All 3 Debates between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Willis of Knaresborough

Fri 4th Feb 2022
Mon 11th Jul 2011

Health and Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Willis of Knaresborough
Lord Willis of Knaresborough Portrait Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)
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My Lords, I first apologise for not being present at Second Reading. It is unusual for me not to be there when a health Bill is being discussed, but I have had a lot of personal family problems.

Never, in the years I have been in both the Commons and the House of Lords, have I been as proud of a committee as I have been chairing the one on sport and recreation. I thought the committee would look very narrowly at sport and recreation and what could be done for them, but it ended up with a set of proposals that are quite revolutionary, which state something really quite different about the way forward, not only for sport and recreation but for the NHS itself. I am deeply indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, for his leadership as our special adviser and for his membership of the committee, and of course to the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, who is not here today, whose experience of working in the Department for Education was invaluable. As we heard earlier in the debate, that department has a crucial role to play in developing some of these key policies.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, I would have preferred for this proposed new clause to be debated as a separate entity, but perhaps it was fitting that it was grouped with amendments that have a common theme, because despite the disagreements between various parts of the House on the previous set of amendments, they are all based around the same issue of how we get a healthier nation. It was incredibly rewarding to see that.

It might seem quite obvious that during the Health and Care Bill in the House of Lords we should be talking about health matters and improving health, but I have to say that, together with the 2012 Bill, so much of this legislation is about shifting the chairs again; it is not about looking at the future health of the nation. There will be marginal improvements from the bureaucratic changes in the Bill, but I was looking at what we can do to make a fundamental difference, and we will not do that until we change the fact that, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, said in that debate, the NHS is currently a repair-and-maintain service. It cannot go on like that because the money will run out and the number of people serving it will run out. We have to change it to a prevent-and-improve service, and that is what the new clause proposed by Amendment 297C is about.

It proposes just a minimum of reorganisation: for instance, simply moving sport from DCMS to the Department of Health is not a massive reorganisation. With moderate investment—nowhere in our report do we spend time talking about massive investments to get change; this is really about changes of attitudes—it has the potential to change the way in which the NHS operates to a very different mode of making sure that people do not get ill, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, quite rightly said. Indeed, the previous amendments were all about that too. Those amendments rounded on obesity and childhood obesity, and that is an area that we should be tackling; there should be masses of things in this Bill which are about supporting that, not just the odd one or two. Making people active from the cradle to the grave, or near the grave, seems to me the right thing to do.

Other amendments in this group rightly observe that what people eat and drink is related to their health outcomes. Given the alarming levels of obesity we have heard about this morning, I am very supportive of some of those, and particularly what the Government are doing in advertising. I fully support their approach, though clearly it is not a once-and-for-all idea.

How is it possible that the UK is world-leading in elite and professional sports, that 3 billion people across the world watch our Premier League matches in over 187 different countries and that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has consistently said, at Olympics after Olympics we are near the top of the league in terms of our elite activities, yet for decades we have failed at grass-roots level to get more people from more diverse backgrounds to be more active, despite all the investment that successive Governments have made?

With one-third of the adult population at the moment getting less than 150 minutes of moderate activity each week; with schoolchildren doing consistently less activity both at school and at home; with PE marginalised in the school curriculum and no longer inspected by Ofsted while, as we heard in our evidence, many primary school teachers get less than three hours’ training in a three-year degree course, which is shameful, so physical literacy in most of our primary schools means nothing, frankly, because it does not appear on the league tables; with access to facilities ever more difficult; with local authorities closing swimming pools and leisure centres to save resources; and with transport non-existent for large parts of the day for large swathes of the community, we have become one of the most lazy, inactive nations in the modern world. Those sections of the population with the poorest diets and the worst levels of deprivation are, not surprisingly, the least active, too, and of course the pandemic has disproportionately affected all the target groups.

My colleagues and I sought in our report not to blame Governments, local authorities or sports and recreation providers, who have worked hard to maintain facilities. This is not a party-political amendment at all; all the groups on the committee were totally united. All the empirical evidence that we looked at shows the huge benefits from being active: improving learning at school; improving mental health; building up resilience and resistance to disease; and, above all, making people happier and more positive in life.

What is more, investing in active lives, as the Health Foundation research demonstrated, would save countless billions of pounds of future NHS spending by placing sport, physical activity and well-being at the heart of government within the Department of Health; by establishing in law an office for health promotion, sport and well-being to replace the Office for Health Inequalities and Disparities—whatever that means—with the same personnel as initially proposed by the Prime Minister himself; by making the Minister for Public Health, Sport and Wellbeing responsible for preparing the national plan that the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, has so ably proposed, a plan that is at the centre of government policy in New Zealand, Australia, Norway and Sweden; by ensuring that the school curriculum places physical literacy alongside numeracy and literacy as a core subject; by making it mandatory for local authorities to provide active-life facilities; and by ensuring that the duties of care and safeguarding, so brilliantly articulated in the earlier review by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, are actually given legal enforcement status, years after they were proposed. We can begin by addressing the physical well-being of this nation. There need be no massive new bureaucracies. Using existing organisations, centralising policy and using the office for health promotion would be a game-changer.

If the noble Earl, Lord Howe, is a supporter of the levelling-up agenda, and I am pretty sure that he is a strong supporter, how better to make his mark than by supporting this amendment? It goes right to the heart of those government policies. If you are going to level up, level up at the start and make sure that we have an active nation.

Baroness Walmsley Portrait Baroness Walmsley (LD)
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My Lords, I regret that I cannot follow the edict of that late, great Liberal Democrat, Nicholas Parsons, and speak for only one minute. The Committee knows that it is my habit to speak very briefly, but unfortunately I cannot do that on this occasion, although I will do my best. It is my duty as a member of the APPGs for health, obesity and a fit and healthy childhood to scrutinise this legislation and the large raft of amendments that have been made to it.

The intention of Clause 144 is of course to reduce the rise in childhood obesity, an objective with which we all agree. An early attempt to do this via legislation was the UK soft drinks industry levy, the so-called sugar tax, which was introduced in 2018. Before the levy was introduced, it had already resulted in over 50% of manufacturers reducing the sugar content of their products after it was announced in March 2016, the equivalent of 45 million kilograms of sugar every year. That was the intention: to reformulate, not to raise tax. Since then it has continued to be highly effective in encouraging reformulation. In the 12 months following its introduction, the consumption of soft drinks rose by 7.7% as people chose healthier options, so neither the food industry nor the TV advertising industry suffered at all.

Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Willis of Knaresborough
Monday 11th July 2011

(12 years, 10 months ago)

Grand Committee
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Lord Willis of Knaresborough Portrait Lord Willis of Knaresborough
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My Lords, I have made the case that technology is crucial in supporting the curriculum today and not simply an added extra. I hope that the Minister can give the Committee a clear undertaking that his Government are not luddites, that they are looking at the use of technology, that they are prepared to support its use across the curriculum and that schools will be required to say how and where they are using that technology. This is not a matter of spending a fortune on ICT within our schools. Like many noble Lords, I get quite irritated going into schools to be taken into a room with 20 or 30 wonderful new computers and have people tell me that that is what they are doing for ICT. It is not the computers; it is what you do with them. There are very simple devices, certainly costing less than £200, that can give all the capacity needed to deliver so much of the curriculum as it exists.

If having ICT in school and using technology in school effectively are important in delivering a 21st century curriculum, it is also crucial for children to be able to access the curriculum from home and for them and their parents to be able to communicate with school from home. Amendment 107C states that it is vital that children have 24/7 access in order to be able to complete their national curriculum work, complete their homework and be able to access a broader general education. The Minister’s response to a Question in Hansard about the number of children unable to access the internet at home is therefore quite disappointing. The Minister’s answer is:

“The Department for Education estimates that around 15 per cent of households with children currently lack access to the internet … Take up of internet access remains strongly correlated with household income with only 68 per cent of households with children eligible for free school meals having access to the internet at home”.—[Official Report, 07/07/11; col. WA 110.]

That means that 32 per cent of children eligible for free school meals do not have the internet at home. Can you imagine the difference in opportunity that that denies them compared with those children who have good access, live in homes with a computer in the bedroom and are in schools that can set them homework and projects where they can access all the sorts of learning materials that are essential to 21st century education?

If you look at the IFS study 18 months ago, right across Britain the poorest areas have the least access to the internet. The 32 per cent figure is not across the board. If you go to the north-east, you find that 41 per cent of homes do not have access to the internet. The figure is 36 per cent in Scotland and 31 per cent in Yorkshire and Humber. Some 27 per cent of our poorest households do not have access to the internet at all. According to the IFS study, the correlation between qualifications and use of the internet is equally stark. Some 55 per cent of individuals with no qualifications at all have never used the internet and do not have access to it. That is a shocking statistic if we are talking about a level playing field for learning.

Amendment 107C simply asks the Government to ensure that,

“all secondary age pupils in maintained schools or Academies who are eligible for free school meals, in receipt of the ‘pupil premium’, ‘looked after’ by a local authority”,

and who are the poorest and most disadvantaged on current measures, should have access to the internet at home and at school. I hope that the Minister will accept that amendment. It is something which his Government—I am sorry, I should have said our Government; you get so used to being in opposition in the other place—should feel proud to deliver. At the end of this historic period of coalition government, any Government would be proud to say, “No child living in poverty in this country is denied access to the curriculum because they do not have broadband and do not have a computer at home”. In saying that, I declare an interest as chairman of the e-Learning Foundation.

Baroness Walmsley Portrait Baroness Walmsley
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My Lords, I have my name to one of these amendments and should have it to the other one as well. I absolutely support what my noble friend has said. In relation to the first amendment in the group, if such a report were made by government, could the Minister look into the technology centres that are closing in a number of local authorities? They are centres of excellence and expertise and are of enormous value to schools that are trying to make the best use of technology not just for children who need assistive technology—that is a very important group—but for every child. Unfortunately, a lot of them are closing. That means that not only is the expertise going but the actual knowledge that helps schools to buy cost-effective equipment and have the technical support they need to ensure that the equipment works properly all the time. I would like to see that issue included in the report.

Amendment 107C concerns a subject which I am pleased to say my party will be discussing at our party conference in September. If the Government are set on reducing inequality and the achievement gap, making sure that every child from a deprived family has access to a computer and broadband is something that we should be prioritising. It is not a luxury. It is a tool for education and in this modern world it is an absolutely essential tool. It is very important for every child, not just, as my noble friend has said in his amendment, those from secondary age upwards, but going downwards as well. Knowing the sorts of deals that government can do with equipment suppliers and with the telecoms companies, I do not think that that would be anywhere near as expensive as it might at first seem given that you would be buying things in bulk. Not so long ago, there was talk of providing children with little laptops for £50. I reckon that you could probably get very basic ones for less than that now. Broadband should be able to be provided very cost effectively given the quantity that government would be interested in. This is an important measure. It is achievable and is absolutely in line with the coalition agreement and this Government’s stated aims in regard to education.

Academies Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Willis of Knaresborough
Tuesday 13th July 2010

(13 years, 10 months ago)

Lords Chamber
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Baroness Walmsley Portrait Baroness Walmsley
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I understand the point that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is making, but I did not discuss that matter with my honourable friend. After all, the procedure at the other end is not a matter for a Member of this House; it is entirely for the other end.

On statementing, the general duty on local authorities to ensure that appropriate children are statemented is not within the scope of the SEN obligations. It is a discretionary matter for academies as to whether they put forward children for statementing. Therefore, on one view, children in academies might be disadvantaged; on the other hand, the likelihood is that academies might overpresent children for assessment for statements—but this, of course, has its own problems.

That the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, has felt it necessary to table this amendment again highlights the fact that many noble Lords are still not satisfied that the mechanism is fair and transparent for calculating how much extra funding goes to the academies and how much will remain with the local authorities to enable them properly to carry out their duties in relation to the children in maintained schools.

In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, accepted that these arrangements must be seen to be fair and undertook to,

“reflect on the underlying principle of making sure that there is transparency and trust in these arrangements”.—[Official Report, 23/6/10; col. 1333.]

The ready reckoner on the department website has a lot to answer for and the funding mechanisms are clearly a work in progress. We have suggested that someone needs to take an independent view that these arrangements are fair to children in and out of academies. However, because of the rules on Third Reading, we were not allowed to table amendments containing further ideas on how this might be done.

We are not convinced that the YPLA is up to the job and remain concerned about this matter. As I said earlier, we have briefed our colleagues in another place, who will now have the opportunity to explore these issues further. The Government have time to get this right and we on these Benches hope that they will do so.

Lord Willis of Knaresborough Portrait Lord Willis of Knaresborough
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I was not in the House when the Bill was presented, but I wish to raise an issue on this important amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins. Since 1979 and the Warnock report, Governments of all persuasions have committed themselves to the principle of inclusive education, of allowing children with mild and complex special needs to be taught with their able peers within mainstream schools. Will the Minister say whether the Bill recognises that the small number of SEN children who appear in mainstream schools, and who will appear in some of the academies, may be refused entry simply because the school does not have access to adequate facilities to make provision for those children? They have specific needs that require funding. I hope that my noble friend will respond appropriately when he replies to the amendment.