Pat McFadden
MP for Wolverhampton South East · Labour · United Kingdom
“In his review Alan Milburn considered that issue and said that, “the UK’s NEET crisis is much more long-term and deep-seated than any decisions taken in the last few years.” As I said earlier, 400,000 more people are in work this year than last year, and the number of young people in employment is up since the election.”
“Since our last DWP questions, both Alan Milburn and the Pensions Commission have published their respective interim reports on young people and on the current state of saving for retirement. I look forward to receiving their final reports later in the year.”
“As Alan Milburn pointed out in his recent report, the UK’s NEET crisis is much more long-term and deep-seated than any decisions taken in the last few years. There are 400,000 more people in work than last year. The number of young people in employment is up by 74,000 since the election.”
“I thank the right hon. Gentleman and send him commiserations for whatever has left him reliant on his crutches today. I am happy to congratulate the businesses he mentioned in his constituency. He raises a serious point: it is important not only to come up with the right policy, but to make it simple for businesses to use.”
“My hon. Friend is right, and I thank Cardiff football club for being a partner. We are supporting nearly 1 million young people and creating up to half a million opportunities for jobs and training.”
“We are making strong progress on expanding youth hubs, with around 130 already in operation across Great Britain. In March, I announced the locations that we want to open in this year, and I have just announced a further 180 locations for the following two years.”
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“How much was spent on the Prime Minister’s idea of building a bridge between Scotland and Ireland before the project was abandoned? The Chancellor should have known, because the Prime Minister has got form. He could not even build a garden bridge over the River Thames, let alone a bridge across the Irish sea.”
“Perhaps that is not surprising when we have seen £3.5 billion-worth of contracts handed out to businesses run by contacts of the Conservative party, and—the Minister and I debated this last Wednesday night—£17 billion in extra costs for the taxpayer, which the Government casually legislated for last Wednesday night to pay for their own mistake in messing up public sector pensions reform. Where is the Government’s commitment to transparency, value for money or proper procurement practices in their fiscal rules? Did they forget to include those bits? Where is the commitment to tackling the level of fraud that has been exposed in Government lending schemes? Where is the commitment to controlling the Prime Minister’s pet schemes?”
“You do not have to take my word for it. Only today, the head of the National Audit Office drew attention to the level of waste that the Government are presiding over. He wrote that “many of the interventions carried out by government are either not evaluated robustly or not evaluated at all. This means government…has little information in most policy areas on what difference is made by the billions of pounds being spent.” He added that only 8% of major Government projects “had robust evaluation plans”.”
“It would help the energy-intensive industries on which so many good jobs rely. It would be paid for, in part, by a windfall levy on the companies making the most money out of the huge spike in gas prices. It is fair, it would help the poorest most and it is fully costed. That is what people need right now—not a reheated political stunt thought up by George Osborne a decade ago. We have to wonder what the conversation was when this was thought to be some great political idea. Did they sit around in the Treasury and say, “We’ve borrowed £400 billion. We’re putting taxes up to levels not seen since the 1950s. We’ve wasted billions on failed programmes and dodgy contracts. But let’s have a parliamentary vote to show that we are really fiscally disciplined”? It will not wash. People are seeing through it.”
“Projections from the Bank of England do not look any better, with forecasts for growth of about 1% in 2024. Does the Minister really think that, with this motion, people will not notice or remember that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have driven a coach and horses through one of their central manifesto promises on tax with the forthcoming rise in national insurance? Is he trying to cover up for the fact that, as families face a cost of living crisis with steep rises in energy bills, he has no plan to help them? The Minister may not have a plan, but Labour does, and it was set out yesterday by the shadow Chancellor, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves). Our plan would offer every family £200 off bills this year. It would give a further £400 off bills for those with the lowest incomes.”
“Crucially, our rules also allow for the investment plan needed for the transition to the lower carbon economy that we will need. The Government’s fiscal rules do neither of those things. Indeed, when we look at what is happening in the economy right now and what families around the country face in the real world, we have to wonder what the point of this exercise is. Did the Chancellor really think that tabling this motion would take attention away from the fact that he is imposing the highest tax burden on the country for 70 years? The Tories have become a high-tax party because they are a low-growth party. They are asking the British people to stump up the cost of their economic record not for the one or two years of the pandemic but for the past 12 years.”
“He was not here last month when businesses were crying out for support as Christmas bookings were cancelled in their thousands, and he is not here again this month for what he once told us was a central plank of the Treasury’s strategy. On the rules themselves, during the covid pandemic the Chancellor has had to borrow a great deal of money—approaching £400 billion extra. The pandemic was an emergency situation that required emergency measures. That is true in this country and around the world. Our fiscal rules, published at the time of our conference, take account of such emergency situations, because there is no point in having a set of fiscal rules that work only when times are good. Fiscal rules have to take account of all kinds of economic weather, and ours do exactly that.”
“At the time, we presumed that he would come along and display his credentials for fiscal probity. He probably thought that it was a clever move at the time, but it does not look so clever now. He has not even turned up for tonight’s debate. What happened? Where is he? When he was dishing out money, he was everywhere. We could not move for Instagram videos and pictures of his slippers or sliders, or whatever they are called. Now the crunch is coming, he is nowhere to be seen. Was the Chancellor worried that if he turned up tonight he would be asked what he will do about the cost of living crisis facing the country? Is he avoiding the House because he has nothing to offer people facing rises in energy bills of hundreds of pounds a year? Why is it that he has done one of his disappearing acts again?”
“I begin by echoing the sentiments from Mr Speaker earlier following the death of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey). I knew Jack for many years, from his time as deputy general secretary of what was then the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and later as a colleague and fellow west midlands MP. He was a tough negotiator, always determined and loquacious, but pragmatic enough to reach a deal and stick to it. We are still in shock at Jack’s sudden death on Friday. We will miss him greatly, and my sincere condolences go to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) and their family. On the motion, the Chancellor announced at the time of the Budget that he would bring this before the House. He made a big thing of it.”
“Perhaps there is no greater evidence for that weariness than the fact that on the question households throughout the country are most worried about, how they are going to pay the bills this year, the Government have said nothing at all.”
“It is not just global factors; it is about years of regulatory neglect in the energy market that created a whole host of small energy Northern Rocks that have now had to be bailed out, and about the choices made by this Government through tax rises. Yes, there are global factors in the energy market, but the crisis has been made worse because of decisions and choices made by the Government. We have published a plan to help people. This is a changed Labour party coming up with real answers to a real cost-of-living crisis faced by families today, and we are facing an exhausted Conservative party that has run out of answers and has sacrificed for ever the mantle of being the party of low taxation.”
“Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who is not with us tonight, has even taken to using our argument about this Government resembling Ted Heath more than Margaret Thatcher. I know that is not how the Chancellor wanted to be remembered. He wanted to be regarded as a tax-cutting modern monetarist, a worshipper of the true Tory faith. But the real truth is that you cannot stand up and give a Budget that imposes the highest tax burden since the 1950s and then issue a disclaimer at the end of it. It is just not credible. It will not wash and nor will this motion today. People want help with what they are facing now. The impending squeeze on family incomes in this country is going to take a battering ram to people’s standard of living.”
“I would like to know how much was committed to it. I hope the Minister clarifies that while he is wrapping up and telling us about fiscal probity. But in the spirit of solidarity, I do have some sympathy with the Chancellor these days. It cannot be easy when his tax policies do not even have the support of his own Cabinet colleagues. The Leader of the House has made his views known. He has told all and sundry that he wants the tax rises coming in April to be cancelled and the Prime Minister has been too weak to do anything about this open breach of Cabinet discipline. Is it a free-for-all in Cabinet nowadays? Does every Cabinet member get to have their own tax policy? Have all the leadership campaigns destroyed whatever collective discipline there might once have been? The former Brexit Secretary, the right hon.”
“Given that the major part of the Bill arose from a court challenge to the Government’s pension arrangements, we also ask how confident the Government are that this is the end of the story, and there will not be further legal challenges that will mean that we have to return to the issue in the future. Labour hopes that this response to the McCloud judgment settles the issues and ensures good quality pension schemes for the workers affected. We owe them all a debt of gratitude for the service that they have given and, in particular, for the outstanding service they have given over the past few years as the country has struggled with the pandemic.”
“In conclusion, we will not oppose the Bill, because we understand that the Government had to respond to the McCloud judgment, and they have a duty to ensure that pension schemes do not operate in a manner that is found to be discriminatory by the courts, but in future we will take with a pinch of salt lectures from Ministers about fiscal probity, when the Government have had to introduce legislation to correct what the Public Accounts Committee has defined as a “£17 billion mistake”. We also want assurances that proper, clear and understandable information will be made available to pension scheme members who will have to make important choices for their retirement under the mechanism that we are legislating for today.”
“I accept that this is a complex matter, but the end result is that a number of police officers feel that a new discrimination is being introduced by the way in which the Government are applying the remedy for the McCloud judgment. In November, the Home Office acknowledged that there is an issue and said that further work was needed. Has any further dialogue taken place with police and fire staff representatives in the past two months, and can the Minister give any further information on how the issue might be addressed?”
“How do Ministers respond to those concerns and what more will the Government do to enhance diversity in the judicial system, because it is important that as the country changes the institutions governing the country change with it? The final issue on which I would like the Minister’s response is the pensions trap, which has been raised by representatives of police officers, among others. Police pensions operate differently from other public sector schemes in that they are based on a 30-year service record rather than a specific retirement age. The Police Superintendents Association, the Police Federation, the Fire Brigades Union and others have raised fears that individual scheme members in their pension schemes could lose out because of the way that the affected years between 2015 and 2022 are treated.”
“I would be very grateful if the Minister addressed those points in his winding up. Forgive the irony, but if I am right about the interpretation, how confident are the Government that, in making this exception, they will not open the door to legal action from other sectors arguing that they too should enjoy similar treatment? The Bill also raises the retirement age for judges from 70 to 75, reversing a change made back in 1993. We understand the backlog in the judicial system, and we support measures to reduce the delays in bringing cases forward. There is truth in the old saying that justice delayed is justice denied, but when the Bill was being debated in the other place, concerns were raised that longevity of service might turn out to be the enemy of diversity in the system.”
“Turning to the part of the Bill dealing with the judiciary, the Bill makes changes to the judicial pension scheme, allowing for the deregistering of this scheme for tax purposes on the basis that judges are an exceptional case. I want to return to the question posed a few minutes ago by the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), who asked about the annual allowance and the lifetime allowance. Could I ask the Minister to clarify what this deregistering means in the context of the annual allowance and the lifetime allowance? If it is the case that those two restrictions, as it were, do not apply to the judicial pension scheme, how will the Government respond to representation from others saying that they too are an exceptional case? We have already heard the example of doctors being raised.”
“What does that mean for where the funding for them will come from, and is there any time period after which this guarantee may lapse? I now turn to part 2 of the Bill, which makes changes to the pension arrangements for former employees of Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock. Their assets have, until recently, been managed by UK Asset Resolution, which is an arm of Government. The Bill provides assurance that the pension liabilities for these former employees will be met and underpinned by the Treasury. We welcome pension security for these pension scheme members, but can I ask the Minister what the estimated cost is of these provisions, and whether these costs are additional to the £17 billion budgeted for the McCloud response or part of the same overall costs?”
“So the third question to the Minister is this: how will the Government respond to what has happened in these examples and how will they ensure that, in this case, pension scheme members are equipped with the best possible information to make the choices envisaged under the deferred choice underpin mechanism set out in the Bill? Finally on this part of the Bill, there is a question about how the cost control mechanism will work. The Chief Secretary has already said that the Government will bring forward amendments on that, and we will have to examine those closely. In brief, it was originally envisaged that, under this mechanism, if costs breached the ceiling, benefits would be reduced, but the Government have said that, in this case, no member will see benefits reduced.”
“Anything that involves individual scheme members making a choice that could have a fundamental impact on their income in retirement raises another question, which is about the quality of information that enables a pension scheme member to make such a choice. The recent history of information on pensions has given rise to some real injustices. We have had unscrupulous advisers trying to exploit pension freedoms and get people to transfer out of perfectly good pension schemes in a way that was clearly not in those people’s interests. Indeed, this House has only recently legislated, in the Compensation (London Capital & Finance plc and Fraud Compensation Fund) Act 2021, for an increased levy on the pension industry as a direct result of increased levels of pension fraud and mis-selling.”
“It is perhaps not the most user-friendly title, but what it means in simple terms is that, when people retire, they will have a choice as to which pension scheme should apply for the affected years—between 2015 and 2022—to ensure that they maximise their available pension benefits. The second question I have for the Minister winding up is to clarify whether making this choice will incur any extra costs for the pension scheme members concerned. For example, if members opt to remain in their legacy scheme for the seven years affected, because the rate of accrual in that scheme is higher, will they have to pay any backdated pension contributions to do so? Then there is the question of how people make their decision under this deferred choice mechanism.”
“The Bill seeks to respond to the McCloud judgment and ensure that people are not unfairly impacted on by the changes on account of their age. The first question for the Minister must be: where will this £17 billion come from and who will pay the bill? Will it come from the taxpayer as a whole or from pension scheme members? We should remember that a very significant proportion of pensioners in this country are members of one of these schemes. It is very important that Ministers give the House clarity on this matter. The second point is about the design of the remedy for the McCloud judgment set out in the Bill. Consultation took place on this, and the method chosen is known as the deferred choice underpin.”
“Even a fraction of it could make a major difference to those families. Or to put it in another context, the cost of fixing this mistake made by the Government is around three times the annual bill for the £20-a-week universal credit uplift that the Chancellor largely removed in the autumn. The Government’s main changes to the pension system in 2015 were to move from final salary to career average pensions and to extend the normal pension age in most schemes. But—this is the crucial point regarding the Bill—there was also provision for those within 10 years of retirement to remain in the previous legacy schemes. That provision was challenged in the courts and found to be discriminatory on the grounds of age in what has become known as the McCloud judgment.”
“The experience of the past two years has underlined the contribution made by the public sector workers affected by this legislation. Many of them had to be at work physically throughout the pandemic, caring for the sick, delivering key services or keeping our streets and communities safe. They deserve decent pay and decent pensions. Part 1 of the Bill seeks to correct what the Public Accounts Committee has termed a “£17 billion mistake” made in the reform of this system through changes introduced by the Government in 2015. To state the obvious, £17 billion is a lot of money. Of course, that is the cost over a long period of time, not just one year, but let us think for a moment what that money could do for families facing energy bills which this year could rise by hundreds of pounds a year.”
“It is a pleasure to respond to the Chief Secretary’s opening speech. I begin by wishing you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and Members on both sides of the House a very happy new year. Pensions are a very important part of workers’ overall pay package. It is in the interests of individuals and society as a whole that good pension schemes and good pension benefits are available to workers in both the public and private sectors and that those who pay into pensions schemes should be able to look forward to a good and secure retirement. When that is not the case, there is more pensioner poverty, lower quality of life in old age and a greater reliance on means-tested benefits. In those circumstances, individuals suffer and society is worse off. The Bill deals with public sector pension schemes.”
“(Urgent Question): To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will make a statement on economic support for business. I want to begin by extending my best wishes to my hon. Friend—”
“Any package should be timely, proportionate and properly targeted and must guard against fraud. That is why it needs the full and focused application of Treasury Ministers and officials. We are not in lockdown, but it would be totally disingenuous to pretend that businesses can trade normally when the Prime Minister has used a special national broadcast to warn the nation of a “tidal wave” of covid infections and the chief medical officer has told us to cut back on social contact. The Government cannot pretend that nothing has changed. This is not the time to abandon businesses, so will the Minister commit to announcing a package of support by the end of today—I mean UK time, not California time—that matches the situation that British businesses and workers now face?”
“What will the Government do to help hospitality businesses affected by the chief medical officer’s advice to deprioritise social contact? Will any support also apply to live music, theatre and other events? What are the Government doing to maintain supply chains, should they be affected by staff absences in the coming weeks? What is the Government’s response to the hospitality industry’s call to maintain the value added tax rates for that sector at 12.5%? Will the Government also allow local authorities to release any unused funds they may have from previous covid aid packages to support businesses right now? The principle here should be that the level of support should match the economic restrictions in place. It is not about a blank cheque; there has already been enough wasteful spending from the Government in the past two years.”
“There is tumbleweed rolling through the Treasury, which says he is in communication with officials, but what about some communication with businesses that are losing bookings by the hour and watching their December profits vanish into thin air? Last night the chief medical officer advised the public to deprioritise social contact. Adherence to that advice will have a clear and direct impact on the hospitality industry, live music, theatre and other public events across the country. The Government documents for plan B say that the decision on economic support will be made “based on the data at the time.” That time is now, so let me ask the Minister this: what measures will the Government take to ensure that those who have to isolate at home have proper sick pay that enables them to follow the rules?”
“Forgive me for my Christmas eagerness, Mr Speaker. I extend my best wishes to my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), the shadow Chancellor, as she recovers from covid at home. We know where she is, but where is the Chancellor? Why did he decide to proceed with a trip to California on Tuesday, when it was already clear that UK businesses were struggling to cope with what the Prime Minister himself has called a “tidal wave” of omicron? Even if the Chancellor is abroad, California is not exactly a communications desert. They have television, and I have heard that they even have the internet, but it is still radio silence from the Chancellor.”
“His death is not the only one in which a lack of understanding of sickle cell and mistakes in treatment have been contributory causes.”
“The focus of our debate is the APPG’s recent report, “No one’s listening”, which has a number of findings and recommendations in relation to the care of people with sickle cell. The trigger for our report was the tragic and avoidable death of Evan Nathan Smith in North Middlesex University Hospital in 2019. The coroner’s report into Evan’s death, published in April of this year, found that he would not have died if medical staff had recognised his symptoms and treated him sooner. The report pointed to a “lack of understanding of sickle cell disease in the medical and nursing staff looking after Mr Smith” and “a failure to appreciate the significance of those symptoms by those looking after Mr Smith at the time.” Evan Smith was just 21 years old; he had his whole life in front of him.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered the treatment of sickle cell. Thank you for chairing our proceedings, Mrs Miller. I am very pleased to open this debate. I chair the sickle cell and thalassaemia all-party parliamentary group, which works for a better understanding of sickle cell and better treatment for those living with the condition. I am enormously grateful to all hon. Members who have supported the APPG’s work, including our late colleague Sir David Amess, who was one of our officers. I am also grateful to the Sickle Cell Society, which provides the secretariat function for the APPG. I also thank Parliament’s digital engagement unit, and the hundreds of individuals from around the country who have emailed me in advance of today’s debate.”
“It is therefore common among sickle cell patients to have to go to hospital regularly, to present at A&E and to be admitted on to wards. This is an important point. For sickle cell patients, contact with the healthcare system or admission to hospital is not a one-off; it is a lifelong part of living with the condition. To prepare our report, we took evidence in three oral evidence sessions in June this year. We heard from patients, clinicians and policy makers. We heard from Evan Smith’s parents, Betty and Charles, who spoke with so much dignity about the loss of their son and their determination to make sure that other families do not have to go through what they have been through. We received over 100 written submissions and, taken together, this is the most comprehensive report on sickle cell care that the APPG has ever produced.”
“I quite agree with my hon. Friend, and our report goes into many recommendations that could improve care. Indeed, it is a call to action; it is a call to arms. Following Evan’s death, the deaths of others and the many near misses involving sickle cell patients, we wanted the report to set out the changes that are needed to stop this story from repeating itself over and over again. Sickle cell affects about 15,000 people in the UK, with many more carrying a trait. Patients with the condition experience periodic crises—bouts of intense, severe pain that sometimes require hospitalisation. The crises are treated with strong pain relief, and sometimes blood transfusions, and over time they can result in organ damage, an increased risk of stroke, other associated conditions and even early death.”
“There is a lack of awareness of the condition and a lack of understanding about how to respond to a sickle cell crisis among some NHS staff. Everyone in the healthcare system knows the key symptoms of a heart attack or a stroke, and how to respond to them. With sickle cell, however, the patient experience is often one of being caught in a perpetual loop of trying to teach staff about what is happening to them and what treatment they need, often at the time that they are experiencing excruciating pain.”
“Some clinicians spoke of adherence to the pain relief guidelines within their hospital being as low as just 20% or 30%. There is a lack of compliance with care plans that have been agreed for individual patients, including with the hospital where a patient has turned up, and people have been told, “That doesn’t apply here.” We found a dangerous lack of communication between the general and specialist parts of the system. In Evan Smith’s case, he had been in the hospital for over two days before the haematology unit even knew he had been admitted. That finding was described as “shocking” by one haematologist who gave evidence to the group. Such delays can contribute to mistakes, with the most terrible consequences. As well as deaths, we heard about a number of near misses where care had gone badly wrong and the patient had still survived.”
“We found that where there is a good level of understanding and knowledge, sickle cell patients are generally well treated and well looked after, but we also found a huge gulf between the good level of confidence and trust in the specialist parts of the system, and treatment in the more generalised parts of the system—specifically A&E and general wards. Our key findings include the unacceptable variability of treatment, depending on where someone lives or who happens to be on duty at the time; patients having to battle for the pain relief to which they are entitled; and protocols on pain relief—for example, that it be administered within 30 minutes of arrival—being regularly and repeatedly ignored or not being implemented. Witnesses told us of waiting for hours in excruciating pain.”
“My hon. Friend makes some very strong points, and I will discuss some of them, including the question of race. Since the report’s publication, I have continued to receive emails from sickle cell patients all around the country that confirm the report’s findings, and I want to put on the record my gratitude to each and every person who has taken the trouble to write to me, whether it was just after the report was published or in advance of today’s debate. Let me set out the main findings of the report for the House. Let us begin with a positive: we found a good level of trust among sickle cell patients in the specialist haematology departments of hospitals that look after them on a long-term basis. We found clinicians passionately committed to better treatment and honest enough to tell us when that good treatment was not there.”
“Most of all, we want to ensure that there is equal health treatment for everyone, regardless of the colour of their skin. That is not too much to ask for, but we do not have it at present. Today I appeal to the Minister, the Secretary of State, my own Front-Bench team and the other parties represented here to become our allies in this and to work with us. Please do not let this be a missed opportunity. Let us collectively resolve that we will not have me, or another chair of the APPG, standing here in a few years’ time making exactly the same points as I am making today. Let us make sure that this time people do listen, that we act on these long-standing failures in the care of people with sickle cell and that we improve healthcare for people with this condition once and for all.”
“However, perhaps the experience of the pandemic will give us a new-found resolve; maybe it will mean that this time people listen. From the Secretary of State and the Department to the NHS in every part of the United Kingdom, we want this report to mark a moment of change in the treatment of sickle cell. We want to ensure that the issues raised in the report are addressed once and for all, and that training is improved so that staff throughout the system understand, and have a knowledge of, the condition. We want to ensure that care plans and pain relief protocols are adhered to by both the generalist and the specialist parts of the system. We want to step up research and innovation in treatment and restore trust among sickle cell patients.”
“Soon after the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care was appointed, he spoke about the “disease of disparity” and about how the covid pandemic had exposed a number of long-standing health inequalities, including racial ones. I welcome the Secretary of State’s commitment to address these inequalities and his warm welcome for our report on the day it was published. Perhaps this is a moment when we are more aware of health inequalities than we would have been before the pandemic; maybe this period can be a turning point for change. There is no need for this to be a partisan issue. No one is pretending that the findings in our report only began in recent years or under one Government. These things have been there for a long time.”
“The principle of racial equality in healthcare is fundamental. No one is seeking to put one group of people above another, but we want to see equality in healthcare treatment and right now with sickle cell we do not have that. That situation is completely unacceptable and, following this report, it must be addressed. Thirdly, the findings that we cite in our report are not new; these things have been happening for a long, long time. They have been raised time and again, and the fact that this situation is continuing has led to a great deal of anger and frustration among those living with sickle cell and their families. Yet, even though all of those things are true, this might—just might—be a moment of opportunity. Why do I say that?”
“Some patients told us that they avoided going to hospital at all costs, no matter how serious their crisis, because they found the whole experience so exhausting and debilitating, or, as one woman put it, “to avoid the mental strain of another battle...when she does not have the energy to advocate for herself”. It cannot be right that people who need help have so little trust that they do not seek that help from the very system of care that is supposed to be there for them. Secondly, there is the unavoidable question of race. Sickle cell is a condition that predominantly, but not exclusively, affects black people. Many patients told us of being treated with suspicion when they sought treatment, being regarded as troublesome by staff, being thought of as drug-seekers, and encountering negative and sometimes even hostile attitudes.”
“I very much agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, the next finding that I was going to cite is a lack of research and innovation in treatment. There has only been one new drug approved in the UK for sickle cell treatment in decades and it was approved just before our report was published. For each of the findings, we made recommendations: about training; about compliance with clinical guidelines; about reviews of sickle cell treatment in secondary care; about communications change; very importantly, about a stronger voice for patients in all of this; and in many other areas, too. Underlying all those individual findings and recommendations are some key overarching themes. First of all, the experiences that I have described have contributed to a damaging loss of trust among sickle cell patients in the system that is there to help them.”
“This time we are going to make a difference, and we are going to change things for good for people living in this country with sickle cell.” Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered the treatment of sickle cell.”
“However, the test will be in the lived experience of sickle cell patients themselves. One problem highlighted in the debate was that often the protocols are there—the 30-minute guidance is there and the care plans agreed with individual patients are there—but in the day-to-day experience they are not being adhered to, so a part of the battle is to make sure that things already there are applied properly. Anything that the Minister and the Department can do to reinforce that is welcome. I make a final appeal to the Minister to make the report a moment for change, not just a debate that is here today, gone tomorrow. I appeal to her to go back to the Department, gather the officials, call in the different key parts of the NHS and tell them: “This time we are going to listen.”
“I thank everybody who has spoken and contributed to this afternoon’s debate. It might be unfair to pick people out, but I want to pick out my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy), who was a witness when we took evidence for the inquiry, and my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi), who spoke so movingly and powerfully about her mum. To echo the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham, I know that her mum would be really proud of her for what she has said in this debate. I am grateful to the Minister for her response and the spirit in which she has listened to the debate. It is good to hear about the specialist units, the expert who has been appointed, and the other things that she highlighted. It is good to hear about all of that.”