Hospice Funding

Debate between Jim Shannon and Peter Gibson

Monday 22nd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon]

That is good to remember. I will mention the volunteers.

The hon. Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) is no longer here, but he mentioned a sponsored walk and encouraged the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) to be involved. Like the right hon. Gentleman, I could not run a marathon, and I probably could not walk it, but he and I could probably dander it—that is the third category. We are danderers. I could do 26 miles, but it would be at my own pace. I am sure everyone else would be on their way home whenever he and I crossed the line—that is a story for another day.

We cannot pay hospice workers enough, but we have a responsibility to ensure that there is enough money to pay them. I do not feel we are currently doing enough, as other Members have said very clearly. The consensus is that we all want to see them paid better, and we want to see the care continue.

Northern Ireland Hospice provides specialist palliative care for more than 4,000 infants, children and adults in Northern Ireland with life-limiting conditions. The charity, which includes the only children’s hospice in Northern Ireland, says that it faces a number of challenges,

“not least of which is the ever-growing cost of this service. Government funds approximately 30% of service costs”.

The hon. Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson) spoke about Foyle hospice, which has to find 65% of its service costs. Well, every other hospice in Northern Ireland has to find 70%, relying on the

“goodwill and generosity of voluntary donations and other fundraising activities.”

[Peter Gibson]

One thing that has not yet been brought out in any of the speeches is the fact that a significant amount of the money that goes to our hospices through their fundraising and charitable fundraising comes in the form of legacy giving. That in itself, because of the size of estates and the value of properties, creates a postcode lottery. Is that part of the problem? Could we use this debate to highlight legacy giving to hospices?

[Jim Shannon]

I understand the issue that the hon. Gentleman highlights, and I will speak about donations.

The people of Northern Ireland are generous to a fault. Understanding Society data suggests that Londoners donate the most, with an annual average of £346 per donor. That is due to a handful of large donors, which I understand is the issue. People from Northern Ireland donate £344 a year to charities in all sectors, not just hospice care, and last week’s figures show that Northern Ireland donates more than anywhere else in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Scotland, at £282 a year, and the south-east, at £270 a year, are the next highest donors. I am proud that we in Northern Ireland are givers, but this has allowed what is tantamount to an abdication of responsibility by those whose duty it is to see this care carried out.

We all support the Marie Curie coffee mornings. They are bun fests, which is not good for a diabetic. People make their donation and drink their tea or coffee. That is what it is about. It is not about what people get out of it; it is about what they give. To me, the Macmillan coffee mornings and Northern Ireland Hospice events should be about providing additional help, not providing the foundation of their funding. We and the Government must step up.

People do not have great disposable incomes, so the coffee mornings intended to raise money for a nurse raise less than half the amount needed to pay for a nurse’s pay increase. We can no longer rely on public generosity to make the difference, and I therefore believe that we must step up and see hospice care not as a charitable extra but as an integral part of the NHS. That is what it needs to be, otherwise we have failed.

I am ever mindful of the seven-minute time limit, Madam Deputy Speaker. If we cannot supply children’s hospice places with specialised staff, we are failing, and we cannot afford to accept failure. The Minister is a good lady, and she believes in hospices. I know she will respond positively, but I want to ascertain how we can do better for palliative care hospices, not in the next budget round but starting here and now. There is a consensus on wanting it to happen, and I believe the Minister and the Government should ensure that it does.

Illegal Vapes

Debate between Jim Shannon and Peter Gibson

Tuesday 16th January 2024 Westminster Hall

[Peter Gibson (Darlington) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of the use and sale of illegal vapes.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Mark, and I am pleased to have secured this debate, in order to highlight my concerns about the use and sale of illegal vapes.

As a country, we should be pleased with the progress that we have made in reducing smoking, with smoking rates falling to their lowest since records began; now, only 12.9% of the population smoke. In some part, this progress is down to the wide array of nicotine replacement products: patches, pouches, gum, and of course, in more recent years, vapes.

However, despite vapes being an effective alternative for adults to use in order to quit smoking, we must be concerned about the risks they pose to children and non-smokers. Vapes are not risk-free. Nicotine is a highly addictive substance, whatever means are used to absorb it, and there remain unanswered questions about the longer-term use of vaping. As Professor Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, has said:

“If you smoke, vaping is much safer; if you don’t smoke, don’t vape.”

I have concerns about vaping that I wish to raise with the Minister in this debate. They are threefold: first, the availability of vaping products to children; secondly, the sale and supply of illegal vaping products to children and adults; and thirdly, the organised crime and exploitation that lie behind the illegal products.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for securing this debate. Many people see vaping as an alternative to smoking and it probably is, but that does not mean that it is, in some cases, any less destructive. Indeed, it has become an overnight epidemic, with vape shops popping up, including in Newtownards, the main town in my constituency. My concern has always been about the regulation of these pop-up shops; they come here and they disappear, only to pop up somewhere else.

Does the hon. Gentleman share that concern and agree that there must be a licence to sell vapes, which should be vigorously checked by the local council to ensure that laws are being adhered to, so that the things he has expressed concern about regarding children gaining access to vapes cannot happen?

[Peter Gibson]

It would not be a Westminster Hall debate without an intervention from the hon. Gentleman. He anticipates two of the points that I am about to come on to in my speech—first, the popping up of these shops; and secondly, the need for licensing. So, I thank him for his intervention.

Legally supplied cigarettes have reached a price that puts them beyond the reach of children’s pocket money. That has been brought about by a raft of measures, including a ban on smaller packets, a ban on advertising, plain packaging, concealed displays and raising the legal age to buy cigarettes to 18. However, we have seen a worrying trend of children taking up the habit of vaping; the latest figures show that some 20% of children have tried vaping.

Those children have taken up the use of a product that is designed to help people to quit smoking, but—this is the important point—they themselves have never smoked. We know that the flavours, packaging and design of vapes are attractive to children, and that vapes are on very visible display in shops, in contrast to the cigarettes that they are designed to replace.

As with the sale of cigarettes, the sale of nicotine-related products is restricted to people over 18, but that restriction is clearly not working. To my mind, many of the measures that we introduced to curtail smoking need to be considered again in addressing this problem.

I have met the parents of children who are addicted to vaping. It is not uncommon to see children vaping in the street and the whole disposable vape industry is visibly responsible for the increase of litter on our streets, which local authorities face huge difficulties in dealing with and which increases the risk of fire in general waste collections.

The Local Government Association is deeply concerned about what to do with the almost 200 million disposable vapes that are thrown away every year in our country, and we should all be concerned about their environmental impact. However, my primary concern is the use and sale of illegal vapes, which do not always comply with our legislation and often have much higher concentrations of nicotine. They are sold with much higher capacities than their legal equivalents. It is estimated that a staggering one out of every three vapes sold in the UK is illicit. They are being sold with no care whatever for the user.

In the north-east, we have seen tragic cases of young children hospitalised as a result of using high-strength illegal vapes. The sale of these products is often concentrated in pop-up mini-markets, which are easily identifiable and distinguishable from reliable and traditional corner shops. Once upon a time criminality hid away, but these operators hide in plain sight. These shops appear quite rapidly, with blocked out windows, vivid lighting and a sparse supply of genuine goods on the shelf and are often, although not always, also selling illegal tobacco products.

I want to put on the record my thanks to Phoebe Abruzzese from The Northern Echo in Darlington for her campaigning journalism on this issue, and I am pleased to be working with her to highlight this problem.

Building an NHS Fit for the Future

Debate between Jim Shannon and Peter Gibson

Monday 13th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Peter Gibson (Darlington) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Steve Tuckwell) on his excellent maiden speech.

Let me begin by paying tribute to His Majesty on his first Gracious Speech. As he reflected in that speech, we were all reminded of the selflessness of his mother, Her late Majesty, which he continues to exemplify. It was fantastic to hear the wonderful speeches of the proposer and the seconder of the motion on the Loyal Address, my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Sir Robert Goodwill) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie). They are both fellow Yorkshire folk and both great friends. My right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby has regaled friends and colleagues alike for many years with his jokes. It was wonderful to hear his entire repertoire in just one sitting. He told us that his first parliamentary contest was, just like mine, in Redcar, where I lived as a child and went to school. It was also where my mum served as an NHS community midwife, so I saw at first hand the incredible work of the NHS from a very early age. Fast forward to the present day, I have the privilege of representing the town, and the hospital where my mum undertook her nursing training. That was some years before I was even born, but still I regularly meet constituents who worked alongside mum in the 1960s.

I welcome the Government’s focus on building an NHS fit for the future. As I visit dentists, doctors and Darlington Memorial Hospital and I speak to constituents at my surgeries, it is clear that despite this Government’s strong record of investment, with record funding, record doctors and record nurses, much more needs to be done. Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys is our local mental health trust. It has some immense challenges to deliver the mental health care that my constituents need. My surgery regularly features people with heartbreaking stories, where the support they need has not been there. That is why I welcome more funding to deliver mental health support.

I regularly see families in my surgery affected by the tragedy of suicide. Those terrible stories of pain and suffering are incredibly difficult to hear. That is why the Government have my full backing in their suicide prevention strategy. However, I think they should bring forward long discussed mental health legislation, just as I believe that we need progress on banning conversion practices. I join my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) in her comments on the terminology used. Abuse is abuse, not therapy.

I also welcome the £8 billion commitment for NHS and adult social care. As a solicitor before being elected to this place, I found that the biggest single concern of those planning for later life was how their care would be covered. Our elderly should have confidence in the care and support they need in later life. I welcome the steps being taken to deliver that.

On hospices, I am privileged to follow in the steps of Jack Dromey as co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for hospice and end of life care. I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, as a hospice trustee. The Government rightly supported our hospices incredibly well during covid. However, with patchwork commissioning from our ICBs, and despite clear direction in the Health and Social Care Act 2012 to commission palliative care, many hospices are vulnerable to closure or reduction in services, putting increased pressure on our NHS. It need not be like that, with ringfenced funding in ICB budgets for palliative care.

Darlington is still not getting sufficient dentistry. Ministers say that is down to the ICBs; the ICBs say it is down to the dentists; and the dentists cannot make the contracts work. Even when additional funding is found, as it has been recently following the closure of one practice, we still cannot get the dentists we need. Is it time to insist that every dentist trained here spends a number of years providing NHS services before they move to exclusively private work? I welcome the expansion in dental skills and urge Ministers to go further to accelerate growth in numbers.

Tackling the challenges of tobacco, illegal tobacco sales, disposable vape sales, the child grooming that flows with that and the organised crime that lies behind that, is of deep concern to parents in my constituency. I welcome the measures to clamp down on tobacco use and disposable vapes, and I would welcome the licensing of sales of legal tobacco as a further way of cracking down on that.

[Jim Shannon]

Respiratory health is very important. Across the United Kingdom, one of many issues is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The hon. Gentleman is well aware of that, for he has spoken before about it. We have the worst figures in all of Europe except for Denmark. Some 33% of COPD patients are readmitted within 28 days of discharge, even though readmission has been found to be strongly related to post-discharge mentality. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that for that 33%, the NICE system in place for COPD needs to be reviewed, and a better service needs to be delivered?

[Peter Gibson]

I concur with the hon. Gentleman’s calls for further work on that. It is deeply concerning to see children using disposable vapes and suffering severe traumas that result in hospitalisation. More must be done to clamp down on the illegal sale of those products.

I am pleased that the Government are focused on building an NHS fit for the future. Finally, can we please see more dentists in Darlington?

Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles (Safeguarding and Road Safety) Bill

Debate between Jim Shannon and Peter Gibson

2nd reading
Friday 10th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Peter Gibson]

My hon. Friend is correct that the devolved nations would be able to access the database. I am not aware of discussions among or engagement between the devolved nations and the Department for Transport.

As I was saying, the existing legislation enables only the authority that issued a licence to take action against it. The Bill will enhance safety by requiring licensing authorities to report information on certain serious safeguarding or road safety matters to the authority that issued the licence.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Peter Gibson]

I would be delighted to take my first intervention from the hon. Gentleman.

[Jim Shannon]

I am always pleased to get a first. I am aware of occasions where people with wheelchairs or mobility rollators have been unable to use taxis. Will the Bill safeguard accessibility for disabled people to use taxis and ensure that they have equality with those of us who are able-bodied?

[Peter Gibson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. I feel as though I have obtained my proper parliamentary wings, having now taken an intervention from him. He raises an important point on the rights and needs of disabled passengers. The Bill does not deal with access to vehicles, but it does deal with safeguarding. I believe it will help deliver that provision for those who are most vulnerable in our society and require public authorities to ensure that safety is of paramount concern in licensing decisions.

The Bill would give the Government flexibility to designate a database provider or to provide the database themselves. Given the existence of NR3, it would make sense to use that database so that the Bill’s provisions can come into effect quickly. I recognise that NR3 does not currently allow for the recording of suspensions, but I wanted that in the Bill in case such functionality is added at a later date. Many local authorities already pay a fee to the National Anti Fraud Network for use of a wide range of services, including access to NR3.

The ability of the database operator to charge a fee would enable the National Anti Fraud Network to continue to recover NR3’s running costs. Indeed, it is anticipated that rather than starting from scratch with a new database, there will be use of the existing voluntary database operated by the National Anti Fraud Network—of which NR3 forms a part—which is already subscribed to by 256 of the 276 licensing authorities. However, only 138 such authorities use the NR3 element. I am reliably informed by the Local Government Association that, with little or no additional costs, the NR3 database could fulfil the Bill’s requirements if the Secretary of State so designates.

The Bill’s objective can be illustrated no better than through use of the current voluntary scheme. Luton Borough Council recently ran a check on the NR3 database for a driver applying for a licence. The search revealed a revocation in another local authority area, due to a safeguarding concern, which the applicant failed to disclose. Consequently, Luton—rightly—refused a licence due to that deliberate withholding of information.