Prosthetics for Amputees

Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Mackinlay, for securing this debate. I, too, pay tribute to him. What a marvellous man he is, and what an inspiration to us all. He reminds me very much of my friend, the late Duke Hussey—Lord Hussey—who was injured and taken prisoner at the Anzio beachhead in 1943. He lost his leg and the other leg was partly paralysed. He developed osteomyelitis of his spine, and the Germans assessed that he was dying and so repatriated him. He arrived in Oxford and the doctors confirmed that he was, in fact, dying.

Being Duke Hussey, he was not going to take this lying down, so he wrote to one of the most eminent professors of orthopaedics at the time and said, “Dear professor, I think you’re the only man in the world who can save me”. This professor was rather impressed with this, and he summoned him and said, “Now look here, Hussey, in this letter you said that you ‘think’ that I am the only man in the world who can save you—but I am the only man in the world who can save you”. He operated on his spine 33 times over a period of years to deal with the osteomyelitis, because the antibiotics were not available, and eventually he was cured. I never heard him complain.

Lord Hussey knew more about disability that most other people, so I got him to sit on my committee to look into the supply of artificial legs and wheelchairs, which Mrs Thatcher set up because she thought that the service was in a bad state—how right she was. I was also helped by the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach. We found out just how bad the service was in terms of limbs that did not fit. It was not rocket science. With the amputee wearing his artificial limb, you could put your hand in the socket while he still had his stump there—such was the poor fit. The other thing was that they were not aligned properly. Some people got so fed up with this that they decided to have a peg leg, and then you had the alignment much better. Some of the farmers with a peg leg found it quite useful when they were planting potatoes, because they would walk down the field stamping on the ground, making a hole suitable into which to drop the potato—so it had its benefits.

We tried to get them to use modern techniques to make a socket that fitted the amputation stump, and it was not that difficult to do. One of the problems was that the companies had such a secure income that they did not bother to develop too much. I asked them what their export attempts were. They said, “It’s very poor indeed—very difficult to export”. I said, “Guess who exports to Israel?” They said, “We’ve no idea”. I said, “It’s a German firm called Ottobock”. I ask the Minister: what is going on at the moment to ensure that the limbs do fit and are aligned properly?