Ageing: Science, Technology and Healthy Living (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Sikka Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Winston. I wish him a speedy recovery. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and members of the Science and Technology Committee on producing this thorough report. I urge the Government to adopt all its recommendations.

Technology plays a great role in every walk of life. However, it must not be a substitute for caregivers or human interactions. We have already seen that face-to-face appointments to see GPs are becoming rare. In online appointments, patients are expected to describe their medical condition. This is impossible to do with any degree of certainty, especially when patients have not encountered a similar health problem before. Technology can be a boon but it can also damage your health; just ask anyone addicted to online gambling, for example, hence the need for regulation.

That said, people’s welfare requires that they must have access to digital technology. However, that access is constrained by institutionalised inequalities. About 1.5 million homes in the UK do not have internet access at the moment. Around 20% of children did not have any access to a device for online learning while schools were closed recently. Those without access to the internet are most likely to be people aged over 65 or households with low incomes or financial vulnerability. Free broadband was a radical Labour policy at the last general election and would have helped many to benefit from the digital revolution. The Government have already plagiarised many of Labour’s policies and revarnished them; I urge the Minister to do the same with the broadband policy.

The noble Baroness, Lady Young, and the noble Lord, Lord Browne, indicated that economic inequalities are a key determinant of healthy life expectancy, but the Government’s policies have accelerated those inequalities and denied millions of people good food, housing, education, internet and participation in democracy to inform policies that can improve their lives. Even before Covid, 14.5 million people were living in poverty. The poorest 50% of people in the UK have just 9% of its wealth and 42% of all disposable household income is in the hands of 20% of people, while only 7% of it goes to the lowest 20%. Some 18.4 million individuals have an income less than the income tax threshold of £12,570. Only 58% of the adult population pays income tax because the other 42% is too poor. Some 6.2 million people have an income of less than £8,844. With such an economic predicament, a large number of people cannot easily access technology and harness its benefits, yet the Government continue to neglect this challenge. Hopefully the Minister will explain why they are so committed to hurting the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society.

Income tax is payable on incomes above £12,570, but the new Johnson tax—a 1.25% hike in national insurance—applies to incomes above only £8,844. As has already been mentioned, universal credit has been cut, and the average state pension is only around £8,000—about 25% of average earnings—which is the lowest in the industrialised world. Some 2.1 million retirees live in poverty. It is estimated that around 3 million people in the UK are undernourished, and 1.3 million of them are retirees. Every year, around 25,000 of them will die because of the cold and related problems. Nearly 6 million people are awaiting hospital treatment in England and there is no relief in sight.

On top of that, the Government have adopted regressive taxation policies. Even before Covid, the poorest 10% of households paid 47.6% of their income in direct and indirect taxes, while the richest 10% paid only 33.5%. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us how he is going to address that situation, because the redistribution of income and wealth is the key to unlocking the door to healthy life expectancy—but Ministers do not utter the “R” word. None of the Ministers at the annual Conservative Party conference mentioned it; hopefully the Minister will put that record right.

On several occasions, the Government have published impact assessments of their policies, but I am yet to see an assessment that explains the impact of their policies on women, senior citizens, children or other marginalised groups in our society. Nothing is said about the impact of matters such as the suspension of the triple lock, the cut in universal credit, the new Johnson tax, wage freezes and cuts in public services on inequalities or healthy life expectancy. Late last year, the 107-page Budget document said absolutely nothing about these things; indeed, the word “women” appeared in it only three times. Can the Minister give an undertaking that, from now on, all government policies will be accompanied by an assessment of their impact on women, senior citizens, children, marginalised groups, inequalities and healthy life expectancy?

Finally, I want to say a few words about the pharmaceutical industry. Two issues have a direct relevance to this debate. First, the pharmaceutical industry has been profiteering through drugs pricing, thereby depriving many people of vital medicines that affect the quality of their lives. Secondly, the pharmaceutical industry does not have the zeal of people like Edward Jenner to eradicate anything; it increasingly creates dependency. You can see that people are dependent on drugs for blood pressure, asthma, cholesterol and many other things because the industry wants more customers. Indeed, some of these drugs themselves have side-effects that affect quality of life, but it seems to me that the drugs industry is off the Government’s radar. Its business model must be examined.