NHS England does not routinely collect or publish data on waiting times for treatment for gender dysphoria, but I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that as of February this year 28,290 adults were waiting for a first appointment in England.
Four years on average for an initial appointment, and seven years at the south-west clinic in Exeter. With healthcare for trans people in effect non-existent, the Government planning to remove trans human rights from the Equality Act 2010, breaking their promise to ban conversion therapy and to reform the gender recognition process, and now threatening to force schools to out trans students to their parents, can the Minister see why this tiny and particularly vulnerable minority feels under attack by the Government, and that some who can afford to are even leaving the country for a less hostile environment?
I can reassure the right hon. Gentleman that we are putting an additional £7.9 million into four new pilot gender identity clinics, because we want services to improve and waiting times to come down. The four new pilot services are now operating in Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Merseyside, East of England and London, and a new clinic will be opening in Sussex later this year. The four pilot studies have already removed 3,400 patients from the waiting list and I am hoping the fifth clinic will go further.
23. Whether he has made a recent assessment of the potential relationship between poverty and life expectancy.
Vaping: Young People
Adult Social Care: Funding
Smoking Cessation
Maternity Care: South-west
Urgent and Emergency Care
Health Inequalities
NHS Dental Services
NHS Appointments
Cancer Treatment: Waiting Times
GP Appointments
In-home Health and Social Care Services
Topical Questions
20 of 179 shown
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Barclay)
ConservativeNorth East Cambridgeshire
The Government are committed to our levelling-up mission to narrow the gap in healthy life expectancy by 2030. That is why, in October, we committed an additional £50 million to 13 local authorities to tackle inequalities and why we are also setting out our plans through the major conditions strategy.
Even in areas that people consider to be affluent, such as Buckinghamshire, health inequalities can be a serious concern. Figures from Opportunity Bucks show there is an eight-year difference in life expectancy between residents of the Aylesbury North West ward and the Ridgeway East ward, both of which are in my constituency, yet the funding for those areas is essentially the same. Will my right hon. Friend explain the steps he is taking to ensure that deprived communities, wherever they are in the country, get the additional help and support—not necessarily purely financial—that they need to address their needs?
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the importance of targeting health inequalities. Let me give the House a practical example. For lung cancer, patients are 20 times more likely to survive five years if we catch it early rather than late. Before the pandemic, those in the most deprived communities had the worst diagnosis. However, as a result of the targeted action we took with lung cancer check vans, they now have the best early diagnosis, which obviously has a big read-across for the five-year survival rate.
The UK ranks 29th in global life expectancy. Professor Martin McKee from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine notes that one reason why the overall increase in life expectancy has been so sluggish in the UK is that it has fallen for poorer groups. The Scottish Government are doing everything they can within devolved competencies to fight poverty—the Scottish child payment and so on—but Westminster controls 85% of social security. What representations has the Secretary of State made to Cabinet colleagues and the Department for Work and Pensions about the damaging effects of their policies on life expectancy?
The hon. Gentleman raises a very important point. He can see the success of the representations I made to Cabinet colleagues from the Chancellor’s Budget statement, when he announced additional funding to tackle, in particular, health impediments to access to the labour market. He will also have seen the recent announcement of targeted action on, for example, smoking cessation, which is a particular driver of health inequalities. That includes our financial incentive scheme to pregnant mums, which obviously has a big impact on both their health and the health of their baby.
It is becoming clear that in Cornwall the only way to get dental care is to go to a private dentist. In a deprived area, of which there are many across Cornwall, that is just not an option for people on low incomes. What can the Secretary of State do to increase the accessibility of NHS dentistry?
This issue concerns Members across the House. We have already started to reform the dental contract. We have introduced the £23 minimum value for units of dental activity and created more UDA bands, reflecting the fair cost. We are seeing more patients nationally—to March, up nearly a fifth on the year. But I recognise that there is more to do, and the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien), is undertaking that work as we speak.
Women in my constituency have a healthy life expectancy of only 56 years. Could the Minister explain why the difference between West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire—where the Prime Minister has his constituency—is 10 years? Why should women have to put up with that kind of experience? What is his explanation of how that has happened?
The hon. Gentleman is right that we should narrow the health inequalities gap, and we are committed to doing that. That is why in the women’s health strategy, which I set out in the summer, we committed to having women’s health hubs as one-stop shops to tackle some of the gender inequality. It is also why, whether on obesity, smoking or lung cancer, we are targeting our screening and public health interventions to close the gap, which he is quite right to highlight.
The Secretary of State is absolutely right: we should be narrowing the health inequalities in this country. It is just a shame that, on his watch, we are not. A baby born in Blackpool today will live eight years less than a baby born in Kensington. Under this Tory Government, health inequalities have widened in many parts of the country. They have scrapped their health disparities strategy and cut the number of health visitors by a third, and ordinary families are paying the price. Why does the Secretary of State not get a grip, adopt Labour’s plan to scrap the non-dom tax status and train 5,000 new health visitors, so that every child has a healthy start to life?