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Health and Social Care Bill

I shall add my two pennyworth on this one. I have total incomprehension about why this benefit was decided on. It is like a benefit seeking a rationale. I am concerned about the opportunity costs of an allocation of this size from the Treasury. What alternative are we missing to promote equalities of health among pregnant women and equalities of access to antenatal care? Why have we decided to spend this money in this way? I should also like some notion of what we expect the Treasury to devote to this grant. What will we be spending on it? That will give us some notion of what we are missing in its place. I am extremely sceptical when I hear it said that nutrition is not important. I remind the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, that for folate to do any good it has to be present when a woman gets pregnant. In fact, evidence shows that we should be improving the health of grandmothers: it is what your mother eats when she is a child that really makes the difference, not what you eat when you get pregnant. Indeed, there is good evidence that action that we have taken in the past has improved the nutrition of babies, children and mothers in this country. Noble Lords may remember the wonderful free orange juice that some of us drank in the 1940s and 1950s and the lovely bottles of a third of a pint of milk, which I remember that I loved. During that time, with those measures we did away with rickets and we massively improved the health of children, particularly in the north of England. Therefore, if we were to give away vouchers for nutritional food—my noble friend Lady Finlay has scribbled the words ““fruit and veg vouchers””—that would be fine, but I do not really understand the purpose of the grant. Perhaps it is a bribe to get people to attend antenatal clinics. If it were a bribe to ensure that people registered, that might be legitimate, as word would go round quickly about how to get the grant. Can we say directly that this is a very effective way of encouraging people to take up antenatal care?