NHS Outsourcing and Privatisation

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

Absolutely. I wish the Labour candidate in Lewisham East well and will be campaigning with them. We will be sending a firm message to the Tories that privatisation of the NHS will end. The NHS is not for sale.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

It is not about my patience, but about Back Benchers.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

I have only one question: will the hon. Gentleman explain why the Welsh Labour Government have outsourced dialysis services at Wrexham?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

We have always said that there is a small role for the private sector. This is what I said earlier—[Interruption.]

Drug Addiction

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that Wales is disproportionately represented? Wales’s population is 5% of the United Kingdom’s, but 10% of those drugs deaths took place in Wales. Will he join me in asking the Minister whether changes to UK legislation are needed to allow devolved Governments to introduce harm-reducing measures, such as safe injecting facilities, in areas with a high concentration of injecting drug users, such as Wrexham?

[Craig Mackinlay]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. She has put that issue on the record, and I am sure the Minister will address it later. I will provide some data for Wales that may assist her.

My concerns are somewhat summed up by that old adage, which is usually used in relation to financial markets: when the US sneezes, the UK catches a cold. I am concerned that we may be on the brink of a fentanyl epidemic here in the UK. I want to highlight both the human costs and the financial costs of drug addiction to the UK economy and to the people of this country.

The human costs are fairly obvious. Everyone will have their own points to add to this list, but they include: physical and mental health issues; disruption to families; the effects on children and their life chances, including the increasingly clear link between drug use during pregnancy and various autism spectrum conditions and physical deformities in children; the obvious spread of disease; the often desperate measures that people take to try to raise cash, resulting in prostitution and all manner of human degradation; forgone opportunities and the essence of all that someone could be in life being extinguished; and, of course, premature death.

NHS Pay

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Wednesday 13th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Deidre Brock]

No.

Those Governments must give nurses the cash to bridge that gap with Scottish nurses and then match the pay rises from the Scottish Government—and make it new money. This has to be new investment, not current resources and not freed-up efficiency savings—those infamous, mythical beasts. It must be new money that is put into the service to keep it viable. Squeezing current resources simply starves the whole service. Please, let us also have no more of the pretence that paying workers a decent wage would bankrupt the economy or that a couple of per cent. on the wages of the lowest-paid would be some sort of spiral of economic doom.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Will the hon. Lady join me in asking why the Welsh Labour Government have not raised the pay cap where they could in Wales? That would have cost £60 million and would have relieved the situation for 30,000 nurses.

[Deidre Brock]

I thank the hon. lady for that important intervention. Austerity, wage cuts and in-work poverty are political choices—this is policy not necessity. The poverty facing public sector workers, including NHS workers, is a choice made by the Government—a choice made by millionaires, making ordinary workers poorer. An “increase” of 1% in someone’s wage while Brexit takes food prices through the roof, heating bills rocket, public transport fares are up by a quarter—more in some cases—the costs of childcare grow faster than the children, and rents soar is simply a pay cut. That makes the effects of the Government’s inhumane austerity policy worse. These workers are suffering the effects of cuts to public services.

In the Tory’s June manifesto, the Prime Minister wrote that she would deliver a

“Britain in which work pays”

and a mental health Bill

“to put parity of esteem at the heart of treatment”.

Last year, the Mental Health Foundation found a causal link between poverty and poor mental health, just like dozens of studies have shown before. That means that Tory Government austerity is increasing the incidence of mental health problems while promising to make it better. That increases the pressure on the NHS and betrays the patients who need the help. We cannot solve the problem in England’s NHS with new laws; it needs new cash. A responsible Government would be finding that new cash and funnelling it into the NHS and other public services.

English police forces have been saying that they cannot afford pay rises without additional funding. Some forces have clearly already reached and exceeded capacity, judging by the stories of crimes being ignored because no officers are available. For some unfathomable reason, the Government have let police numbers drop by around 20,000 since 2010. That is not a public service in a serviceable condition; that is a public sector breaking down.

If austerity continues, England’s public sector will cannibalise itself, and when that happens, Scotland’s public services will be damaged as well. Tied to this place, Scotland gets damaged time and again, but public services in England have reached fracture-point and are disintegrating. At this point, England’s NHS is not struggling but dying, and it is being helped on its merry way by Ministers who would rather it was gone. Breaking down the fabric of public services renders them irreparable, and breaking down the workers who deliver them does the same. Decent pay for decent work is not an outrageous demand, and decent funding for society’s infrastructure is a matter of respecting one’s own self-interest as well.

Children’s Wellbeing and Mental Health: Schools

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 10th January 2017 Westminster Hall

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

It is an honour to serve under you as Chair, Mr Nuttall, and I thank the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) for securing this timely debate, which he opened excellently.

Mental health in schools is devolved to Wales and provision there is often used as an example of good practice. Today I would like to draw Members’ attention to certain areas of good performance in supporting children’s mental health services in Welsh schools, particularly in Gwynedd, the county in which my constituency is located and that I served as portfolio leader for education between 2008 and 2012. There is always room for improvement and there are still areas of concern, some of which infringe upon non-devolved competencies and impact heavily on the wellbeing of children and young people.

I will just point out that student union presidents at Grwp Llandrillo Menai, the three-college further education institution for north-west Wales, are so troubled by the prevalence of mental health issues among 16 to 19-year-olds that they have chosen Mind as this year’s cross-college union charity. The Children’s Society’s “Good Childhood” report for 2016 highlights the issues affecting children’s wellbeing, as well as the connections between wellbeing and mental health. It calls for the introduction of statutory provision of emotional wellbeing and mental health support within schools in England, to act as a point of early help and to provide referral to specialist services if necessary.

Although they were conveniently timed during a row surrounding the “humanitarian crisis” in health, I am sure that we all welcome yesterday’s announcements about reform of mental healthcare, particularly the pledge to offer mental health first aid training in schools. The Government are making the right noises, but the detail is yet to be communicated. The real-terms increase in health spending is unlikely to meet the requirements created by health inflation over the coming years, so it is by no means a silver bullet solution, and of course it has implications for the Barnett consequentials that Wales receives.

As I have said, counselling provision in schools is already on a statutory footing in Wales. During the Plaid Cymru and Labour “One Wales” Government of 2008, the goal was set of ensuring that every secondary school child could access counselling as needed. In addition, in our first few months as an Opposition party last year we secured a landmark budget deal with the Welsh Government, whereby we realised a manifesto pledge to increase spending on mental health services by £20 million a year, and to improve access to trained counsellors and therapists in the community.

An example of a successful school counselling scheme is being implemented by Plaid-run Gwynedd and is operating in both Gwynedd and Ynys Môn. Since its instigation in 2008, 500 children a year have received counselling, and I am glad to say that very few of them have gone on to be referred to child and adolescent mental health services. In fact, in 2014-15 more than 11,500 children and young people across Wales received counselling, and 89% of those seen did not require onward referral after the completion of their counselling.

However, despite significant progress in that field in Wales, there are still areas of concern. A number of issues remain about the provision and delivery of CAMHS, including the transition from child to adult services and the support offered to children and young people who do not meet the clinical threshold for CAMHS but who still need support. In Wales, the comparable waiting times for child and adult mental health services are such that four of every 1,000 children and young people are waiting for treatment, which is eight times greater than the equivalent number of adults.

A particular point to which my attention was drawn came from my surgeries, as I am sure is the case for many Members here today. It seems that those children and young people who cannot attend school because of mental health issues fall between the cracks. Olivia Hitchen is 15, and I am glad to say that she was happy for me to mention her name—of course I asked her first. She lives in Corris in Dwyfor Meirionnydd and has explained how better support needs to be provided for young people who suffer extreme anxiety when they are placed in the crowded environment of a school classroom. It struck me as interesting that we expect children to operate in social groups for the purpose of education in a way that is strikingly different from the operation of most working environments; we do not usually put people in large groups with one person addressing them. If individual children do not fit into the conventional classroom, there seem to be precious few alternatives for them, particularly if they have mental health issues as well.

Olivia is highly intelligent and articulate. Her issues with anxiety appear to be reduced when she does not attend formal education, but she now needs to achieve formal qualifications, such as GCSEs, through examinations. Surely our education system should match the needs of the child and not expect our children to be moulded to the needs of the education system.

My final point today relates to the non-devolved ways in which children’s wellbeing may be improved. Of course, poverty increases the risk of mental health problems; it can be both a causal factor and a consequence of mental ill health. My constituency of Dwyfor Meirionnydd has one of the highest poverty rates in the United Kingdom. Of the 11,312 children living there, it is estimated that 2,510 live in poverty. Increasingly, those children who are in poverty live in a household where at least one adult is in work—there are 1,958 children in that situation in my constituency. A move into work is not automatically a move out of poverty. The impact of this Government’s punitive universal credit moves is hitting children in my area hard. Families in my constituency face a four-year freeze in their benefits, and the cumulative effect of the changes to support will mean that many families lose out overall, thus aggravating mental health-related issues.

Every child must be given a chance of achieving robust health and happiness. Despite the gains created by the examples I have cited from Gwynedd and from Wales overall, more must be done at both Welsh Government level and UK Government level to ensure that the best opportunities exist for all our children.

Baby Loss

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Antoinette Sandbach]

I know many good examples of that. I shall talk a little later about the Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, where a midwife together with the chaplain have developed the most amazing suite of resources to support parents. They have tailor-made the information available specifically for the loss that parents face—whether a miscarriage or a stillbirth—and it was all done in their own time, unpaid and unsupported. There is that level of dedication. For every area where there is bad practice, there are fantastic and dedicated clinicians, midwives and indeed chaplains, providing support to bereaved parents.

Like George’s father, members of the all-party parliamentary group want to make a difference. We welcome the Government’s commitment to a 20% reduction in stillbirth rates by 2020 and a halving by 2030 and the additional resources that have been put into the perinatal mortality tool. We are calling for some additional steps which we believe will help to deliver those targets.

The report that we launched yesterday identifies three key aims. The first is prevention. We need a sustained public health campaign that informs parents of the known risks. We know that parents of twins are three times more likely to suffer loss. Black and ethnic minority groups face much higher rates of stillbirth and loss. Mothers over 40, mothers living in poverty, and teenage mothers all have increased risk of stillbirth or neonatal death.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I am most grateful to both the hon. Lady and the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince) for securing the debate.

A Dwyfor mother asked me to take the opportunity to express the depth of her feeling. She wrote:

“We don’t just suffer the loss of a baby, we lose a toddler, a child, a teenager, birthdays, Christmas days, mother/father’s days the list is endless as is the grief. The pain of losing a child never leaves you.”

She also wanted me to say that she believes that a third-trimester scan would have made a significant difference in her case.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

I am very grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that point.

We know that information needs to be targeted at high-risk groups: messages about smoking during pregnancy, risks associated with obesity, and, of course, the importance of not sharing a bed with your baby, and of putting the baby back to sleep. The success of the Back to Sleep campaign, supported by the Lullaby Trust, has shown what can be achieved in reducing sudden infant death. We now need similar information campaigns in relation to stillbirth, Count the Kicks and reduced foetal movement. I welcome the additional steps being taken by the Department of Health—along with the major charities—to highlight avoidable risks, but it is vital for such messages to be targeted at the most at-risk groups in order to have the biggest impact.

Space Policy

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) and for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) for securing this debate.

Tim Peake’s six-hour adventure tomorrow, as part of a team of two Tims, to replace a solar power connection unit in space will be watched with awe by children and adults alike—hon. Members will be glad to hear that I removed from that paragraph a cliché that has already been used.

Tim’s iconic voyage into space, living and working on the international space station, is beamed into our lives tweet by tweet, which is fascinating. He has paid tribute to David Bowie’s “Starman”, and he sends us extraordinary aerial views of the planet, alongside spacesuit selfies. He really gives a feeling of life on the space station, as well as those iconic visions and views, and he raises our aspirations to the farthest frontiers. Let us make the most of this chance to spark young people’s interest in the careers of the future.

The spirit in which this motion is presented is to be greatly appreciated, and there is perhaps potential for not just a single spaceport site, but for a number of sites across the UK. Members with vested local interests in a possible spaceport site in their constituency will inevitably take the opportunity to set out their individual stalls—that is our representative duty. However, the proposal to ensure that fantastic scientific, cultural and technological opportunities arise from UK spaceport development must benefit the United Kingdom as a whole.

With that semi-apology, I will turn to the possible spaceport site at the former RAF camp near Llanbedr. It is in a coastal location surrounded by sand dunes between Cardigan bay and the hinterland of Snowdonia. The site has a 50-year track record of airspace management and operations. It comprises three main runways, the longest of which is oriented in such a way that flights pass over sparsely populated areas. Unique among all the candidate sites, Llanbedr already has access to 2,000 square miles of segregated airspace over Cardigan bay. The airfield was bought by the Welsh Government in 2004 as a strategic asset, and since 2008 it has been leased by Llanbedr Airfield Estates on a long-term lease.

So far the site has mostly been used for testing, evaluating and developing remotely piloted air systems and unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones. Its most recent initiative relates to the use of drones for protecting fisheries. The site is included in the Snowdonia enterprise zone, which has facilitated improvements including a £1.5 million spend to upgrade its facilities and infrastructure. The Civil Aviation Authority has rightly identified safety as the overriding operational principle for a spaceport. That applies not only to any members of the public and workers using that port, but also to the “uninvolved public”. That would imply that the combination of relative isolation, coastal location and segregated airspace satisfies those requirements as fully as possible.

It is safe to say—others have already made an excellent case for this—that the economic potential for a spaceport, both in the immediate locality and further afield, is immense. The county of Gwynedd is to a great degree dependent on public sector employment and the leisure industry. The constituency of Dwyfor Meirionnydd suffers from seasonal and minimum wage employment, and although official unemployment figures are low, chronic economic inactivity is a very real issue. The demographics of the area indicate a steadily ageing population, as young people move away for higher education and employment. That is the price we pay for dependency on the seasonal tourism industry, a shrinking public sector, and scant Government investment in well paid employment.

Of course, this is in no way simply a local investment in a far western corner of the United Kingdom. Llanbedr has the potential to benefit the whole of north Wales, with its educational powerhouses in the University of Bangor, Wrexham’s Glyndwr University, Grwp Llandrillo Menai, and Coleg Cambria. Indeed, it goes much further than that, because the northern powerhouse would have that development within easy reach, and it is the nearest site to the international travel hubs of Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff and London. It is also the closest candidate site to the UK space gateway at Harwell in Oxford.

This has the potential to make a real difference to Gwynedd, and indeed to the economy of the wider area and the UK as a whole, yet we are still waiting for the Government to bring us out of the limbo of expectation by providing the operational criteria for the UK spaceport. It is impossible to move ahead, as we do not yet know what we are bidding for. It is difficult even to quantify, in terms of jobs both locally and further afield, until we know the operational criteria. We need them as a matter of urgency. The uncertainty impacts locally, as caravan sites in the area tell me their customers are reluctant to commit to new contracts until a definite decision is made about the future one way or another.

I spoke to a student at my local sixth-form college, Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor, who happens to live in the next village to Llanbedr. He told me that his fellow students think this is a cloud cuckoo project that will never happen. How could it ever happen in somewhere like Meirionnydd? But then I could see a flash of hope and a realisation that yes, this could happen, this could happen here and I could be part of it. Like Buzz Lightyear, we can turn falling with style into infinity and beyond.

Off-patent Drugs Bill

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Friday 6th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. Repurposing is becoming increasingly common. Approximately 10% of the Brain Tumour Research portfolio is in repurposed drugs. For the Cure Parkinson’s Trust, the figure is 50%, and for the Alzheimer’s Society it is 13.6%. My hon. Friend makes a powerful point.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

The debate is poignant for me. Breast Cancer Now is very supportive of the Bill, and my best friend and the mother of my goddaughter is currently in hospital recovering from her second treatment for breast cancer in 10 years. I should like to take the opportunity to say this. Christine Lennon, the most organised, capable and scary of my friends: we all want you home as soon as possible. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]

Some 850,000 people suffer from dementia, and that number is likely to increase to 1 million in 10 years’ time. The matter raised by the Bill is relevant to 20% of the drugs that the Alzheimer’s Society support, and it claims that the Bill will enable it to work on off-patent drugs. Does he agree that that is very significant, given that the disease affects so many people?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

On the second part of the hon. Lady’s intervention, I entirely agree that it would assist the Alzheimer’s Society. On the first part, I am sure the whole House wishes her best friend a speedy recovery.

Given the time restraints, I will touch on just one benefit that the Bill would have. zoledronic acid, a type of bisphosphonate, was originally used to treat bone fractures in advanced cancer and osteoporosis, but it can also reduce by 28% the risk of breast cancer spreading to the bone in post-menopausal women. If it were routinely available to 34,000 women, it could save 1,000 lives a year, at the cost of about 5p per day per patient. That is precisely the kind of benefit the Bill could bring.