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Dementia Services

I echo the words of the Secretary of State by warmly welcoming the chance to debate this important issue. I congratulate the hon. Member for Eddisbury (Mr. O'Brien) and his team on bringing the matter forward. This is a particularly important time to talk about this range of conditions—we need to remember that that is what dementia is—that have such an impact not only on the individuals who are unlucky enough to suffer from them, but on their families, carers and friends and on the communities that they live in. Here we are, nearly a year after the announcement and commencement of the national dementia strategy, which we all welcomed as a big step forward in how we, as a country, deal with dementia. It is right and proper that we now consider the matter and where we are up to, just before we get into the campaign proper, because whoever is in government after the next election must be firmly committed to seeing the strategy through its whole 10-year period. We are certainly happy to make that commitment, as I am sure Members of all parties are. The comments of Professor Sube Banerjee to the Public Accounts Committee were an extremely powerful way of describing the effects of dementia. He said that it was""one of those rare diseases that people actually consider worse than death."" We all know that dementia is becoming more and more prevalent in our society. Already about a third of people in care homes suffer from it, and the latest estimate is that there are approximately 600,000 people with dementia in England. However, as the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Jeremy Wright), who leads the all-party group on dementia, has made clear, we simply do not know the actual number. That is partly because of the challenge of early diagnosis and partly because of the challenge of getting people to present to doctors when they fear they may be in the early stages of the condition.