It is a pleasure and honour to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck—for the first time, I think. I thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for securing this debate, not only as vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on diabetes, but as a fellow Fox—a supporter of Leicester City Football Club. As we heard from the hon. Member for South Antrim (Paul Girvan), he is also probably one of the most assiduous Members of this House.
I am pleased to see the Minister in her place and congratulate her on her appointment. I hope she will last longer than the last three diabetes Ministers—I am not one of those who wants a general election tomorrow,
and we would like to see her build herself into her portfolio. I hope she will last as long as the shadow Minister, who has been there a while and so has been through many Ministers. We hope they will be able to share information. Let us keep the Minister in her place for some time—until the election, of course.
I declare my interest as a type 2 diabetic and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on diabetes. I have a family history: my mother, Merlyn, and my maternal grandmother both had diabetes, which gave me a 4% higher than average chance of getting diabetes. Added to my south Asian heritage, that makes me six times more likely than my European counterparts to be someone who would get type 2.
We have heard some amazing statistics. We should all just sit down, as if we were sitting in the Supreme Court, and say, “We agree with the hon. Member for Strangford,” because we agree with practically everything that he and my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) have said. However, it would not, of course, be the nature of Parliament if we all just agreed with the speech of the person before us, so I will plough on; I apologise if I repeat some of the things already mentioned.
As we know, every two minutes someone is diagnosed with diabetes. In my own city of Leicester, a higher than average number of people have diabetes—8.9% compared with 6.4% nationally—and that is expected to rise to 12% of the city’s population by 2025. That is due to the higher proportion of black and minority ethnic residents compared with the UK national average—BAME communities are genetically more likely to get diabetes.
In the time that I have spent as a type 2 diabetic, which is about 10 years, and as the chair of the APPG, I have come to the conclusion that there are five pillars of diabetes care, and I want to talk briefly about each one. The first is putting consumers first: we must put diabetics at the heart of diabetes care. There are meetings, seminars and events—a whole industry around diabetes care. We need new technology, experts and so forth, but we must never forget that it is the consumers—the diabetics—who should be put at the forefront of the debate on diabetes. Sometimes we forget the user: the people at the end of the process.
As we have heard, we need better technology. Members of the APPG and I visited the Abbott site in Witney in July 2019. I was first invited to go there by the former Prime Minister, in whose former constituency Abbott is based, because we wanted to look at the company that produced flash glucose monitoring devices, which have transformed the lives of so many people with type 1 diabetes. We went there because there are shortages of the equipment. In the past, one could go on the website and take one’s own device. There has been a shortage since the Government very kindly decided that everyone with type 1 diabetes would be able to get a machine on World Diabetes Day last year, so we went to talk to the chief executive about it. I know the company is working hard to ensure that the situation is reversed—I suppose we win the lottery by being able to provide the machines, but then we find that we do not have enough machines. I hope that this is going to improve.
I would like to show you my fingers, Ms Buck, so you can see the holes from my twice-daily finger pricking—I am surprised that I have any blood left. I use my GlucoRX device in the morning and am shocked at the reading in the evening, but I just carry on. I would love
to have a flash glucose monitoring device—I cannot get it on prescription, because it would probably bankrupt the NHS if all type 2 diabetics received it, but it is a very important device.
My hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton, who is an assiduous member of the APPG, reminds us of the importance of diabetes specialist nurses such as Debbie Hicks in Enfield and Jill Hill, who have both given evidence to the APPG at one of our meetings. They have an incredible amount of knowledge. To go back to what the hon. Member for South Antrim said, we know that doctors are gods—they have a better reputation than MPs, anyway. Who wants to listen to an MP when they can listen to their local GP? However, they do not have the time. From our constituents, we all know that doctors are unable to see all their patients and spend sufficient time with them talking about diabetes. The point that has been made about diabetes specialist nurses is very important: we need to ensure that we have more of them.
The second pillar of diabetes care, after the need to put consumers first, is awareness. We all know that diabetes is a ticking timebomb. There are 4.6 million people with diabetes in the country, but an additional 1.1 million people, which is equivalent to the entire population of Birmingham—imagine the whole of Birmingham suddenly getting diabetes overnight—are undiagnosed. We therefore need to support awareness campaigns, which have been led very much by the private sector but supported by the Government, because that is the best way to tell whether people have type 2 diabetes and whether they can change their lifestyle.
We have heard from the former Chinese-meal eating, lemonade and fizzy drink-drinking hon. Member for Strangford how he changed his lifestyle. If only he had been told before, he might have changed it earlier. I remember that when my mother had type 2 diabetes, I had just been appointed Minister for Europe by Tony Blair and had no time to look after my mother. I was flying around Europe trying to enlarge the European Union by bringing in Poland and Hungary—as we are about to leave the European Union, I will not start another debate about that. The fact is that I did not spend enough time with my mum, which is a source of great guilt for me personally—finding out about diabetes, how she got it, what she was doing about it, and why she was still eating chocolate when she was a type 1 diabetic. Looking back at it, it seems amazing. It is important that we diagnose earlier, because then we can take our medication.