Ageing: Public Services and Demographic Change Committee Report

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to speak after my noble friend Lord Borwick and to congratulate him on an eloquent and perceptive speech. I have known him for a little over a year but in that time we have become firm friends, despite the fact that we were briefly rivals on the hustings. He is, I venture to suggest, exactly the sort of successful and independent mind that the House of Lords most values. Indeed, I hope I do not cause offence if I say that there are probably not enough of us here who have such direct experience of manufacturing industry. He has developed batteries, reinvented electric vehicles, traded with China, run a foundry and metal powder group, employed thousands of people and, of course, was for over 20 years the man behind the famous London black cab.

I am sorry to trump my noble friend Lord Wei but, although my noble friend Lord Livingston became chief executive of a plc at the age of 32, my noble friend Lord Borwick did so at 31, albeit that the company was a slightly smaller one. It is curious that we should be trumping each other on youth in a debate about ageing. It was in that role, as he has said, that my noble friend Lord Borwick championed the idea of making the London taxi the first wheelchair-accessible public transport in the UK. This precedent enabled him to make the door ramps that transformed the London buses to become wheelchair-accessible too.

Successful as my noble friend has been, though, he has had his share of worries and challenges. He has mentioned today his two sons who needed complex heart surgery, and I know that he and his wife Victoria have thrown themselves into various medical and disability charities to enable others to cope with what life throws at them. I congratulate him on a fine maiden speech, and we look forward to many more contributions from him.

Turning to the topic of the debate today, and not wishing to take up too much of your Lordships’ time, I begin by saying that it is hard to remain an optimist after reading some of the things at the beginning of this report. We read phrases like “woefully underprepared”, see references to an inappropriate health model for England and are told that the current system is in trouble now. So, before making a more serious point, I would like to offer a tiny crumb of demographic good news—at least, I think it is good.

Although the number of 85 year-olds is going to double by 2030, as the report says, and although the number of people over 100 is increasing at the rate of about 7% a year globally so that there are now 500,000 people in the world over the age of 100, none the less there are just 60 people in the world over 110 and that number, if anything, seems to be going down. When the party opposite came to power in 1997 there were four people in the world over 115; today there is one. I am not sure who that reflects badly on.

The last time the global longevity record was beaten was in 1997 when Jeanne Calment died at the age of 122, and it will be at least 23 years until it is beaten again. The last time Britain’s longevity record was broken was in 1993—20 years ago—when Charlotte Hughes died at the age of 115. So something slightly odd is happening. Average lifespan is going up dramatically all the time, but maximum lifespan seems not to be changing much at all. As I said, it is a very small crumb of comfort as far as the issues discussed in this report are concerned.

I turn briefly to three of the report’s conclusions that I found most interesting and vital. The emphasis on a new model of healthcare to cope with this problem is crucial. We had a debate in this House a few months ago, which was initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Patel, on models of healthcare. I was very struck by how bipartisan the support was for fresh thinking on how we tackle healthcare. We have to be able to get beyond the sterile debate about whether it should be public or private and realise that it is bound to be a mixture of both.

The second, which the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, mentioned in his speech, is the importance of drawing on the assets of the elderly to support their care. This is not an easy subject, and it is one that many people have struggled with. I do not pretend to have the answer, but it is vital to have raised this matter and to be able to discuss it again, I hope in a bipartisan way.

The final thing is the vital importance of economic growth, because if we redoubled our efforts to increase the growth rate of this country, some of these problems would suddenly look a lot less insoluble. Nothing does more to make debts affordable than economic growth. If this country were suddenly to find a way of growing at 5% a year, it would double its economy in 14 years. On that note, I draw the attention of the House to the possibility that what we need to be doing is looking at the wider economy as a whole as a way to solve this problem.