abuse them. We all remember examples of local authorities using terrorism legislation to rummage through residents’ bins or to spy on local paperboys. If local councils need to investigate crimes and require telephone data, my response is simple: go and speak to the police. These are very serious powers, which is why I urge Ministers to restrict them to the police and the security services.

[Victoria Atkins]

Local authorities will not have the powers to deal with internet connection records. Indeed, the powers of local authorities are very much restricted, following the very legitimate concerns voiced several years ago about exactly the things my hon. Friend describes.

[Will Quince]

I take my hon. Friend’s point about internet data, but local authorities will have the powers in relation to telecommunication data. That is still very much in the Bill.

My second concern is around the modification of warrants. Clause 30 allows the Secretary of State to add, remove or change the names of people, organisations or premises to a warrant already issued. We are told this is for situations where the same target uses different names—in other words, the use of aliases. For example, the same individual may be known as Mr Smith with O₂ and Mr Clark with Vodafone. That must be made clear in the Bill. These modifications should apply only to adding, removing or altering aliases of existing targets on warrants; the Bill should not permit changing names to investigate a completely different person.

My third and final problem concerns situations where a judicial commissioner refuses an urgent modification. The Bill says that where a commissioner refuses an urgent warrant, they can require that the information collected through that warrant be destroyed or restrict how it is used, but it does not make clear the commissioner’s powers when they refuse an urgent modification of a warrant. When the commissioner refuses urgent modifications to a warrant, I would like the Bill to allow them to require that any material obtained under the modified provisions of the warrant be destroyed or that restrictions be put on its use. In some instances, judicial commissioners are not required to review or approve modifications made to warrants at all. The Government should agree that all modifications require the approval of a judicial commissioner.

Despite those concerns, I will vote with the Government today. In order that we be kept safe, we need a Bill that confirms the powers of our police and security services, but we have only one chance to get the Bill right, so I hope that amendments can be made on Report.