Speeches by Craft.

“I am picking up from what you are saying that one of the things that might be helpful is resetting the relationship between formal care and unpaid carers, perhaps unpaid carers having a better seat at the table or more parity of esteem. What would that look like to you, and how would it work in practice? Is there anyth…”

“Are we able to quantify the cost of increased unmet health needs on unpaid carers, or is it perhaps too vast and wide?”

“I want to add my congratulations to the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) on securing this incredibly important debate. The Minister has spoken well on the process involved. If a couple are married when the father dies while the woman is pregnant, it is a relatively simple process to register that person as…”

“It is true. It is not just the previous Government. We hear concerns around access to Government consultations. It is important to note that BSL, being a language in its own right, does not follow the same grammatical rules as spoken English, so a lot of BSL first language speakers struggle with educational attainment.…”

“There you go—he has learned “scandal”.”

“Go on, Chris.”

“Thank you for the opportunity to make the case to the Committee for this debate. I have asked for a debate in March because that is when Sign Language Week is celebrated. British Sign Language, as some Members will be aware, is an official language of the UK, thanks to a private Member’s Bill that was passed in 2022. I…”

“Yes.”

“We have considered DWP. It is interesting because it kind of encompasses the whole of Government agenda, because it is a language. We have suggested DWP because Stephen Timms holds the disability portfolio. But there is now a disability Minister in every Government Department, so it could be any Department answering it…”

“It could be the Cabinet Office, yes. It could be the Home Office.”

“There is scope to be flexible. A big ask from the British Deaf Association is around education and parents—the vast majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents—and ensuring that British Sign Language tuition and lessons are available in a way that is relevant and local to all parents of a deaf child. It is ba…”

“Do you not feel that there is an appropriate case for ringfencing women’s health, if we look at the specifics? The Women and Equalities Committee identified pervasive misogyny in the healthcare system. Is there not a case to be made that ringfencing would go some way to addressing that? I understand what you said about…”

“Can you provide a list of existing ringfenced spend, and what it will look like going forward?”

“Almost. I am interested in whether your approach going forward is to remove ringfencing in general in planning guidance.”

“Just to follow up on the niche subject of ringfencing and what appears in planning guidance, what is your approach to planning, and how does it ensure that historically overlooked populations in healthcare do not continue to be?”

“There is one other thing I want to pick out. You said there is a health hub in pretty much every ICB. There is an ambition to have one in every ICB area. Is there potentially a risk that, if you remove this ringfence, ICBs that are not doing that work and do not have a hub may opt to put their funding somewhere else? Y…”

“You touched on tracking spend on individual children. Is there something in that about how accountability can follow from that? If ICBs have put x amount of resource into an individual, the onus is almost on them to make sure that that resource has been spent well. Maybe there is something on their own internal account…”

“You touched on tracking spend on individual children. Is there something in that about how accountability can follow from that? If ICBs have put x amount of resource into an individual, the onus is almost on them to make sure that that resource has been spent well. Maybe there is something on their own internal account…”

“Do you think that leadership is ministerial steer or are you looking for people who work in NHS England, for example, or at the ICB level, or is it throughout the organisation?”

“I am here guesting today from the Health and Social Care Committee. I have been incredibly interested in your thoughts around collaborative working—how that might look going forward. I did have a question about how effective current accountability mechanisms are in that space, and I think we have probably covered that.…”