UKPOL.CO.UK

Category: Health

  • Mike Penning – 2022 Speech on Accountability in the NHS

    Mike Penning – 2022 Speech on Accountability in the NHS

    The speech made by Mike Penning, the Conservative MP in Hemel Hempstead, in Westminster Hall, House of Commons, on 30 November 2022.

    I beg to move,

    That this House has considered accountability in the NHS.

    It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir George. I called this debate on accountability in the NHS. As a nation, we love our NHS which does a fantastic job for us, day in, day out. However, like any human being or organisation, sometimes it makes mistakes. When the NHS makes mistakes, the process of trying to get an apology or a mistake rectified is invariably a bureaucratic nightmare.

    I have a couple of examples I would like to raise. I have permission from one to use their name, but I probably will not do so, because I will yet again pass correspondence to the Minister. I appreciate that the Minister here, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince), is not responsible in the Department for this subject. The relevant Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield), is on the Floor of the House answering questions, and I thank this Minister for explaining why she is not here.

    We in Parliament are here to speak up for those who sometimes cannot speak up for themselves. When something goes wrong, Sir George, you would think we could get answers for constituents and get matters rectified, but within the NHS there is a lack of ministerial accountability, which I will come to in a moment. The complaints procedure eventually ends up with the ombudsman, but it takes for ever. There is a feeling in my constituency that, when things go wrong, the longer the process can be delayed, the more people will just accept what has happened. In some cases, they will sadly not be around any more. For their families and loved ones, this short debate is very important.

    Probably the most dramatic example for me, not of the physical effects of surgery but of the effect on someone’s life, concerns one of my constituents. The NHS decided in 1986 that he needed an operation on his nose, but the operation that took place was not the one that was supposed to. I will use the language: it was botched. It was probably not intentional; it was a mistake but, to this day, that has had detrimental effects on his quality of life.

    My constituent tried to go through the process of getting it rectified. I have tried to find out what was going on. He has pushed from pillar to post by different trusts: University College London and West Hertfordshire. I have written to previous Ministers over the years, only to be told that Ministers do not interfere in individual cases. I accept that but, when we reach a situation where there is nowhere else to go, ministerial accountability is important.

    Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)

    I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, not least for the sensitivity of the issues he is raising. Ministers under Governments of all colours have sought to keep NHS operational matters at arm’s length. Does he agree that that reduces accountability and effectiveness? I am thinking more generally about the current huge backlog in cancer diagnosis and treatment. I do not see any direct and urgent Government intervention. Does the right hon. Gentleman think that is partly the result of the lack direct operational accountability for Ministers to the service?

    Sir Mike Penning

    I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. We have seen during covid that, actually, when things get really bad, Ministers can step in and Prime Ministers can step in, but when we talk about individual cases, they cannot.

    In the case I am referring to, I ended up writing to the Minister, to be told to go to the ombudsman. I got fobbed off by the ombudsman, after we had been to the trust three or four times. I then wrote to the Minister again—this is over the course of years—to be told to take legal advice. This particular person has now been told, “Go back to your GP and get them to re-refer you if you’ve still got problems.” He has problems because they did not do the operation properly in the first place, and it has had a massive long-term effect on this gentleman’s quality of life.

    That is not the only case. I have been here for nearly 18 years, and I worked for a Member of Parliament for many years before that. In every constituency, this sort of case is brought before the MP. I have another example. Last summer, in the middle of heatwave in July, when the temperatures were unbelievably high, a very vulnerable young lady was brought in for a scan at my local hospital. She is the most vulnerable young lady. Her mother cares for her 24/7. She has carers in. She is a wheelchair user or bed-bound. She was left on a trolley in the heat for five hours when her ambulance did not arrive.

    When I contacted the trust and said, “What happened there?” it blamed the ambulance trust. When I contacted the ambulance trust, it said, “No, it was cancelled by the trust—it was their fault.” I do not care whose fault it was. It was the NHS’s fault that this happened to a very vulnerable young lady. She had no drink and no food. She was very, very ill. The ambulance trust said that the return journey was cancelled because she was so poorly on the trolley—well, she was so poorly because she had been left there for five hours!

    Trying to get to the bottom of what happens within the NHS when something goes wrong is so difficult. We have seen terrible situations in maternity services and in trusts around the country. These problems need to be addressed early on, instead of the drawbridge being brought up and people having to go through a massive complaints procedure where they have to complain three times before going to the ombudsman, and then the ombudsman will say it is out of time, and if they are not careful, they cannot go to court because that is out of time too. Is that the way we want our NHS to be seen by the public, who love the NHS?

    The NHS sees the NHS as a single entity. As MPs—and I was a shadow Health Minister for four and a half years—we understand that it is not a single entity. It is a set of silos where everybody passes the buck back and forth. What we need is joined-up thinking. When Members like myself write to Ministers about these issues, the answer is not to say, “Nothing to do with me, guv” and pass it down the line to the ombudsman or a lawyer. That surely costs more money and does not put the NHS in a particularly good light with my constituents who have had their operations botched

    Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)

    I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. He talks about silos, and I want to give him an example of that in my constituency. Many people await their care packages in order to be released from hospital and get better at home. On the other hand, there are people waiting urgently for hospital beds who cannot get one. Does he agree that there must be greater communication between trust managers and social care workers to ensure efficiency of care in the community, which would free up hospital beds and allow people to be treated quicker? In other words, we should do away with the silos and get things co-ordinated.

    Sir Mike Penning

    I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I know that right next to my constituency, my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell) goes to Watford General Hospital and looks at the boards to see whether people can medically be discharged, but they cannot because there is a lack of joined-up thinking.

    This is different. This is about the need for the NHS, when it may or may not have made a mistake, to address it full-on at the start. It should not draw up the drawbridge, with people having to go through the long, drawn-out procedure of making complaints and going to the ombudsman. For a Minister to say to a colleague and fellow MP, “Perhaps this person needs to take legal advice,” is not the attitude we should have towards people who have done the right thing. The NHS has said that they should have an operation, and the NHS has mucked up and botched—I use that word under privilege. At the same time, the person’s life has been detrimentally affected for years and years to come.

    I know the Minister is not the Minister responsible, but because we are all constituency MPs, I guarantee that before he was in his position, people were at his surgeries or wrote to him to say, “This happened to me within the NHS. What can you do to help me do something about it?” Somewhere along the line, perhaps the short debate we are having today will nudge the Department of Health and Social Care and the Government —I was a Minister in several Departments—to look at ministerial oversight.

    Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)

    The right hon. Gentleman is making a fantastic speech. In the light of this week’s shocking reports from Byline Times about the amount of sexual abuse and rapes that have occurred in hospital settings, does he agree that to improve accountability, we need the Government not only to urgently repeal the five-year rule, which limits some people from making complaints to the NHS, but to have clear, systematic and consistent data collection on all sexual misconduct across all hospital settings?

    Sir Mike Penning

    As usual, I agree with the hon. Lady. We do not agree on everything, but we agree on 99% of things.

    This is the crux of the matter, and there are two real issues here. In the case that I spoke about earlier, which goes way back to the ’80s, the gentleman’s mental and physical health has not been great. Other people, including the extreme examples alluded to by the hon. Lady, may be mentally affected in a way that I and many of the people in this room probably cannot understand. To have a block exclusion post five years seems so arbitrary in the modern world. The Government really must look at whether there should be an arbitrary rule and perhaps leave it to others to decide, rather than setting down in regulation the exceptional circumstances that might well have been in place. Trusts do have delegated powers—many more powers than I think they should have—and I know the new Act will help that, but it does not take into consideration the points that we have tried to raise in this morning’s debate.

    If we had this debate on the Floor of the House, I think we would have a full Chamber of colleagues. Rather than talking down the NHS, they would be saying, “When things go wrong, we need to address them.” When I was Police Minister, there was a big mistake under my portfolio, and I went before the House, explained that mistakes were made on the funding formula and put my hands up. I took a lot of flak for that, but it was a way to address things going forward. With the NHS being such a massive organisation, and an organisation that the public want to be able to trust, it must be better for us to address the issues at the start of a complaint.

    The Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes, did not write the letter that I mentioned; it was written by her officials, who desperately want to defend the NHS. The complaint was not about the NHS in general; it was about a specific issue that we need to address. We are all here as Members of Parliament because we are supposed to represent the taxpayer—representation through taxation. I should be able to represent my constituents in that way without being told to go to the ombudsman. I know I have to go to the ombudsman, because I have been here a very long time, so I am capable of working that out. I am also capable of working out that we are outside the time limit, given the five-year rule.

    We need a change of mindset. I do not want individual Ministers to say, “This operation should take place, that one shouldn’t, and the hospital should have this number of wards”, but there has to be ministerial oversight when things go well, and when things go wrong.

    My constituent has given me permission to raise his case. I think it would be more useful not to put his name on the record here, but I will pass another letter to the Minister, which I hope might get a little more positivity when the Minister responsible writes back to me, rather than a response that fobs us off and says, “Please go away.”

  • Marsha De Cordova – 2022 Speech on the National Eye Health Strategy

    Marsha De Cordova – 2022 Speech on the National Eye Health Strategy

    The speech made by Marsha De Cordova, the Labour MP for Battersea, in the House of Commons on 29 November 2022.

    I beg to move,

    That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to publish a national eye health strategy for England; and to require that strategy to include measures for improving eye health outcomes, for reducing waiting times for eye health care, for improving patient experiences of eye health care, for ensuring that providers of eye health care work together in an efficient way, for increasing the capacity and skills of the eye health care workforce, and for making more effective use of research and innovation in eye health care.

    The Bill would ensure that regardless of where one lives, everyone can access the right care where and when they need it, eliminating the postcode lottery and addressing the inequalities in access to eye care services. An estimated 2 million people are living with sight loss in the UK. We rely on our eyes every day, yet we do not give much thought to our eye health until our vision changes.

    A report earlier this summer showed that 17.5 million adults in the UK had not had an eye test in the past two years, as recommended. Anyone can be impacted by sight loss, and Members from across the House will have hundreds of constituents affected. Fifty per cent. of all sight loss is avoidable and 250 people begin to lose their sight every day, with a shocking 21 people a week losing their sight due to a preventable cause.

    Eye care services in England are under intense pressure due to huge backlogs as a result of the pandemic, demand from an ageing population and low recruitment and retention of all groups of the ophthalmology clinical workforce. More than 650,000 people are on the waiting list in England, of whom 37% have been waiting for over 18 weeks and over 4% have been waiting for more than a year—that is, 26,000 people who have been waiting for more than 12 months to see a specialist.

    Ophthalmology has been the busiest NHS out-patient clinic for the past three years. Delays to diagnosis and treatment can lead to a complete loss of sight. For example, patients with age-related macular degeneration can experience rapid and sometimes complete central vision loss within weeks if not treated. As well as the social and emotional impact of sight loss, there is a huge economic cost to the UK economy, which is estimated to be £36 billion annually.

    To respond to the crisis in eye health, the Government can commit to implementing a national eye health strategy for England that would include measures to improve eye health outcomes, reduce waiting times, improve patient experiences, increase the capacity and skills of the workforce and make more effective use of data, research and innovation.

    In the first instance, the Government could seek to appoint a single Minister with responsibility for eye health rather than having the current situation where multiple Ministers are responsible.

    The strategy should include the following areas. First, there should be an eye health and sight loss pathway to require care and support for those with sight loss, focusing on the provision of non-clinical community support to complement the work of community optometrists, ophthalmologists in hospitals and rehab officers. The pathway must focus on the physical and emotional impacts of being diagnosed with sight loss, as research has shown that people affected are likely to experience poor mental health lifetime outcomes such as depression and anxiety. It should not only address geographical eye health inequalities, but ensure more equity of access to eye care among communities and populations more at risk of being unable to access NHS sight tests, including people who are homeless and people with a learning disability.

    The second area is to improve connections between primary and secondary care, with an emphasis on integrated care systems and on improving the relationships and collaboration across the two services so that they can work more effectively together while ensuring timely and accurate referrals. That would significantly improve patient experiences and health outcomes.

    The third area is workforce expansion. Limited capacity is a particular concern in eye care because there is a significant shortage of eye doctors. Back in 2018, the Royal College of Ophthalmologists revealed that 434 additional specialist posts were required to meet demand, and we know that the situation is now even worse. The World Health Organisation’s Workforce 2030 plan recognises the fundamental role of the workforce in improving health outcomes. A national strategy for eye health must address that issue, placing emphasis on the recruitment, training and upskilling of medical and non-medical eye health professionals.

    The fourth area is health intelligence and data. Meaningful action starts with good-quality data, but for too long population data has not been used effectively to pinpoint the location of need and places where opportunities for change can be found. A strategy should involve focusing on robust data collection to inform decisions and improve the delivery of the service. Advances in research and technology, from how people are diagnosed to how they receive treatment, must be incorporated. Effective and efficient methods are available, but they are not being used. A strategy would change that.

    Finally, the fifth area is raising awareness of eye health by creating better public health messaging. Nearly 2 million people each year turn up at an accident and emergency department or try to get a GP appointment for a problem that could be dealt with by visiting a community optometrist. We need campaigns to raise awareness of the importance of maintaining good eye health and to educate the public on the differences between eye screening and eye tests, along with improved signposting on where to go for help, should one need it.

    Health strategies have delivered positive outcomes in Scotland, as they have in England for other diseases, but at present England is the only country in the UK without an eye health strategy. It is important to note that for such a strategy to be successful and of value, it must be designed in collaboration with stakeholders, including blind and partially sighted people, civil society groups, care providers and the industry. It must also have sufficient resource and investment.

    Given the scale of the problems, it is in the Government’s interest to commit to a strategy. The benefits would transform lives, alleviate pressures on the health service and reduce economic costs. We should make it our goal to ensure that no one loses their sight unnecessarily. I thank everyone who has contributed to the Bill, including the partnership The Eyes Have It, the Thomas Pocklington Trust, industry leaders such as Specsavers and Roche and, most importantly, people living with sight loss. The sector has been united in the call for a national eye health strategy. It is time for the Government to act.

    Question put and agreed to.

    Ordered,

    That Marsha De Cordova, Kate Osamor, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Sir Stephen Timms, Rosie Duffield, Janet Daby, Kim Johnson, Ian Byrne, John McDonnell, Clive Lewis, Dr Rupa Huq and Jim Shannon present the Bill.

    Marsha De Cordova accordingly presented the Bill.

  • Alan Brown – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    Alan Brown – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    The speech made by Alan Brown, the SNP MP for Kilmarnock and Loudoun, in the House of Commons on 29 November 2022.

    Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)

    I am sure that many MPs on this side of the House had no idea that a VIP lane existed for PPE contracts, but even if I did know about a VIP lane for referring contracts, if a constituent came to me and said, “Alan, I have never worked in a PPE environment. I’ve never ordered it before, but I’ve got a great plan. I can order it from China. Just refer me to a Minister”, I would not have done that because it would be impossible to do proper due diligence. So it beggars belief that this Government accepted recommendations from companies with no involvement and no expertise in PPE contracts, and still awarded these billions of pounds of contracts. Instead of mediation with PPE Medpro, is it not the case that a full investigation is needed and, if the Government are not going to do it, surely we need a public inquiry into PPE procurement.

    Neil O’Brien

    We are prepared to litigate whenever a company did not provide. There is a process, which I set out earlier. In many cases, there were people who did have important contacts in China and in other countries where PPE was being produced, and it was important to pursue all those leads because we needed to have that. But, to the hon. Gentleman’s point, due diligence had to be done and was done on all those cases in the same way. I have talked about the scale of the challenge and the 19,000 companies on which due diligence was initially done, and the huge drop-off between that number and the 2,648 companies that actually made it through that filter. So we can see in the difference between 19,000 and 2,648 that there was a huge amount of filtering done by the team of 400 people who were working so hard to try to get the PPE that we needed to the nurses and doctors in our NHS.

  • Peter Grant – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    Peter Grant – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    The speech made by Peter Grant, the SNP MP for Glenrothes, in the House of Commons on 24 November 2022.

    Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)

    My colleagues on the Public Accounts Committee are at an important evidence session this morning, otherwise I have no doubt that many more of them would be here. The report on PPE contracts, which was unanimously agreed by the Committee earlier this year, stated:

    “At no point was consideration given to the extent of the profit margin that potential suppliers would be taking on payments for PPE. Neither was consideration of any potential conflicts between individuals making referrals through the VIP lane and the companies they were referring. We”—

    the Public Accounts Committee, unanimously—

    “are therefore unsurprised to see the reports of excessive profits and conflicts of interest on PPE contracts.”

    Yet if today’s Guardian reports are correct, the extent of lobbying of Cabinet Ministers, one of whom is back in the Cabinet, by a senior Conservative politician went significantly further than the Public Accounts Committee was aware of at the time. Can the Minister confirm that the reports of additional lobbying in today’s Guardian are accurate and, if they are not accurate, can he come back with a statement to confirm that?

    Neil O’Brien

    I read the same article as the hon. Gentleman. I notice that it did not lead to a contract—the case that was mentioned in The Guardian—but more generally, absolutely, there are many lessons to learn about this process. However, we were having to pay, in some cases upfront, for PPE because, as part of the global scramble for PPE that I have described, if we were not prepared to go that extra mile, we would simply not have had the PPE and we would have had more nurses without the vital protective equipment that we all needed.

  • Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    Geraint Davies – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    The speech made by Geraint Davies, the Labour MP for Swansea West, in the House of Commons on 24 November 2022.

    Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)

    The Welsh Labour Government received £874 million for PPE as its population-proportionate share, but spent only £300 million—about a third of the money given. That suggests, says Cardiff University, that the UK Government could have saved £8 billion, or £300 a household across the UK, had they used public authorities, health authorities and councils instead of private profiteering contractors known to Ministers. Will the Minister look carefully at the Welsh model and, in future, use the public sector rather than private sector cronies known to Ministers such as the former Health and Social Care Secretary, the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock), who is out in the jungle making more money for himself?

    Neil O’Brien

    Inevitably, a huge amount of the PPE that is produced in the world is produced by private companies. There is no world in which we could avoid the use of private companies to supply PPE.

  • Steve Barclay – 2022 Speech at the Spectator Health Summit

    Steve Barclay – 2022 Speech at the Spectator Health Summit

    The speech made by Steve Barclay, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, in London on 28 November 2022.

    In the Autumn statement – alongside difficult decisions designed to tackle inflation and keep mortgage rises down – the Prime Minister and the Chancellor made a clear commitment to public services, increasing the NHS budget by an extra £6.6 billion over the next two years and increasing funding for social care by £2.8 billion and £4.7 billion in each of the next two years. So, combined, £8 billion going into 2024.

    That recognises that what happens in our health and care system has a big impact on the wider economy.

    I’m pleased that investment and prioritisation was well-received within the NHS itself, with Amanda Pritchard, the NHS chief executive, welcoming our decision to prioritise health and the NHS Confederation calling it a “positive day for the NHS”.

    But with that financial package a key part now of my job is to make sure those funds are spent effectively.

    That means tackling the pandemic backlogs, operations, access to GPs, and urgent and emergency care. I’m sure this audience recognises that a big part of the challenge we face both with ambulance handovers and in A&E is shaped by what happens with delayed discharge – those patients who are fit to leave hospital but are often still in hospital for many days further.

    Now, efficiency within the NHS is often seen through the lens of finance.

    So, the case I want to make today is that efficiency is not just a finance priority – it’s a patient priority too.

    Because efficiency is an indicator of wider system health.

    An efficient system addresses bottlenecks that delay patient care by designing new journeys for patients that avoid those delays.

    Because quicker – and therefore earlier treatment – will lead to better patient outcomes whether that is from earlier cancer diagnoses, with the announcement a couple of weeks ago on direct access for GPs, or on antibiotics – getting the right antibiotic first time, rather than the third or fourth time. Obviously bringing significant patient benefits, but it is also efficient in terms of cost.

    So an efficient system will get better treatment to the patient and improvement patient outcomes, but in doing so, it will also unlock value for money.

    And for this to happen, we need to move to more personalised care – we can already see examples of this taking shape.

    During the pandemic, people got used to the idea of a Covid test being sent to them at home. Home testing offers the opportunity for patients to be tested for specific things, even before they realise they have the symptoms, enabling them to get care at a much earlier stage than what would have traditionally been the case.

    That kind of fast-tracking is not only potentially life-saving but it also will mean that the NHS over time will pay less for that care.

    Another example is what we set out in the Women’s Health Strategy around one stop shops, enabling women to access a range of services on a single visit. Not only do you improve the speed of care, but we also improve its effectiveness whilst delivering that at a lower cost.

    So we know whether through the Women’s Health Strategy, through Community Diagnostics Centres, through surgical hubs, we can deliver care in different ways – where the treatment is delivered to the patient at an earlier point than is currently the case, but in turn will unlock better value for money.

    And that requires us to think differently about the mix of services. Let me give you an example in terms of Pharmacy First. Pharmacist First you would have thought, in the name, would involve the pharmacy being indeed first, and yet, quite often, the patient goes to the pharmacy before the GP programme referral, suggesting the scope to further streamline the process.

    So, in short, quicker access to treatment means addressing bottlenecks, delivering new pathways, and in doing so, unlocking better outcomes for patients.

    But for this to really take root, we need to be open about our attitude to risk and our risk appetite.

    Currently, I believe the NHS scores the risk of innovation too highly when compared to the risks of the status quo and I think that needs to be recalibrated.

    This is because innovation tends to be judged, in isolation, in a silo.

    Take for example the risks around the introducing machine learning.

    On its own, it may carry some risk. But that risk should be judged against the risk of the status quo, where there may be long delays due to staff shortages, and so the speed of treatment and the ability to better target valuable resource needs to be weighed as part of the risk assessment of that innovation.

    So, we need to be scoring innovation risk within a much wider context than simply looking at it in a silo.

    And as we change our risk appetite for innovation, we also need to change our risk appetite for transparency.

    Because only when we’re transparent about the challenges we face will we empower greater patient choice, particularly in the context of vested interests which are inevitable in a budget of £182 billion.

    It’s also why we need senior clinicians to lead that change too.

    And why I’m so pleased that Professor Sir Tim Briggs – one of the country’s most highly regarded orthopaedic surgeons is taking up his new leadership role as Clinical Lead for the Elective Recovery Programme working closely with Sir Jim Mackey, one of the country’s most respected hospital CEOs.

    Now, one shared point of understanding must be the scale of the Covid backlog, with around now 7.1 million patients.

    We must also be transparent coming out of Covid around excess deaths.

    For example, we know from the data that there are more 50 to 64-year-olds with cardiovascular issues.

    It’s the result of delays in that age group seeing a GP because of the pandemic and in some cases, not getting statins for hypertension in time.

    When coupled with delays to ambulance times we see this reflected in the excess death numbers.

    In time, we may well see a similar challenge in cancer data.

    I want us to innovate around challenges like this.

    We already know that GPs are under pressure. So what else can we do by way of innovation?

    Well, let me give you just one example – we could think about how employers can help us better reach those who might otherwise not come forward?

    So, by being more transparent around who to prioritise on excess deaths, I believe we can engage employers and different ways of reaching key groups.

    When we are collectively understanding the challenges, it becomes easier to find the solutions.

    We also need to be clear about some of the demographic headwinds we face too.

    We have an ageing population.

    By the end of this decade, there are projected to be over four times as many people aged over 80, as a proportion of the population, that there were around the time the NHS was set up.

    On average, treating an 80-year-old is four times more expensive that treating a 50-year-old.

    And as proportion of the population, we have fewer working people to pay for healthcare.

    Around the time the old age pension came in over a century ago in England and Wales, we had 19 people aged 20 to 69, for every person over 70.

    Today that figure is down closer to 5 to 1.

    At the same time, healthcare continues to become more expensive.

    But in the face of such headwinds – from an ageing population or on the legacy of the Covid backlogs – it’s important we also focus on where we have the ability to turn the tide.

    Today I want to pick out on just two of those:

    The expansion of life sciences – and the promise of new treatments and the embrace of technology and the better use of data.

    As today is Life Sciences Day, that’s where I’ll start.

    When we published our Life Sciences Vision last year we also launched ambitious missions, from dementia to vaccine discovery.

    And I’m pleased that we’re seeing four more missions on cancer, obesity, mental health and addiction – and we’re backing those with £113 million of new funds.

    It’s an example of how we’re turning our country’s cutting-edge research capabilities onto the biggest healthcare challenges that we face and doing so in a way where the British people can really experience the benefits.

    And these missions will continue to benefit from the incredible life sciences ecosystem we have built here in the UK, from the MHRA, to NICE, to the NHS.

    And just this morning, that powerful collaboration has seen us give the go ahead to a new life-extending treatment on the NHS for patients with advanced stage prostate cancer. It’s another example of how that ecosystem is working for the benefits of patients.

    Another increasingly important part of that ecosystem is Genomics.

    Whilst Genomics England has been in place since 2014, there is scope to bring forward and apply their science more directly to the immediate challenges the NHS faces, rather than Life Sciences being seen as uneventful research that will emerge in a number of years’ time.

    Genomics in particular offers significant hope to rare diseases, often the diseases that receive less treatment.

    Life sciences offers scope to get the medicines, the right drugs, first time.

    By using genetic insights, we can discover the unique “signature” of a cancer tumour and make sure each patient gets the best course of treatment for them.

    The second area that I wanted to bring up this morning in terms of meeting those headwinds is around tech and big data.

    We are at a historical moment where we have the ability where patients consent to generate big data through the internet of things through new MedTech and wearables.

    We can achieve it because, over the last decade, the cost of computer chips has come down exponentially helping us generate more valuable data, with the ability to store it safely, cheaply and securely in the cloud – which has also increased significantly.

    That in turn combines with machine learning, where we have a new capability to analyse it.

    Generate. Store. Analyse. All of which have been transformed in recent years.

    This is a virtuous triangle that unlocks our ability to move to a more personalised form of care.

    It’s also yet another area where efficiency will actually equate to better patient outcomes, enabling funding to go further.

    Just as genomics can help create more bespoke treatment – like those examples I gave on drug resistance and cancer, so can data.

    And I will encourage the safe and secure sharing of data through the NHS for those patients who consent so that patients can play their part in life-changing medical breakthroughs and become the beneficiaries too.

    Now, we can see this spirit in action with the new Our Future Health research programme, which was launched last month.

    It aims to find new ways to prevent, detect and treat disease.

    Three million people have been invited to join the programme, which will eventually recruit five million or more people from all walks of life.

    Now, throughout the pandemic, the British public showed their willingness to play their part and be part of the solution.

    And it’s great to see them doing so again in our fight against diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer’s and many more.

    Anyone can sign up – so, and I use this as an opportunity for a plug, just go and Google Our Future Health and register online.

    The programme also reflects an innovative new model of funding.

    While about £80 million of the programmes’ funding comes from the UK government another £160 million comes from life sciences companies.

    So, it’s a great example of public and private coming together to strengthen the NHS and help lift some of the burdens of late-stage disease.

    The final thing I want to reflect on this morning is what this embrace of technology and data can achieve for our mental health.

    The pandemic saw us move online like never before – and mental health provision was no exception.

    Our services rapidly adapted to provide patients with support through video consultations, digital models of therapy and self-management apps.

    I know that for patients, it presents a number of advantages, with greater flexibility to use resources at evenings and weekends and greater anonymity too.

    So it’s exciting to explore the future possibilities of technology in the treatment and support of metal heath conditions – from common conditions like depression and anxiety to more complex conditions like eating disorders ad bipolar disorder.

    I recognise that much of the demand for mental health provision comes from children and young people.

    We know that 50 per cent of mental health problems are established by the age of 14, and 75 per cent by the age of 24.

    That’s why mental health provision for children and young people is such a priority for my department.

    And when it comes to our adult population I’m a strong supporter also of social prescribing and the wellbeing agenda.

    Indeed, when I was Chief Secretary, to the slight surprise I think of the Department of Health and Social Care and DEFRA, I chaired a committee trying to get the Treasury to push those departments to go further on social prescribing.

    I think it’s exciting to see the scope that social prescribing offers through the ability of tech to better measure activity now and therefor make the wider economic case around what potential that it unlocks, and that in turn, I think, will help change the Treasury appetite for programmes which were given lower priority in the past.

    In Great Britain, the total cost to our economy of preventable or treatable ill health amongst the working age population is somewhere between £112-153 billion.

    To put that in a different context, it’s equivalent to up to 5-7% of GDP.

    So at a time when we have a shortage of workers, making strides on mental health makes sense on every level. For those more familiar with the Treasury, it is what one might call a double or triple word score – it benefits health, it benefits their agenda on levelling up, and it benefits the economy in terms of GDP.

    In closing, I want to be clear on the central themes through which we will approach the significant challenges the department faces.

    First, a focus on devolving decisions matched with better quality data and more of that data in real time, rather than through a rear-view mirror looking weeks, months – and sometimes even years behind.

    Second, a prioritisation of patient outcomes and empowering much greater patient choice.

    Indeed, when I was Minister for the Cabinet Office, with responsibility for science and technology, I discovered we had 50 different strategies within government for science and technology.

    So, I strongly favour a more agile approach of delivering the initial change and then building from there – rather than looking to what might be delivered in many years’ time, through a particular big change some years hence.

    Third, embracing transparency to help empower patients in supporting the case for change and in particular, for innovation – given that, when spending around £182 billion of public money there will always be defenders of the status quo. And indeed, some of those interests will often be more trusted than, dare I say it, politicians making the case for change.

    What brings those three principles together is the fact that – to meet the scale of the health challenges we face must ensure we don’t slip back into old habits.

    Covid is still with us. And so in particular are its consequences, in the form of pandemic backlogs.

    So we must continue to embrace the pace and risk appetite of the pandemic when it comes to innovating at pace and at scale, and better assessing how risk is scored when we do so.

    That is what I believe the British people rightly expect us to do, and if we are to confront the scale of challenges facing the NHS, that is what we need to do.

  • Tan Dhesi – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    Tan Dhesi – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    The speech made by Tam Dhesi, the Labour MP for Slough, in the House of Commons on 24 November 2022.

    For Tory peers and other chums of the Conservative party to have been profiteering at taxpayers’ expense from shoddy, unusable PPE, especially through the VIP procurement lane, at a time when people were locked down in their homes and tens of thousands of people, including my loved ones, were dying is absolutely sickening, shameful and unforgiveable. Given that The BMJ estimates that the Government have written off approximately £10 billion in unusable, undelivered or shoddy PPE, will the Minister take the opportunity to apologise to bereaved families for the amazing lack of integrity at the heart of the whole process?

    Neil O’Brien

    I set out earlier what the high priority route was and was not: it was absolutely not a guarantee of any kind of contract; it was a way of managing the huge numbers of contacts and offers for help that we were all receiving. It delivered something in the order of 5 billion items of PPE, all of which helped to save lives and protect workers in our NHS and social care settings. Of course, we had to take up those offers of help and respond to them when people wanted to help in the middle of a huge national and global crisis. We had to process those offers, but they were processed in exactly the same way as every other bid for a contract.

  • Sarah Owen – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    Sarah Owen – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    The speech made by Sarah Owen, the Labour MP for Luton North, in the House of Commons on 24 November 2022.

    Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)

    We have all seen the shameful Guardian front page this morning, but the front page that sticks in my mind is the one showing nurses in bin bags—not PPE on the frontline, but bin bags. This was at a time when Luton Borough Council was facing another cut of £11 million. People are struggling, so why are this Government not lifting a finger to get our money back? They could start by releasing the records after the mediation process.

    Neil O’Brien

    The hon. Lady’s question takes us back to that extraordinary moment when we had a huge crisis of PPE, and we were desperate and doing every conceivable thing we could to get the PPE that those nurses needed; that is what I have been referring to in my answers this morning. It is just not true that the Government are not lifting a finger to get the money back. We have a process, and there is a substantial team in the Department working on it right now.

  • Brendan O’Hara – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    Brendan O’Hara – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    The speech made by Brendan O’Hara, the SNP spokesperson for health and the MP for Argyll and Bute, in the House of Commons on 24 November 2022.

    Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)

    From the moment we learned about the existence of this VIP lane for the politically connected, it was almost inevitable that it would come to this. This get-rich-quick scheme to fast-track cronies, politically connected pals and colleagues was never going to end well. I suspect that today’s revelations, however shocking, are simply the tip of a very large iceberg—an iceberg that could yet sink this ship of fools.

    Transparency International UK has flagged as a corruption risk 20% of the £15 billion given out by the Tories in PPE contracts at the height of the pandemic. As we have already heard, they are spending £770,000 every single day to store much of that useless equipment in China. One Tory politician who had absolutely no background in PPE procurement personally made millions from those contracts, so do the Government plan to investigate proactively how many others like that are in their ranks, or are they content to sit there and watch this dripping roast of sleaze, corruption and scandal unfold on its own?

    Neil O’Brien

    Of course we take action whenever we find underperforming contracts, and I have set out how we do that. We are working our way through that. I say simply to the hon. Gentleman that we were all desperate to get PPE for our health and social care workers and for everybody who was responding to the pandemic. Inevitably, some of those contracts were not going to perform, and we are now taking action against all those underperforming contracts. On the idea that the “politically connected”, as he says, had some sort of greater success, they were our constituents—they were getting in touch with all of us, they had to be referred on somewhere, they had to be managed and they went through the same process as every other contract.

  • Angela Rayner – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    Angela Rayner – 2022 Speech on Government PPE Contracts, Michelle Mone and PPE Medpro

    The speech made by Angela Rayner, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, in the House of Commons on 24 November 2022.

    Thank you for granting this urgent question, Mr Speaker. I welcome the Minister to his place—I think this is the first time we have met at the Dispatch Box—but to be honest, to his defence of due diligence I would say, “What due diligence?” Last night, documents seen by The Guardian revealed yet another case of taxpayers’ money being wasted, with a total failure of due diligence and a conflict of interest at the heart of Government procurement.

    In May 2020, PPE Medpro was set up and given £203 million in Government contracts after a referral from a Tory peer. It now appears that tens of millions of pounds of that money ended up in offshore accounts connected to the individuals involved—profits made possible through the company’s personal connections to Ministers and the Tories’ VIP lane, which was declared illegal by the High Court. Yet Ministers are still refusing to publish correspondence relating to the award of the Medpro contract, because they say that the Department is engaged in a mediation process. Can the Minister tell us today whether that mediation process has reached any outcome, and what public funds have been recovered, if any? Will he commit to releasing all the records, both to the covid-19 public inquiry and to this House, once the process is completed?

    Rightly, there are separate investigations into Baroness Mone’s conduct, but the questions that this case raises are far wider. It took a motion from the Opposition to force the Government to release records over the Randox scandal. Will they agree today to do the same in this case without being forced to do so by the House? Can the Minister say now what due diligence was performed when awarding the Medpro contract?

    Today’s reports concern just one single case, but this Government have written off £10 billion just on PPE that was deemed unfit for use, unusable, overpriced or undelivered. Worse, Ministers appear to have learned no lessons and to have no shame. As families struggle to make ends meet, taxpayers spend £700,000 a day on the storage of inadequate PPE. Can the Minister confirm whether the Government’s new Procurement Bill will still give Ministers free rein to hand out billions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash all over again?

    Mr Speaker

    Order. Can we please stick to the rules of the House on time limits? I do not make the rules; the rules are meant for us all. This is happening too often.

    Neil O’Brien

    The right hon. Lady asks two main questions, the first of which is what we are doing on PPE Medpro. It has been widely reported that it had an underperforming contract. Let me set out what we do in such cases. The first step is to send a letter before action, which outlines a claim for damages. That is followed by litigation in the event that a satisfactory agreement has not been reached. To answer the right hon. Lady’s question directly, we have not got to the point where a satisfactory agreement has been reached at this stage.

    On the high-priority group, let us be clear about what it was and what it was not. Approximately 9,000 people came forward. All Ministers will have had the experience of endless people ringing them up directly to try to help with the huge need that there was at the time. Many of us, as Back Benchers, will have been approached by constituents who were keen to help and needed to be referred somewhere. All that the route did was handle the huge number of contacts coming in to Ministers from people offering to help. Let me be clear that it did not give any kind of successful guarantee of a contract; indeed, 90% of the bids that went through it were not successful. Every single bid that went through the route went through exactly the same eight-stage process as all the other contracts—it looked at the quality, the price and the bona fides of the people offering to produce.

    On the point about PPE that has not been useful, I set out in my answer the extraordinary context in which we were operating. There was a global scramble for PPE. People were being gazumped: goods would be taken out of the warehouse if people could turn up with the cash quicker than them. It was an extraordinary situation in which we had to act in a different way. Loads of us will remember standing up in this House and saying to Ministers, “What are you doing to get more? More, quickly!” That was the context in which we were operating.

    Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)

    Does my hon. Friend agree that if we had not wasted billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on PPE, we would not have to increase taxes as much as we are doing? What has happened to the £122 million that was spent on 25 million gowns supplied by the company referred to earlier? Those gowns were not fit for purpose and were never used.

    Neil O’Brien

    That was the underperforming contract that I referred to in my previous answer, and I set out the process that we go through when we take action on underperforming contracts. There is the initial letter before action, and then a process in which we look to see if a satisfactory agreement can be reached. If not, that leads on to litigation. Of course, there was wasted PPE—my hon. Friend is absolutely correct about that—but I have already set out the context of the global scramble and the huge amount of PPE that was successfully delivered, saving lives and protecting workers in our NHS.