Health and Social Care Bill

My Lords, I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, was not here to move his amendment. However, I think that the general principles that the other amendments in this group address are very much what I want to bring to the attention of the House and the Minister. We now know so much more about the development of children. In the 18th and 19th centuries there was a great amount of dirt and other problems in the streets. This aspect of public health was taken up by municipal authorities, which had to build drains and sewerage. It was seen as critical to the future of this country. It also, of course, had an important effect on people’s health. We now know much more. In my last job in government, I was the Social Exclusion Minister and had the enormous privilege of introducing to this country the Family Nurse Partnership Programme. In learning about that evidence-based programme, which affects the development of children more advantageously than any other single programme in the world, I discovered a little about what neurologists and others now know about brain development. The truth is, if we do not support parents and children in those early months and years, by the time they are three, they are so far behind it will take the rest of their lives to compensate for what they have not had in those early months. I listened to the debate on alcohol and wanted to intervene. In family nurse partnerships, mothers learn that if you drink alcohol in pregnancy, it will affect the brain of the foetus and therefore the child. It has been incredibly successful, therefore, in giving young women the determination not to drink, because they want the best for their child when it is born. These are all things that we now have a lot of knowledge about. Recently, I was at a meeting where a neurologist talked about research into the stress put on children and what elements in the body can be measured to tell whether or not there is stress and what can be done about it. Stress can lead to violence and violent behaviour. We know about these things, but they did not know about them in the 18th century, when they began talking about public health. We did not know about it when I was growing up, but we know about it now. That means we have a responsibility to take it into account and build the early development of children into our understanding of public health. We must make sure that we address it. It should not be until we get to extremes, when suddenly somebody notices that a particular child is developing in a difficult way, such as noble Lords have talked about, when children end up in the criminal justice system. We know what will happen to children if we do not pay attention to this: they will end up in the criminal justice system, and they are more likely to end up with an alcohol or drug dependency. We know these things now and, in my view, we have no option but to take account of them as a matter of public health. Therefore, I believe that we have to write that into the Bill.