---

Older People's Rights (Health Care)

I want to say how pleased I am to be contributing to the debate. I commend the Joint Committee's excellent report, and the work of the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) and his Committee. The report could not have come at a better time to move the debate forward. We would probably all agree that things have not been moving as quickly as we should have liked. To quote Help the Aged, which also welcomed the report:"““Sadly, we have seen little progress in this area since we published Rights at Risk in 2005 and think that it is now long overdue.””" As the Joint Committee's report made clear, there is much excellent health and social care provision for older people throughout the country. It is very heartening when we see at first hand the best of our health and social care professionals giving such care, and ensuring the dignity and human rights of older people—something to which we are all committed. Unfortunately, as we have already heard powerfully expressed by the hon. Member for Hendon, examples of neglect and abuse of older people are simply too widespread. We probably all accept that we are talking about a societal problem, and not simply a political one. Some people's attitude to older people is a manifestation of a view of them as second-class citizens who somehow do not have the same human rights that other people do. All the cases that we have heard about from the hon. Gentleman suggest that such attitudes are found far too frequently. I was very happy, as I think the hon. Gentleman knows, to put my name to amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill that tackled the current loophole in the Human Rights Act 1998, affecting private and voluntary care home residents who are not state funded. I shall talk about that more later, but will mention now that there are 300,000 vulnerable older people who are not protected by the Human Rights Act. There have been discussions with the Minister of State, Department of Health, the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), and I welcome the fact that they are continuing. We still, however, hear of cases of malnutrition and dehydration, rough handling of patients, bullying, neglect and people being left in their own urine and excrement. The British Institute of Human Rights provided a list of examples, including continent older people being forced to wear incontinence pads; the bathing of older people one after the other in the same bath; routine over-medication to keep people docile; night staff forcing older people to wake at 4 o'clock in the morning to be cleaned and dressed, simply because that suits the shift pattern; and an older woman being placed on a commode, fed Weetabix and washed by a carer, all at the same time. The issue that was so well highlighted by the Joint Committee's report is that, at the moment, there is no real recourse to a legal remedy under the Human Rights Act. Until that changes, older people and, of course, younger disabled people are unable to challenge clear violations of their human rights by independent providers of health and social care. The report was neatly summarised by the hon. Member for Hendon. He mentioned some of the key issues, the first being hospital discharge. Again, inhumane discharge procedures often happen simply because of a lack of consultation with families or a lack of information to the individual and their family. There is very little information about options—frankly, a lot of the time, there is no choice at all. Often, such things happen in the context of bed-blocking, which is a difficult situation, and the need to move patients into appropriate care facilities from hospitals. However, despite the inevitable pressures, we must ensure that older people have rights. That needs to be addressed, and patients' rights need to be clearly spelled out, which I hope we will hear from the Minister. I am sure that we agree that confidentiality causes problems. It is vital that the Department of Health issues clear guidance and perhaps a code of practice to make clear the limitations to the duty of confidentiality so that, when appropriate, family members or carers receive information and are involved in decisions, as they clearly need to be in some cases. On the right to complain, there are huge barriers in the system as it currently operates. The hon. Member for Hendon gave a powerful, specific example of someone who was evicted for complaining. So many people in our care homes fear that. People within the NHS often have limited awareness of the organisation's complaints system, or they have difficulties navigating it. That strongly makes the case for an independent advisory service for people, their families and carers to enable them to navigate their way through the system and to show them where to go when they have a grievance and wish to make a complaint. There should be an independent complaints system in social care settings to ensure that people have the right to speak up. Returning to the human rights loophole, we had lengthy discussions on the matter in debates on the Health and Social Care Bill. Because 90 per cent. of care homes are in the private or voluntary sector, the issue can no longer be ignored if we are serious about tackling the problems that we have heard about today. I was pleased to take forward amendments on the back of the Joint Committee's report, and to work with the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins), who led on those matters in the Health and Social Care Bill Committee. I welcome the way in which the Minister of State, Department of Health, the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), listened and engaged with organisations and MPs across the political spectrum to take the matter forward, but the fundamental issue remains. Until we close the human rights loophole—some of us strongly believe that that must be done in the Health and Social Care Bill—we will continue to experience situations in which two residents in the same care home have different rights or, indeed, one will have rights under the Human Rights Act but the other will not, simply because one has assets of more than £21,500 and the other does not. That cannot be right. I was happy to discuss the matter at the Department of Health, and to acknowledge the challenges of the way in which the Human Rights Act is currently framed. However, it cannot be right that one person is covered and another is not, even though they receive the same care in the same institution. We all accept that principle but the challenge is to legislate for it. The Government said consistently in Committee that they did not believe that the Health and Social Care Bill was the right measure to tackle the issue, and they talked about doing so later on in a Bill of Rights.