Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Byrne Excerpts
Tuesday 23rd January 2024

(2 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Andrea Leadsom Portrait The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Dame Andrea Leadsom)
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My hon. Friend is a great advocate for her community, and I pay tribute to her for working with determination to see more access to dentistry in Cornwall. She is right to do so. We have a plan, which is almost ready. I urge her to wait just a little longer. She, like all colleagues across the House, will see significant and real measures to improve access to dentistry.

Ian Byrne Portrait Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)
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T2. NHS staff have expressed concerns about the Anaesthesia Associates and Physician Associates Order 2024. Can the Minister tell me if resource will be needed for AAs and PAs to be properly supervised by doctors on a one to one ratio? Will he meet trade unions and professional bodies as a matter of urgency to clarify the Government’s position on this hugely important public health issue?

Andrew Stephenson Portrait The Minister for Health and Secondary Care (Andrew Stephenson)
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PAs and AAs are an essential part of the reform piece to the long-term workforce plan. I note that the order was passed by the House last night without a Division, so I am grateful for that cross-party support. We are working with the General Medical Council, the British Medical Association and others to ensure that the regulations are fit for the purpose. We look forward to the GMC launching its consultation on the fine print of the regulations very soon.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Byrne Excerpts
Tuesday 11th July 2023

(8 months, 3 weeks ago)

Commons Chamber
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Neil O'Brien Portrait Neil O’Brien
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Absolutely. We are conscious of the additional needs of people who have equipment like that. By the end of June, the Government had covered nearly half of a typical household’s energy bill through the support schemes we put in place, but we are always looking at what more we can do to help vulnerable households.

Ian Byrne Portrait Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)
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11. What assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of primary care service closures on public health.

Neil O'Brien Portrait The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Neil O’Brien)
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Each integrated care board is required to ensure access to GP services for all. Overall, more people are being seen in general practice than ever before—about 10% more than before the pandemic—but where some practices close, the local ICB has to ensure that patients are transferred smoothly to other practices.

Ian Byrne Portrait Ian Byrne
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Park View medical centre in West Derby, one of the most deprived areas of my city, is facing imminent closure, and there has been a lack of transparency and accountability throughout the process when dealing with the ICB to get the decision reversed. In the Minister’s reply to my letter, he said it was essential that, if a GP surgery closes, it does not lead to a reduction in the quality of care for patients in the locality. Park View patients have been clear that dispersal to other surgeries would be catastrophic, especially when all GPs are already facing huge pressures. Will the Minister urgently intervene to halt the closure due to the legal insufficiency of the consultation process and meet me and patients?

Neil O'Brien Portrait Neil O’Brien
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I have looked carefully at that case, on which the hon. Gentleman has been campaigning. The incumbent provider chose not to bid for the future contract for Park View medical centre, and NHS Cheshire and Merseyside decided that the best thing was to help patients to transfer to neighbouring practices. Patients will only be transferred to practices rated as good, and there are 10 other practices rated as good within a 1-mile radius of Park View. Since 2019, there has been an increase in the number of patient-facing staff of about 50% in the constituency. That means there are more people in his GP surgeries. We are working hard to ensure high-quality GP services in his constituency.

Healthy Start Scheme

Ian Byrne Excerpts
Wednesday 7th September 2022

(1 year, 6 months ago)

Westminster Hall
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Kate Green Portrait Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
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I beg to move,

That this House has considered access to the Healthy Start scheme.

It is a pleasure to introduce the debate and to see you in the Chair, Ms Rees. I start by praising Healthy Start. The scheme provides support to expectant mothers who are more than 10 weeks pregnant, and to parents and care-givers who are responsible for at least one child under the age of four. Healthy Start vouchers, which have a value of up to £4.25 a week, or £8.50 a week for those with a child under one, entitle parents in receipt of certain social security benefits to fruit and vegetables, cows’ milk, infant formula and pulses. The vouchers also enable mothers to access vitamins from pregnancy until their child reaches the age of one, and enable children to access them from birth until the age of four. Originally, the scheme used paper vouchers, but since September 2021, families who were already enrolled on the Healthy Start scheme have been moved on to prepaid cards. Since the end of March 2022, prepaid cards have entirely replaced the paper vouchers.

Healthy Start has an important role to play in helping to ensure that mothers and young children have a nutritious diet. It is effective: research has found that participating families increase their spend on fruit and vegetables. The Minister will understand how crucial a healthy diet is for pregnant and new mothers, babies and young children. The British Medical Association has highlighted the effects of poor nutrition during pregnancy: adverse health and social outcomes, premature birth, low birth weight, shorter life expectancy and a higher risk of death in the first year of a child’s life.

Ian Byrne Portrait Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)
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I thank my hon. Friend for securing this incredibly important debate; I know the work that she has done on the issue. A report from Feeding Liverpool, published today, has found that thousands in our city who are eligible for Healthy Start are missing out. In 2021, an estimated £758,521 went unclaimed, rather than on giving children and those who are pregnant in Liverpool access to good food, milk and vitamins. That is a huge loss for families who are struggling to cover the rising cost of living in a city where one in three is now food insecure. It will have a huge health impact; we know how important nutrition is for children in the early years. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government must urgently review and extend the eligibility threshold for Healthy Start, to enable more families to benefit from the scheme, and that the Government must invest in a national Healthy Start communications campaign to increase awareness and uptake?

Kate Green Portrait Kate Green
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It is a pleasure to respond to my hon. Friend’s question. He has done excellent work as part of his “Right to Food” campaign, and he raises a number of issues, including take-up, the generosity of the scheme and the importance of adequate nutrition, that I will come back to in my speech.

My hon. Friend will know that child food poverty continues to stunt children’s development as they grow up, and that overstretched family budgets, which mean that mothers go without in order to feed their children, are harmful to maternal health, increase maternal stress and are especially dangerous if women are breastfeeding—or, indeed, may prevent them from doing so. The Minister will share our concern that a new YouGov survey commissioned by Kellogg’s, which will be released next week—I appreciate that she has not had a chance to see it yet—has found that 66% of low-income families say that accessing Government benefits is complicated, and 53% are not confident that they are aware of all the benefits available to them. At the same time, 80% of parents on low incomes say that the rising cost of goods has impacted their ability to pay for essential items, and more than one in seven says that their children are worried about the situation.

Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Byrne Excerpts
Tuesday 19th July 2022

(1 year, 8 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Maria Caulfield Portrait Maria Caulfield
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I outlined in my answer to the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) that around half a billion-worth of pounds of procurement in Scotland did not go through the usual channels. All offers that were identified, regardless of route, underwent rigorous financial, commercial, legal and policy assessment, led by officials, and the final decision on whether to enter a contract sat with the appropriate accounting officer at the Department.

Ian Byrne Portrait Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)
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T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

Steve Barclay Portrait The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Barclay)
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I am honoured to have taken on the role of Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, and to have responsibility for incredibly important services that touch all our lives. I pay tribute to my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), for everything he achieved in this role, and for the dedication he showed. I also welcome my new ministerial team.

Since my appointment, I have been relentlessly focused on the urgent pressures facing health and care, including this week’s extreme weather. Yesterday I updated the House on the strong support we are giving, including extra ambulance capacity and more call handlers, and we will stay vigilant so that we can make sure our health and care system is there for those who need it.

Today marks one year since we lifted covid restrictions. While the virus has not gone away, we are able to enjoy our freedoms, thanks to the incredible vaccine roll-out. I have accepted the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s advice for a covid and flu autumn and winter booster campaign, in which we will roll out that vaccine further.

Ian Byrne Portrait Ian Byrne
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I have been contacted by many constituents working in the NHS who are struggling to cope with financial pressures, exhaustion and stress. I recently spoke to a district nurse using our food pantry in West Derby, and it was a heartbreaking example of how the cost of living crisis is impacting people across our communities. That nurse was going to lose their home and was struggling to feed their children. How does the Secretary of State plan to address the dire situation that the very people he applauded as heroes during the pandemic now face? Maybe a start would be giving NHS workers an inflation-proof rise.

Steve Barclay Portrait Steve Barclay
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On NHS pay, I expect to announce a response to the integrated pay review bodies shortly. We are putting more funding into the NHS, as I signalled in my statement yesterday.

Future of the NHS

Ian Byrne Excerpts
Monday 31st January 2022

(2 years, 1 month ago)

Westminster Hall
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Ian Byrne Portrait Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)
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It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. The privatisation of the NHS has been a lengthy and well-documented process that started during Thatcher’s Conservative Government in the 1980s. It has shifted the responsibility for the long-term care of the elderly and the vulnerable from the NHS to local authorities, and allowed hotel-type charges for long-term care. This violated a key NHS principle that patients should not pay health charges. Charges became means tested, and homes had to be sold to pay for the bills. Local authorities were forced to pass on their responsibility for healthcare to outsourced private companies. That created a for-profit industry worth £6 billion a year.

Ninety per cent. of nursing home beds are now operated on a for-profit basis. Almost 400,000 elderly patients are now a source of income in an increasingly privatised sector. The staff in those nursing homes are an increasingly casualised and deskilled workforce. The privatisation of care for the elderly created such a mess that we are still trying to sort it out 40 years later. That is the shameful legacy of privatisation in one sector of healthcare. We can see clearly that the process of privatising the NHS itself will follow the same pattern. It will be run by private contractors who will de-professionalise and casualise a temporary workforce.

There has been a creeping privatisation of the NHS. In 2012, an Act was passed that, among other things, required all NHS contracts to be tendered to any qualified provider. Now we have ambulance services run by taxi firms, private companies that have taken over GP practices covering half a million patients in London, and a private company taking over an NHS hospital and cancelling the contract when there was no more money to be made. I have seen first hand, working for Unite and organising outsourced workers in the health sector, the damage that privatisation does to our essential care services.

If that tale of incompetence was not enough, the Government are now pushing through a new reorganisation, this time to establish what they call “integrated care”. It does the complete opposite, instead butchering our NHS into 42 separate areas. It should not be called integrated care but “disintegrated care”. Each area has a fixed budget that cannot be overspent. This will create a postcode lottery and force each area not to co-operate with each other to save cash. Each area board will allow private healthcare companies—another play on words: they are mostly private health insurance companies—to make decisions about the provision of healthcare.

Here we go again: the Government’s answer to underfunding our NHS is to let private companies run it. History has taught us that this is not the solution. NHS staff employed by 42 different organisations face a most uncertain future of casualisation, deskilling and the introduction of poorer terms and conditions. The people of England face a regional, not a national, health system, which will have different terms and conditions for its workforce and different provision of treatment. It is chaotic and irresponsible.

Every Government of the day have been entrusted to preserve and protect one of the country’s greatest achievements—to cherish, not cherry-pick and hive off to the private sector. I urge the Minister to listen to the calls of my constituents, campaigners and the trade unions and scrap the catastrophic Health and Care Bill, which destabilises, fractures and imperils our NHS.

Medical Cannabis under Prescription: Children with Epilepsy

Ian Byrne Excerpts
Wednesday 3rd November 2021

(2 years, 4 months ago)

Westminster Hall
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Ian Byrne Portrait Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)
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It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Bardell. I thank the hon. Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa) for securing this incredibly important debate and for his extremely powerful contribution. I am also grateful for the other contributions that we have heard, especially that of my great friend, the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald).

I pay tribute to those of my Liverpool, West Derby constituents who are living through the devastating consequences caused by the lack of access to medicinal cannabis. I pay tribute to the families, their friends and all those in our community who have campaigned relentless for those people. They should not have to fight that hard and they should not have to endure so much. It was a real privilege to meet some of the campaigners at the End Our Pain event. One of my constituents wanted to be there, but it is extremely difficult for her to be away from her child at the moment—their time together is so precious.

I was proud to sign End Our Pain’s letter to the Prime Minister and Secretary of State yesterday, which asked for immediate action to find a way to help the families with children with severe epilepsy, who continue to be denied NHS access to medical cannabis, as we have heard so powerfully so far. I know that the Minister was listening intently, and I can see the empathy in her eyes. I urge her, on behalf of my constituents, to take immediate steps and do whatever it takes to help these families. I ask that the Minister intervene to help adults who require access to medical cannabis under NHS prescriptions. I spoke to some families yesterday. There are siblings going through the same unimaginable pain. I am happy to discuss this at any time with the Minister.

The law was changed on 1 November 2018 to allow access to medical cannabis under prescription. This brought hope to many families. In my first meeting after becoming an MP in 2019, I spoke to families and they had an air of optimism. They thought there was change coming, but the reality three years on, as so eloquently put by the hon. Member for South Leicestershire, is that only three NHS prescriptions have been written for whole-extract cannabis oil. Families are having to raise £2,000 a month to buy this medicine privately.

We need to remember that we are in the middle of a pandemic, so funds that those families had raised previously had gone. The people I spoke to yesterday were talking about mortgaging or selling their house, doing whatever they can to raise the money. Tragically and heartbreakingly, there are families who believe that this medicine will help their child, but they will not put the child on it because of the limitations to starting the process and having to take the child off, as well as the financial issues. I cannot imagine what is going through their minds.

My constituent Lauren wrote to me last night. Although I cannot do full justice to everything she put in the email, I would like to impress on the Minister just some of what she is going through and what she is asking from the Government. She says:

“My time together with my son is precious, and I shouldn’t have to keep fighting. I want to make memories for whatever time we have left. In March NICE reiterated their guidelines about prescribing medical cannabis and these guidelines are certainly not being enacted. The Health Secretary must help now before it’s too late. Allow GPs to prescribe, and if that can’t be done instantly, then establish an emergency fund for the children already benefiting from private prescriptions.”

Lauren is a truly awe-inspiring mum and campaigner, like many I met yesterday. Her asks are simple and need to be listened to. Families are being pushed from pillar to post, and this injustice cannot continue. The interests of patients should be put first, and the system must start delivering the enormous benefits that this medicine can offer.

Reducing Baby Loss

Ian Byrne Excerpts
Tuesday 20th July 2021

(2 years, 8 months ago)

Westminster Hall
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Ian Byrne Portrait Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab) [V]
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It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Gray. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) for securing this important debate, for her incredibly moving contribution and for her work on baby loss. I also pay tribute to my constituents in Liverpool, West Derby who have been in touch to ask me to speak today and raise their concerns, and to all those affected by the devastating loss of a baby. Nothing I can say here can do justice to the heartbreak they have been through, but I hope to do my best to raise some of the issues that constituents have shared with me.

It is truly heartbreaking that every day about 14 babies in the UK die before, during or soon after birth. The recent report by the Health and Social Care Committee notes the good progress made, but stresses the urgency with which actions must be taken to achieve the Government’s ambitions of reducing baby loss by 2025. The expert panel also raised serious concerns about aspects of continuity of carer, personalised care and safe staffing, and the Committee has made a series of recommendations, including for a Government commitment to funding the maternity workforce at the level required to deliver safe care to all mothers and their babies.

The report also states that the improvements in rates of stillbirth and neonatal deaths are good but are not shared equally among all women and babies. Babies from minority ethnic or socioeconomically deprived backgrounds continue to be significantly at greater risk, and as the charity Sands says in its report:

“Babies should not be at a higher risk of death simply because of their parents’ postcode, ethnicity or income.”

I wish to raise a case on behalf of one of my constituents today and to pay tribute to her. Can the Minister provide an update on the progress made since the important debate on covid-19 and baby loss in November and outline the steps the Department is taking on research and actions to make sure that nobody has to go through what my constituent has experienced?

My constituent is a health worker who became poorly last year with covid, 36 weeks into her pregnancy. At 37 weeks, she attended hospital with reduced foetal movement, and her daughter was monitored for five hours. When she got to the delivery suite, her daughter had died.

The hospital completed an investigation and found that there were many lessons to be learned. Policies and procedures were not correctly followed. My constituent should have been reviewed by a senior consultant and was not. There were delays of hours in transferring her to the delivery suite due to low staffing levels. The cardiotocography traces showed that her daughter was in distress, but unfortunately at the time that was not acted upon or escalated. If it was, she would have been taken for a caesarean section earlier in the day.

I close with the words of my constituent:

“I have spoken to other women who have been in the same position as me with covid at the same time but their hospitals have acted fast and thankfully their babies have survived. I have also spoken to women in other areas who have sadly lost their babies because their hospitals did not act appropriately. A gold standard of care should be followed nationally. It should not be a postcode lottery if your baby lives or dies.”

Motor Neurone Disease (Research)

Ian Byrne Excerpts
Monday 12th July 2021

(2 years, 8 months ago)

Westminster Hall
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Ian Byrne Portrait Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab) [V]
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It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Cummins. I thank the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) for introducing this important petition to the House.

I thank the 110,700 people, including 225 of my constituents, who signed the petition and campaigned for an increase in much-needed funding for urgent research into motor neurone disease. I pay tribute to constituents in West Derby who have been diagnosed with motor neurone disease and to their families and friends.

The petition has one clear ask: new Government investment of £50 million over five years to kickstart the pioneering MND research institute. That call is based on the assessments made by the Motor Neurone Disease Association, MND Scotland and My Name’5 Doddie Foundation. The Government, in their response to the petition, claim that they have spent £54 million on MND research over the past five years, but analysis by the MND Association shows that the figure includes general neurological research, often with no tangible link to MND. I therefore urge the Minister to come back with the package of targeted support that is needed.

Today, I will speak about a friend and constituent, Mark Maddox, his fight against motor neurone disease and how his work exposed me to the heart-breaking impact that it can have. I will do everything I can to assist in this campaign moving forward.

I first met Mark a decade ago, when I helped to coach his youngest son’s football team—he will laugh, watching this, at the word “coach”. Mark was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2010. It was my first experience of the disease, with the impact that it had on him, his family and friends. Mark is an absolute legend of the local football scene both in Liverpool and at Altrincham football club, where between 1996 and 2006 he made 349 appearance as a tough-tackling captain and centre-half. The bravery with which he has tackled the disease was hewn from that background.

After being diagnosed with motor neurone disease, Mark ran three marathons, skydived, did bike rides, released an album and, in 2011, fronted a nationwide campaign through every football league in the country, reaching more than 2 million people through match-day programmes. He also appeared on Manchester United TV—despite being a huge Liverpool fan—BBC North West and various radio stations, as well as LFCTV making a mini documentary about Mark. That was all done to raise awareness and funds for the campaign to fight this cruel disease.

Mark was told at diagnosis that he would be lucky to live beyond a year—that was 11 years ago. Mark believes that the love and support he receives from his family—his wife in particular—his friends and often complete strangers have helped him to get through to this day. Over the past decade, however, Mark has become increasingly frustrated with the Government’s lack of understanding of people with motor neurone disease and their families and of its devastating effects. He wants change.

To finish, I urge the Minister to listen to Mark and the many other people who have been diagnosed with motor neurone disease and to say, “No more!” Motor neurone disease stopped Mark achieving great things in football and, with world-leading UK scientists on the cusp of major breakthroughs in MND research, we need a commitment from the Government: for a vital increase in the funding that will accelerate the discovery of treatments; and to pledge the funding needed to kickstart a pioneering motor neurone disease research institute. Together, we can work to end motor neurone disease so that people diagnosed, like Mark and countless others, can fulfil their potential.

Covid-19 Update

Ian Byrne Excerpts
Monday 14th June 2021

(2 years, 9 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Matt Hancock Portrait Matt Hancock
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I happily will, but I urge my hon. Friend to see the financial support that is in place and continues to be in place, most of it through to September. It was extended over that period in case we had to make an extension to the road map, and while I fully understand the impact on business—of course I do—I also can see the impact on saving lives. The advice is that this change will save thousands of lives because the protection of the vaccine, especially against dying of covid, is very, very strong, but the vaccine coverage is not yet comprehensive, especially with those second doses, so we need to get that done.

Ian Byrne Portrait Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)
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Thank you for calling me, Mr Speaker. There are now huge differences in the vaccination rate between Britain’s poorest wards and Britain’s richest wards. In Heartlands ward in my constituency, we have sky-high infection rates but rock bottom vaccination rates, yet, as the Secretary of State knows, the ward is the home to Heartlands Hospital. Down the road, GPs told me this afternoon that there is no Pfizer left in their fridges. There is no certainty about when it is going to arrive, and they do not know how much they will get when it does come. We know that when we open mobile units there is a five-hour queue. We know that pharmacies are successful, but in Birmingham tonight, there are, at best, vaccines for just 10% of the population of 18 to 29-year-olds. Over the next 34 days, how many Pfizer doses will arrive in Britain’s second city? We cannot unlock until we unblock this pipeline.

Matt Hancock Portrait Matt Hancock
- Parliament Live - Hansard - - - Excerpts

Before making an intervention like that, the right hon. Gentleman should first thank the teams who have supplied so much vaccination to this country, acknowledge that we have gone faster than almost anywhere in the world and work with us—work with the West Midlands Mayor and work across Birmingham—to make sure that we get the testing done as well and that we get vaccination done wherever possible. The fact that the fridges ran out of Pfizer demonstrates that we are getting through this as fast as we can, but supply is the rate-limiting factor on vaccination—it always has been—and on that the team have done a pretty amazing job, and I support them to go as fast as they possibly can over the weeks to come. That is what we will get done.

A Plan for the NHS and Social Care

Ian Byrne Excerpts
Wednesday 19th May 2021

(2 years, 10 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Ian Byrne Portrait Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)
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I pay tribute to all my constituents in Liverpool, West Derby who work in the NHS and social care; I send my solidarity and thanks to them. My speech will focus on defending these workers and on defending our NHS against the Government’s plan for major reorganisation—words that should terrify every citizen in this country who values this wonderful model of socialism. These worrying plans come at the same time as 5 million people are waiting for NHS treatment, and at the same time that NHS staff are exhausted and those same staff are facing a proposed real-terms pay cut.

Last month, I held a meeting with Royal College of Nursing members. They were visibly exhausted, and I came away genuinely worried for their wellbeing. How can this be? I urge the Minister to listen to the concerns of the Save Liverpool Women’s Hospital campaign, Doctors in Unite, EveryDoctor, Keep Our NHS Public, We Own It and many others who are calling for the reorganisation to be halted and for a full public consultation.

The Government’s proposals for the NHS, as set out in their White Paper, could, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) has said, open up privatisation, deregulation and cronyism. They could open up opportunities for private companies to be represented on ICS boards, have a say in what healthcare gets delivered in an area and then provide that service. They could allow for the deregulation of professionals, which would threaten patient safety and have serious implications for the pay, terms and conditions of NHS workers. It is unthinkable that the Government are pushing ahead with these plans after the events of the past year. A person more cynical than me would maybe think that the exhausted state of both the NHS and the nation have created an environment that the Government find ideal for pushing through these changes, which will imperil the public ownership of our NHS even more.

In closing, I ask that this Government find the same values that they discovered earlier in the month, when greedy billionaire capitalists tried to destroy our football heritage, putting profit ahead of the interests of football fans, and the Government reacted. Well, now they are back, but this time it is our NHS that they wish to destroy. I ask the Government to act with equal urgency to protect the greatest jewel in our heritage—to halt these plans for the reorganisation of the NHS and a roll-out of integrated care systems and, instead of pushing ahead with privatisation and threatening the rights of our NHS workers, to give our health service the resources it needs and give our NHS workers a 15% pay rise. They deserve no less.