Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I should like to make a short intervention to ask my noble friend one or two questions. When I was a Minister I was responsible for the Health of the Nation policy, which I much enjoyed. At the time we introduced the five-a-day programme. That was 21 years ago, so we can see how long it has taken to get that message deep into the psyche of the British people. There is something about promoting good health and habits of living to try and get it into the population—it takes a very long time. I want to speak to Amendments 62, 65 and 68. I was very much hoping that we would have a debate on Amendment 94A, which is about Public Health England. But courtesy is the hallmark of this House and, as the noble Lord, Lord Patel, is not here, it is absolutely right that we should not debate it today. On Amendment 62, on scientific and other evidence from the noble Lord, Lord Warner, it is the ““other evidence”” that I want to ask my noble friend about. As my noble friend Lady Williams said, other evidence is something that you build up, and I am quite concerned about how we are going to get this evidence into health and well-being boards and how we will ensure that the Government have enough evidence that builds from the bottom up. One problem is with access to data; if we are going to have joint needs assessments through the health and well-being boards and strategies, and if that information on the ground cannot be shared, it will be very difficult to ensure that we have joint needs assessments. The GPs have those data and share them with other people in the National Health Service, but I do not believe that at this time they can share them with local government. That will be a very important issue because, although it is anonymised data, if you are going to run a public health programme on obesity you really need to know exactly in what geographical area that obesity is at its worst so that you can target it. When you are looking at the needs of individuals, you may have information about the numbers of people who have diabetes or coronary heart disease, but it is when you link those diseases to individuals that you get back to the previous debate that we were having on long-term conditions. Linking some of this stuff together is absolutely critical, and maybe my noble friend could think about that in the intervening time and write to me—and to other noble Lords, if they are interested. I agree with my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones that this may be not quite the right moment to discuss medical records, but I really cannot resist it, although I will be brief. Some 21 years ago, in this House, from the place where my noble friend now sits, I made my maiden speech on medical records, so it is something that I have quite an interest in. When I produced a policy document on changing childbirth, one recommendation was that women who were pregnant should hold their own medical record, sometimes known as hand-held maternity notes. That has had an enormous impact; it has made those women feel that they are very important—they are pregnant and they are going to have a child and a whole readjustment to family life. That is a very important time in a woman and her partner’s life, and it acted as a sort of passport to them. Bearing in mind that 30 per cent of women who are pregnant are obese, which has a huge impact on the next generation, it seems to me that having hand-held records or access to or ownership of your own records is terribly important. Of course, we have the red book that women get about their children so that they can share that information with health professionals. My last point is on Amendment 68 and the standing advisory committee. I absolutely understand why the faculty of public health and other people like that idea. I am not sure whether that advisory committee, as has already been suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, will make an annual report. That is possible. We will have the Chief Medical Officer’s report annually, as she said, which is a very brave and independent document; the Chief Medical Officer says how it really is, and I know that it is very often extremely uncomfortable for the Government. When we have Public Health England, will it make an annual report? I am concerned that we do not get too confused. Some of these standing advisory committees have been extremely effective, such as the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. When I left the Government, in our last year we did not have a single case of home-grown measles. That was a tremendous achievement and my hero is Professor David Salisbury, who has worked in this field for years. However, if one individual like Andrew Wakefield comes along, it can destroy the herd immunity for years. So, although advisory committees are helpful, they will not necessarily prevent that sort of thing from happening. In addition, advisory committees breed. It is absolutely extraordinary. Yes, you want to keep the good ones. There are others that I have set up and given a time limit to complete a task within two or three years. Then you try to get rid of them. It is so difficult, because they get dug in, they love the work they are doing and many get paid for it. In the end, they become not so much a help but more of a nuisance. So I have some reservations, but when we get to the debate on Public Health England we will see how some of this knits together.