Dame Diana Johnson
MP for Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham · Labour · United Kingdom
“Longer-term funding is subject to future spending reviews. The Department and NHS England are committed to prioritising funding for sepsis in future spending bids. The framework is a 10-year plan. I do not pretend that we will deliver everything overnight, but it sets clear targets to reduce deaths by a quarter over the next 10 years.”
“It is not acceptable that when someone has been through the worst experience of their life, they are just left to get on with it. That is why we are committed to improving access to post-discharge support and rehabilitation, with priority actions set out in the framework.”
“I encourage everyone who has not yet come forward to do so, and to ensure that they obtain both doses of the vaccine for proper protection. The framework commits to improving vaccine access. The shadow Minister put a number of questions to me. I will respond in writing, as I am conscious of the time.”
“No one knows a child better than his or her parents or carers, which is why listening to patients, carers and families is vital to supporting sepsis recognition and escalation. Too many cases have shown the devastating consequences when deterioration concerns are not heard.”
“During Sepsis Awareness Month, I pay tribute to the charities, such as the UK Sepsis Trust and Sepsis Research FEAT, that do so much to support families, raise awareness and fund research.”
“That will include research calls that cover sepsis improvement priorities, whether it is vaccination and screening, faster and more accurate diagnosis or innovative treatments. It is true that the most recent data from the Office for National Statistics suggests that sepsis deaths went down in 2024.”
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“The government will shortly be announcing the Midlands Engine Strategy, and is continuing to build the Northern Powerhouse.” The latest Treasury figures show that transport investment in London is £1,943 per head of population, but in Yorkshire and the Humber it is £190. There is a real gap in the investment going into the north. The Chancellor said that £90 million is being made available to “the north”. The north is such a large area. It just goes to show that the Government really do not have a handle on the needs—”
“It has said how successive cuts in corporation tax by 2021 will amount to about £13 billion per annum, and it has compared and contrasted that with the cost of free social care for those with critical care needs, which would cost £14 billion. The Government could have taken different decisions about how they raise money and spend it than the ones set out in the Budget. On investment in the north, the Red Book contains just one reference to the northern powerhouse and the north-south regional divide. It states: “As set out in the Industrial Strategy green paper, the government’s ambition is to support growth in all areas of the UK.”
“In Kingston upon Hull, because of our low council tax base, that will raise only £8.01 per head. Contrast that with Kingston upon Thames, where it could raise £15.27 per head. Clearly that policy will not meet the needs of areas that have such a low council tax base. I want the Minister to set out some clear guarantees about the most disadvantaged areas getting funding from the pot of money that has been made available. We know that in politics it is all about making choices. One policy area that I thought the Government could have looked at for filling the gap in social care has been put forward by the Women’s Budget Group.”
“Of course we need a review and a long-term strategy for dealing with social care. In my view, the time has come to set up a national care service akin to the national health service created in 1948. However, the announcement made by the Chancellor—to spend £1.2 billion in 2017-18, £800 million in 2018-19 and £400 million in 2019-20—will overall close only half the gap that we already know exists in social care, and there are no specifics on how the money will be distributed. Disadvantaged areas such as Hull face a crisis in social care. We are the third most disadvantaged area in the country, we have more people in need of social care than other areas, and we have fewer people who are able to self-fund. The Government have so far introduced an increase in the council tax precept of up to 3% to deal with the demands on social care.”
“First, I was very surprised indeed that the Chancellor made no mention of Brexit in his statement, given that it is the major issue facing the country. Secondly, the Government have clearly broken their party’s 2015 manifesto pledge by introducing the rise in national insurance contributions for the self-employed. They stated four times in their manifesto—I checked—that they would not raise those contributions. Many of the 9,200 self-employed people in my constituency—the hairdressers, plumbers and electricians—are already just about managing. They are part of the group of people the Prime Minister said she wanted to be on the side of. I think this is a real kick to that group. I want to focus on three issues today. The first is social care. I welcome what the Chancellor said about the need for a review.”
“As it is International Women’s Day, I want to start my remarks by paying tribute to Mary Denness, one of the “headscarf revolutionaries” of Hessle Road in Hull, who sadly died a few days ago. She fought to improve safety in the trawling industry after many husbands, sons and brothers died while at work. She won that battle. I want to quote another formidable woman, the late Barbara Castle, who said: “In politics, guts is all.” I pay tribute to the women of the WASPI lobby, who are here today, for their guts in standing up and saying that an injustice has been done to them, and in continuing to campaign. I am very disappointed that there is nothing in the Budget to deal with that injustice. I want to make two points at the outset.”
“This Budget is a bit of a damp squib. Hull will have to carry on making its own luck, as it has done for many years. We have been fortunate with the City of Culture and the investment from Siemens. In the spirit of where I started—the headscarf revolutionaries—we will continue to battle for a fair deal for our city from this Government, because we are certainly not getting it at the moment.”
“I am really disappointed that the money allocated for education is for the ideological pursuit of free schools and selective education, rather than ensuring that the schools we have are properly funded. There is likely to be a cut of £380 per pupil by 2020 in Hull; 8% of the budget is going. The announcement about busing children who are on free schools meals to selective schools does not help us because there are no selective schools in Hull. If the Government are serious about social mobility, that money would have been much better spent on nursery school funding. It was announced that there were 2.4 million apprenticeship starts in the last Parliament, but today is International Women’s Day, and we know that young women in apprenticeships are paid less and that there are fewer of them in science, technology, engineering and maths.”
“And the money is for over four years, as my hon. Friend rightly points out. No money was identified to help Hull, particularly with the electrification that we have been fighting for over many years, even though we put together our own plan to bring in private sector money. There was no mention of trying to assist with that. There was also no mention of devolution for Yorkshire and the Humber. That would obviously be a way of accessing funds, but no decision has been made about that. On education and skills, we all want our children and young people to have access to the best high-quality education possible. The renewables industry is very important to Hull, so we want young people to come through with the skills for that industry.”
“Staff morale is very important to safety and security in prisons, so I wish to ask the Minister again about the flexibilities that I understand governors will have on pay increases from 1 April. Will that mean that we could end up with prison officers in Hull being paid less than prison officers down the road in Leeds? How will that affect morale?”
“Parents will be shocked to know that, under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, youth leaders and sports coaches are not included within the definition of a “trusted position”, which means that they can legally have sex with 16 and 17-year-olds for whom they are responsible and whom they supervise. Will the Home Secretary work with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to close that loophole in the law?”
“Many constituents have contacted me, too. I understand that the Secretary of State cannot talk about the substantive issues, but can she give an estimate for when a final decision will be made? Also, if the merger is refused, will it be open to the Murdochs to keep coming back again and again on the issue?”
“How can it be right that the local authorities under the most pressure in terms of social care can raise the least amount through the council tax precept, when that precept is the basis of the Government’s social care policy? East Riding Council, next to my own, can raise 56% more than Hull even though it has less demand.”
“Given that 15 of the most dangerous prisoners have been transferred to Hull following the Birmingham riot earlier this year, that prison officers are saying that they fear for their safety, and that the prison was in lockdown in December, does the Minister understand why morale is so low, especially when the pay award is not going to areas such as Hull? Will the governor there have the flexibility come April to give these hard-working prison officers that pay increase?”
“The Minister did not answer the question that my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) posed: is anybody currently on a TPIM? Given we know that UK citizens have travelled to fight for Daesh and then returned to this country, I would be surprised if there were not some people on TPIMs to protect people in this country.”
“The Minister for the Northern Powerhouse has a big job of work to do, and I imagine that he was dismayed by this week’s Treasury figures showing that transport infrastructure investment in 2016-17 is £190 per head in Yorkshire and the Humber but £1,943 per head in London. May we have a debate on what the northern powerhouse actually means for areas such as Hull, where people pay taxes and fares on the railways but do not seem to get a good deal?”
“We now need a national health and care service to be set up and paid for from general taxation to stop the existing postcode lottery and to ensure that people such as those who fought in the second world war and helped to build the country back up after 1945 get the kind of care that we all want them to receive in our communities.”
“For example, Unison has pointed out that although business rate receipts for central Government have gone up, the Government have not allocated that extra money to councils. In 2017-18 additional receipts will amount to £6.6 billion. If the Government gave only £1.8 billion of that unallocated money to councils such as Hull, it would go some way towards relieving the pressures in social care. Now is the time for a radical rethink of social care. In 1948 the view was that we needed to set up a national health service that we all contributed to and that we could all access.”
“The plight of our vulnerable residents is going unrecognised by the Government, perhaps because they are not in the stockbroker belt and are not so immediately obvious to the Ministers making decisions in Parliament. Many years ago Neil Kinnock warned about playing politics with people’s jobs. Failing to fund social care is playing politics with people’s lives. New academic research shows that cuts in social care and the problems in the NHS led to 30,000 excess deaths in 2015. The Minister needs to reflect on that, and I urge him to consider it. He should also listen to some of the suggestions being made, because it is not as if there are no proposals for how to plug this gap.”
“Surrey County Council leader David Hodge commented: “I believe we have a duty to look after people…We cut £450m already, we squeezed every efficiency and we can do no more. I am sick and tired of politicians not telling the truth. Surrey people have the right to know and I’m not going to lie.” That, obviously, was in relation to social care. Those comments resonate for hundreds of councils up and down the land and in more deprived parts of the country even more than they do in Surrey, because the pressures in places such as Hull are even more severe. Yet when council officers in Hull did the right thing, told the truth and raised the issue, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle said, it seemed to fall on deaf ears. Sadly, they do not have a direct line to Tory special advisers, as Surrey obviously did.”
“In Hull that 1% increase in council tax will raise only £2.1 million a year, whereas the living wage costs for adult social care in Hull are £3.5 million a year. Quality private care providers are under enormous pressure to provide a good service, which is what they want to provide, but they have to do so with a very limited income, and on top of that they now have to meet new obligations such as the living wage. We will see many more care home providers—the good ones, such as the one I visited—saying that they simply cannot continue, that it is not possible. It would be remiss of me not to comment on Surrey. To recap, Surrey County Council is the 150th most deprived local authority area in England, and Hull the third most deprived.”
“The council in Hull pays £416.55 a week for an older person in residential care. The majority of people in Hull’s care homes are not self-funders—as my right hon. Friend said, only 7% in the city are self-funders, compared with 45% nationally—which means that the care homes rely on the amount of money that Hull City Council pays. The homes cannot generate extra income for themselves. It is worth pointing out that the cost of booking into a Travelodge in Hull is £456.75 a week, although that obviously comes without any of the support that is provided in a residential care home. The social care precept, however, does not even make up for the costs of the new national living wage policy.”
“Staff turnover, however, is extremely high because of the pressure on them and their low wages. In the past three months alone she has lost five carers with whom she had built a good relationship. Every day my constituent Mrs Hensby is left worried about who will be coming through the front door to help her. That is the reality of what the crisis in local council funding looks like day to day in many homes in Hull. Shortly after the Government made their living wage announcement, I visited a residential care home in Hull. That announcement is to be welcomed, but the owners of the home told me they were worried about its future financial viability, although they have run it for many years, they have loyal and long-serving staff and the home has glowing reviews.”
“Staff told Mrs Hensby that they were paid by the minute and that if they could not provide evidence that they were fully occupied for the full half hour they were meant to care for her, their pay was docked. The CQC expressed severe concerns during its inspection about that pay-by-the-minute system. Furthermore, some staff work 16-hour days, from 7 am to 11 pm, and many were asked to opt out of the working time directive on starting with Direct Health. The provider does not fund staff’s transport costs, and sometimes carers spend large parts of the day rushing between appointments but not getting paid for that. As we might expect, Mrs Hensby likes consistent care with people she knows and trusts. She does not want strangers helping her every day with some of the most intimate and personal of care.”
“The staff who do that are hard-working and dedicated, but unfortunately they are working in an impossible situation. Joyce’s care is funded by Hull City Council and provided by a private company, Direct Health. In June last year the Care Quality Commission judged Direct Health’s service as requiring improvement. The CQC said that the provider did not have sufficient numbers of suitably qualified, competent, skilled and experienced staff, or the appropriate systems in place to ensure that people received the services agreed. Some care co-ordinators were being forced to do two jobs at once, and some care packages were being given back to Hull City Council because there were insufficient staff.”
“Even with the social care precept, the better care fund and the adult social care grant, we will not be able to cover that. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle said, Hull City Council is doing its very best in those difficult circumstances. It is being innovative and trying to integrate social care with health as much as it can, but the council’s financial situation means that individual men and women in the city of Hull are not getting the care that they deserve. I want to tell hon. Members about a constituent, Joyce Hensby. Mrs Hensby has a range of medical conditions, which mean that she relies on carers to come into her home. For example, every morning she needs a 30-minute visit from a carer to get her out of bed, shower and dress her, and make her breakfast.”
“Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle made about the demographic make-up of Hull and what has happened to our funding since 2010. We are the third most deprived local authority area in the country, and the cuts since 2010 will equate to £548 per head by 2020. By then, an estimated £40 million will have been cut from Hull’s social care budget, and its central grant will have been reduced by 55%. I am going to be political here—the right hon. Member for East Devon said we should take out the politics, but I am going to say this. The most recent analysis shows that Labour councils have faced cuts five times higher than Tory councils, but even those figures do not tell us the whole story. From now until 2020, the council expects that the cost of its social care services will increase by £25 million.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) on his eloquent speech, in which he set out the key issues that we are here to address. The right hon. Member for East Devon (Sir Hugo Swire) is right that we live in a prosperous country. As politicians, we know that politics is about choices, but I think the choices being made at the moment about social care are wrong, so we need to revisit the Government’s decisions and put pressure on them to think again. I want to spend a few minutes talking about the human cost of the financial pressures that my council is facing and the impact that is having on individuals, care staff and the care sector in general. I want to emphasise some of the points that my right hon.”
“Hull City Council wrote to the Secretary of State a short while ago. In his response, he offered to meet the leader of the council and its chief executive. We waited many weeks for that meeting to be set up, until we received a letter from the correspondence secretary saying that the Secretary of State was not able to meet. Having just said what he did about meeting local authorities, will he now agree to a meeting with Hull City Council?”
“I am very surprised that the Home Secretary did not understand the depth of feeling in the House and make a statement to the House on this announcement, rather than publishing it in a written ministerial statement yesterday. I am really struggling to understand how, if we put a cap of 350 on the scheme, that is not closing the scheme. Perhaps the Home Secretary can explain that one more time.”
“I was pleased that Surrey County Council spoke out about the social care funding scandal, but if it is bad there, think how much worse it is in Hull—the third most deprived area of the country—where a £45 million shortfall in social funding is forecast by 2020. After yesterday’s revelations, can all Members of Parliament outside the stockbroker belt be given the telephone number of “Nick” so that we can all text him to get the best deal that our areas need?”
“21. Hull is the 19th most deprived area of the country. In November, when I asked the Secretary of State about the £13 million projected cut to Hull’s school budgets by 2020, she denied it. The figures have now been crunched, and actually it is a £13.2 million reduction in budgets by 2020. What should I say to the heads of the schools in my constituency?”
“The Education Act 1996 needed to be amended so that all taxpayer-funded schools, including primary schools and academies, should be required to teach it. We wanted it to be statutory to ensure that teachers would then be required to have the proper training that they needed to deliver the subject well. We agreed that although parents would still be able to opt their children out of most of the lessons if they wished—it is certainly worth noting that, as the law stands, a parent can withdraw a child from sex education up to the age of 18, even though the age of consent is 16—we negotiated with religious faiths such as the Catholic Church, so that we would guarantee that every child got at least one year’s teaching in SRE before they turned 16.”
“We felt that the issue of consent particularly needed to be addressed, that it needed to be spelt out clearly that physical and mental threats were not acceptable in any relationship and that no one should have to do anything that makes them uncomfortable or frightened. We also believed that young people needed to understand about keeping safe, which is especially important for younger children at primary school, and as children got older and became teenagers, to learn about sexual assault, rape and sexual harassment, and to understand what that meant. Should the worst happen, they needed to know whom they should approach and what they could do. We argued that all that should be taught under the umbrella of a broader subject: personal, social, health and economic education.”
“Three quarters of young people told us then that consent was not being taught even once during those lessons. One in seven pupils could not recall receiving any SRE at all. The guidance on the teaching of the topic, dating from 2000, clearly needed to be updated. To address that, we planned to teach students much broader lessons covering a lot more than just the narrow biology of sex and what fits where. We felt that students needed to learn about healthy relationships in the broadest context, about being kind and valuing themselves and the other person, about self-worth and building up self-esteem, and about how they talk to and negotiate with one another.”
“That happened in the final months before the 2010 general election and I regret that the Labour Government had left it so long to make important changes to sex and relationships education. By that time, it had become apparent that sex and relationships education in our schools urgently needed to be improved. The vast majority of parents—88%—told us that they agreed, and so too did the vast majority of children and young people. A wealth of educational specialists—the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Brook, the Sex Education Forum and the Terrence Higgins Trust—all recommended at that time that the legal requirements on SRE should be strengthened. Under the Education Act 1996, only maintained secondary schools were required by law to teach SRE and even they could get away with providing it only in science lessons.”
“One of the best examples that I have seen of great relationships and sex education was in a Catholic primary school, where children were learning about the body and about the clothing that people wear and why. The lesson looked at modesty and why certain parts of the body are special, private areas. It was done with parents being fully included in the lesson’s design, using the correct names for the parts of the body but in a safe and age-appropriate way. That is the type of age-appropriate, quality relationships education that I would like to see in all our schools and not just—sadly—in the few where a headteacher understands its importance and devotes time to it being taught well. Under the last Labour Government, I had the honour of serving as Schools Minister during the passage of the Children, Schools and Families Act 2010.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered statutory sex and relationships education in all Government-funded schools. I am very pleased to have secured this debate, and it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. As hon. Members on both sides of the House may know, this issue has been close to my heart for some time. I have been campaigning for improvements in sex and relationships education for several years. Actually, I think we should call it relationships and sex education, because I believe that the focus should be on equipping children and young people to establish healthy relationships and to build their self-esteem and self-worth.”
“Of course, some schools do that very well, but I want to ensure that all schools—whether academies, free schools or primary schools—provide that level of education to equip our children and young people for what life will throw at them. We need to strengthen provision. That is my issue.”
“A vacuum is being left that is being filled with unacceptable messages to our young people.”
“By the time they start secondary school, the majority of children will already have been exposed to online pornography, often of the most violent nature. Eight in 10 teenagers get most of their teaching on sex and relationships from unreliable sources outside school. It is no wonder that since Labour first recommended changing the law in 2010, even more organisations have joined the call for a change in the law. The Select Committees on Education and on Women and Equalities have also recommended changes, as has the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners. Our education system should be at the forefront of efforts to tackle those problems. I am the first to acknowledge that it is not the whole solution, but it has a big part to play and, sadly, we simply are not doing enough.”
“A Fawcett Society survey released on 20 January asked: “If a woman goes out late at night wearing a short skirt, gets drunk and is then the victim of a sexual assault, is she totally or partly to blame?” Four in 10 men and a similar proportion of women said that she was. On the same day that that survey was released, the world bore witness to the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a man who has boasted of harassing women and who stands accused of abusing numerous female contestants on the American “The Apprentice”. Half of all female students say that they are sexually harassed every single time they go out to a nightclub, half of all women in the workplace say that they have been harassed and one quarter of the female population has experienced domestic abuse, many on more than one occasion.”
“Professor Alexis Jay estimates that in Rotherham alone, 1,400 children were abused in the sixteen years to 2013. Her report highlighted that in the minds of many children and young people, SRE in their schools was taught to an extremely poor standard and left them ill-equipped to understand that they were being groomed. We simply do not know the full scale of abuse across the rest of the country. It is thought that at any one time, approximately 5,000 young people are being sexually exploited. Online exploitation is now the fastest growing area of concern. We also know even more than we did before about the shocking views that many hold about consent in relationships and women in general.”
“I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us today that the Government will accept the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy). It is an understatement to say that since 2010, the arguments for improving sex and relationships education have only become stronger. When Labour tried to change the law seven years ago, we already knew that the case for doing so was overwhelming, but none of us predicted the shocking revelations that have emerged since, making the case even more overwhelming. I am talking about things such as the revelations after the death of Jimmy Savile and Operation Yewtree. We have learned the scale of the exploitation of children and young people that has taken place over many years.”
“We keep being told that it is being considered—“There’s a review. We’re having a look at it. We agree things need to be improved”—but there is no action. Over the same period of seven years, the obligations on schools have only become weaker. As more and more schools become academies and more free schools open that do not have to follow the national curriculum, the proportion of schools required to teach SRE has decreased; now only 40% of schools need to do so. I called this debate because now, more than ever, the Government need to revisit the issue. The Children and Social Work Bill, which is about to enter Report stage in the Commons, now offers them the opportunity finally to amend the law to bring about the changes that should have been incorporated into law in 2010.”
“The argument used with me at that time by Conservative MPs was that the issue was one on which families, not schools, should take the lead. At the time, it often struck me that although of course families play a huge part in equipping young people for growing up and what happens in life, they often do not feel able to talk about such sensitive issues and want professionals to help. I also thought at the time that the children and young people who are most in need of relationship and sex education are, sadly, often from families where there might be domestic abuse or poor communication. They are the very children whom we want to ensure can access good-quality PSHE and SRE. In the seven years since, more and more MPs from both sides of the House have fought to make the Government see sense.”
“I accept that. It does not contradict it; it builds on it. That is where I want things to go. All the evidence shows that when taught properly, age-appropriate sex and relationship education and PSHE work. Research by UNESCO highlights that it can, importantly, delay sexual activity and increase the likelihood of contraceptive use. It is a vital tool in the fight to address unacceptable attitudes to women, combat child abuse and tackle homophobia. I was describing what happened in 2010, just before the general election. Unfortunately, the Conservative party, faced with all the evidence, decided that it was not willing to support the clauses to introduce PSHE into the Children, Schools and Families Act 2010, so it was passed without those vital clauses.”
“I hope that in the coming debates on the Children and Social Work Bill, the Government will do exactly that, good sense will prevail and young people will finally get the relationship and sex education that they deserve to equip them far better for life than the current outdated provisions.”
“We spent a great deal of time and consulted widely among the relevant people to ensure that our proposals were balanced and effective. I set out clearly in my introduction what steps Labour had put in place under the Children, Schools and Families Bill. As recent events in the United States show, we cannot assume that the most unacceptable attitudes to women and others will go away on their own. Educationalists, law enforcement experts and campaign groups all agree that the fight must start in our schools. Now, more than ever, we need to improve SRE in our schools.”
“Thirdly, will the Government update the 17-year-old guidance on the teaching of SRE to cover same-sex relationships, child abuse, the dangers of online predators and internet pornography, transsexuality and violence against women and girls? Fourthly, what will the Government do to support our professionals to teach the subject in the best possible way? Four in five teachers feel that they are not sufficiently trained to teach SRE. What measures will the Government take to ensure that our teaching workforce get the training that they need? In last week’s Adjournment debate, the Minister highlighted that we should take a comprehensive approach to the issue and take the time to review the options to ensure that we get it right. However, I say to her with the greatest of respect that that has already happened.”