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Dignity for life

I want you to know how grateful I am to have this opportunity to speak with you this morning.

Last week I met Niall Dickson the chief executive of the King's Fund who briefed me on 'The Business of Caring' which was published yesterday. It had some very blunt messages about the quality of care for our older and betters in the capital, such as this;

'The care system seems to operate at times with no recognition of older people's human rights.  They can be subjected to physical, psychological, financial and sexual abuse by the people charged with their care and can also experience inhumane and degrading treatment'.  

I have to tell you though that a day or two before I met Niall I reviewed the results of the first year's work of our joint project with Action on Elder Abuse into how authorities are recording abuse.  It too had some blunt headlines;

About two thirds of local authorities showed physical abuse as the most common, and 85%  showed paid carers as the most common abuser.

I have now placed the report in the House of Commons library.

And let me give you some more news; we have had to triple the numbers of staff working to deliver the Protection of Vulnerable Adults Scheme. Why? Because we've received over 1700 referrals already - 180 a month - far far more than we predicted.

So what this says to me is that one of the biggest jobs I - and we together - have to do over the next few years is going to be one of the hardest - that job is delivering to everyone who is old in this country dignity for life -  and I expect it to be one of the; if not the signature issue of my time in this office.

When you talk to older people about dignity, you very quickly understand that dignity is not a hard and fast concept, it is self-defined - your definition of dignity may be different to mine - but it is always going to be related to the issue of retaining control in situations when control feels as if its beginning to slip away.

But the reason that dignity for life is not simply important for the individual but for our country as a whole is because dignity is a reciprocal arrangement; the measure of any individual's dignity is in large part defined by the conduct of the society around them. The debate about dignity is in a way another facet of the debate the Prime Minister' has started about respect. It is at the heart of how we deliver equality in the quality of life.

I must say that I did not fully understand this until last year when I was sitting on the Bill Committee examining what is now the Mental Capacity Act line by line. And I might say that that Act was a big step forward for this agenda.

And like everyone on that committee I was snowed under with briefings and petitions and so one day I went to see a church group in my constituency to discuss two issues at the heart of the controversy; withdrawal of Artificial Nutrition Hydration (ANH) and the supposed weakening of euthanasia rules.

The most powerful message I heard was from a long retired nurse who spoke up in the Priest's front room and moved the rest of us to tears about the way she had in the past seen terminally ill patients treated. It was at this point that I understood that what moved her to anger was not simply the experience of that individual, but the violation of a more profound and deeper sense of our shared humanity and obligations to each other.

That is why I say that -

The quality and the quantity of dignity in any country is like the hallmark on something precious; it signifies the true value of the item it embosses.

When our country is at its best, there is nowhere, I don't think, that any of us would rather be. We have given the world, and history so much; the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, Industrialisation and the fight against fascism.

But the truth is that very often in our history, while we have invented new freedoms or moved heaven and earth to battle oppression, we have failed to deliver the full fruits, or the full measure of a free life lived in dignity to every last corner of our country.

A few years ago, a writer, not in my Party but another, was bemoaning modern government and quoted Keynes' famous lines written after the first world war as a celebration of the so-called 'night watch-man state'. Keynes wrote;

"The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth -- he could at the same time and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprise of any quarter of the world -- he could secure forthwith, if he wished, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality."

But the truth of course for most Britons was very different. There is no better description that the extraordinary Mrs Braddock in the House of Commons (former MP for Liverpool, Exchange) speaking in the Second Reading debate on the National Assistance Act in 1947. Describing the lives of families in Liverpool after the first world war she said;

'When we talk about queues at the present time, we do not realise what queues used to be like. Let us remember the queues outside the Poor Law relief offices, the destitute people, badly clothed, badly shod, lining up with their prams - many of the men lining up with the kitbags which they had carried during the 1914-18 war - for their week's rations of black treacle and bread. Bread was issued once a week - and we know what bread is, even in the best of times, when it has been kept for a week.'

To change this world, the 1945 Government delivered the big changes

So much of our work since 1997 has focussed on refreshing this settlement into a foundation fit for the 21st century.

This coming year, we have a great number of decisions to take forward;

Older people are actually more satisfied with the NHS than everyone else - 73% of over 65s are satisfied with the NHS and they are more likely to say that they 'were treated with dignity and respect' - but we still have reports and stories which trouble us - often related to simple stories about conduct, but sometimes worse. Comic Relief are also commissioning a research project that will increase our knowledge about the numbers and type of abuse of older people.  I am delighted that the Department will be contributing £250,000 towards this project.    So we need to challenge this.

But when 80% of care homes for older people are run by the private sector, we know that we can't do this on our own. And when we hear that 64% of incidents that are reported take place at home, we know we can't do this without changing common conceptions of what and what is not acceptable, and without giving older people meaningful choices about how their care is delivered.

So we have an extraordinarily important year ahead of us. Someone recently reminded me of a quote by Albert Einstein made at the height of the Cold War who said;

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."

As we look forward to the next 18 years we can reverse that. By 2020 our national wealth is forecast to double, and the genetic revolution will transform medical science. Our goal must be to ensure that amongst the new possibilities that new world we hold onto our oldest values. That cause, of dignity for life is a great cause and one in which I hope we can both unite.