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Health and Social Care Bill

I listened to what the noble Baroness, Lady Masham of Ilton, said, but her argument is more about the availability of specialist foods for patients who have particular difficulties. I refer to my experience in this matter. I support this eminently sensible amendment, but there is another side to the story. It has become very easy copy in this country to knock hospital food. It is one of those things that turn up in newspaper articles because people are very ready to make complaints. People who have spent long periods in hospitals, as I have—sometimes for months on end—often have a very different experience of hospital food. When you are in hospital, you learn how to work the menu. You learn what are the good meals and what are the bad meals. I have never been in a hospital where I found the food deficient. Admittedly, when I was away at school in the 1950s and early 1960s, I became used to school breakfast, lunch and dinner menus. However, the point is that in hospitals conditions are very much the same in the sense that people can eat well if they choose to do so, but many people choose not to do so. They refuse to eat. When I was in hospital, I found that people shunned their food because they did not want to eat. Their meals were often ordered by visiting relatives who filled in the forms. They were often filled in by nurses who asked someone what they wanted. That food was delivered to the patient and he or she did not eat it for all sorts of reasons, perhaps because they had been given food by their relatives who visited that day. To measure food on the basis of how much is returned uneaten to the kitchens is not a very good way of assessing whether the food in hospitals is nutritious. I accept that there should be standards and that this is an eminently sensible amendment about nutritional standards. Hospitals should comply with standards set down. But, equally, it is wrong of us to presume that in most hospitals in the United Kingdom standards of food are very poor; I completely disagree.