Alec Shelbrooke MP: speeches

Speeches

• 11 Feb 2025 · Reducing Healthcare Inequalities · Hansard source

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  I welcome the hon. Lady to her position. She may be unaware of the number of debates that I have led into women’s health and endometriosis and pelvic mesh, and there is an inequality in the health service with how women are treated. Many women are deeply concerned by the announcements and statements about how the concentration on women’s health has been reduced. Will the Minister speak to the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists? Following that meeting, will she speak to the Secretary of State, who rightly says that he recognises when mistakes have been made, about reconsidering the approach to women’s health taken in the statement the other week?

• 20 Jan 2025 · Obesity: Food and Diet · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) on securing this important debate. There was a lot in his speech with which I agreed, and a lot with which I disagreed. I do not want to explore the subject of childhood obesity, although I think that many of his points about it are quite important; I want to focus on adult obesity. There are a great many new Members in the Chamber who do not know who I am, so they will not have seen me when I was enormously fat, before I was down to the size I am now. I have struggled with my weight throughout my life, but I have controlled it for several years. Back in 2019 I managed to lose 4 stone through smoking. Cigarettes provided a way for me to diet and keep the weight off. I gave up smoking in May 2022—we do not need to have a debate about smoking and what it does to people—and put on a considerable amount of weight. There is always a lot of stigma surrounding weight. Everything about weight is stigmatised, whether we are too thin or too fat or dieting—and, by the way, everyone has advice for us when we are dieting. It does not matter what is working; they will say, “What you need to do is this.” I will come on to the weight loss regime that I am on at the moment, but they will say, for instance, “You shouldn’t be giving up drinking, because you will lose your social life.” Well, going to the small Yorkshire village where I live and having several pints over a few hours means having a lot of empty calories—thousands of them—so that is exactly what someone who is trying to lose weight should do; but people always give that advice. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned 400 incidences, but what that statistic did not say about the damage that the jabs, as we call them, can do is that half a million people are having them. We are in danger of getting into the same arguments that some of the nutters who talk about the covid jab have got themselves into—that it is deadly and we are poisoning everyone; and this, that and the other. It is administered to millions of people, and drugs will always have side effects. That is something we must remember. The contraceptive pill, used by millions of people, has side effects. Drugs do have side effects, but that is not a reason to rule them out. I want to expand on this stigma about the jabs. As I said at the outset, I am focusing today on adult obesity, and as I also said, the hon. Member for Stroud made some important points about childhood obesity and the links with food, but much of what he said was based on the idea that people have three meals a day and they are eating too much. That has not been my experience. Many Members, especially new Members, will learn how exhausting this job becomes. At some points in their career, they will ask themselves, “How do I carry on?” and they will turn to sugar to get them through the rest of the day. I see plenty of Members nodding. They will have chocolate bars, because that is the boost we need and that is where we end up. I have done that. I have what some might describe as an addictive personality: when I cut something out, I replace it with something else. When I cut out cigarettes, I replaced them with food. It has been a difficult journey. I tried to eat healthily and I tried to do things with my weight, but I reached a point at which I could not do it. In the middle of September, I started taking Wegovy, and since then I have lost over 5 stone. I have gone from a body mass index of 42 to one of 30, although there are still a couple of stone that I want to lose. But—and this is the big “but”—people have to work with it. These are not miracle drugs. The biggest mistake that the press made in this regard was referring to “fat-dissolving drugs”. There is no such thing as a fat-dissolving drug; that is blatant nonsense. For me, this drug takes away the cravings. It has enabled me to do the intermittent fasting, having a protein-based meal at 1 pm, a banana at 5 pm and a small meal in the evening with a tiny bit of carbohydrate, and I do not eat after 9 pm. That is how I have dropped the weight. I cut out drinking for the first eight weeks, although I did drink over Christmas, and I cut out sugar for 12 weeks. I want to build on something that the hon. Member for Stroud said about sugar being a drug. Oh boy, yes, it is a drug. I felt horrific for the first three weeks of cutting out sugar. Having had a little bit of sugar over Christmas, I thought, “It is Christmas; you have to manage the psychology of this.” Well, the first time I had one mince pie, boy, did I know about it! I had to have some grapes later to try to bring about the slow sugar release. There is no doubt that high sugar and salt levels are addictive, but I have a personality that made me do that. A very interesting point was made on Radio 4 last week. Emma Barnett was interviewing someone about this drug—I missed who it was. She said, “But isn’t there the question of morality when people use drugs to reduce their weight?” This is where I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of obesity in adults and the issue of weight. What is now emerging is a link, a thread that runs through several aspects of someone’s health, not least related to fatigue, mental health or personality, and what is being discovered is that the drugs have a positive effect in many of those areas. We need to remove the stigma from talking about being on drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro. They are certainly helping me, and I know of many friends and many colleagues in the House who are using them, because they do take away that craving. However, it still comes down to willpower. I stand before Members today, and I feel horrific. I have consumed less than 600 calories so far today and it is now 7.10 pm. I do not feel great, but it is working. I am engaged in a process in which I am trying to lose the weight in the first six months, and in the next six months I will go back to the normal number of calories, do the exercise and build up my fitness. This is a programme and a regime, and it is working for me. However, I must make the point that if people are not willing to work with these drugs, they will not have the effect. There must be a “brake” in their promotion, because people who think they can just inject themselves at home and lose weight are wrong. It is so easy to cheat. Why do I not feel too great at the moment? There are not enough calories in me. What would give me a boost straight away? Some chocolate, or anything like that. When I cut out sugar, I cut out crisps, cakes, biscuits and various other things, including alcohol for a while. I am not going teetotal for the rest of my life, and I am not cutting out sugar for the rest of my life. People have to find a balance, but it is easy to cheat and they have to want to lose weight. There is no correlation here, but I think there is an interesting piece of work to be done—I will explain why I am saying this in a moment—on the fact that there has been a huge reduction in smoking in the 21st century and a big rise in obesity. I certainly used cigarettes to help keep my weight down, and I know that many other people do too. If someone feels hungry, they can have a cigarette. I am delighted that I gave up smoking; it took me most of my life to do so. I smoked for most of my adult life, and I have drunk a lot for most of my adult life. I am 49 years old, and I was in my twenties in the 1990s. There was a culture in the ’90s that carried on through. Why did we push forward with getting people off smoking? We did it because of the absolutely obvious and well-proven health consequences of smoking, such as thrombosis, heart attacks and high blood pressure. Since I have lost 5 stone, my blood pressure has come down by 30 millibars; it is now textbook blood pressure. The hon. Member for Stroud is absolutely right. I had pain in my joints and feet, and I would sweat, but I would not give in to it. When my feet hurt, I would not give in to it, because I thought, “If I give in to it, I’m just going to put on even more weight.” I would not stop, because I have always been fairly active and have kept going. I make these points because I recently heard a report that if weight-loss jabs were put out on NHS prescription, it would bankrupt the NHS. I think that is absolute nonsense, because we know just how preventive this sort of action is. That is why we got people to give up smoking. We made a lot of tax from the sale of cigarettes, but it cost the NHS billions of pounds. We know that a lot of the conditions that cigarettes cause are equally caused by obesity, along with many other things. Again, the use of weight-loss jabs could prevent the NHS from spending much more money later on diabetes care, orthopaedic care and mental health care. We know that people find being inactive depressing, quite frankly, and that their mental health takes a decline when they become inactive. We have to separate the issues of childhood obesity and adult obesity, which are two very different things. For those of us who end up starved of sleep, and those who end up never knowing when they will have a proper meal or where they will get it from, it is easy to fall into the traps. I have often found that people who have never had a problem with their weight are full of all the answers for those who do struggle with their weight, who may well tell others what they are doing and then be told, “No, what you want to be doing is this.” It is nonsense. The use of weight-loss jabs offers the NHS a real advantage, but we have to reduce the stigma and it is right that we ask whether it is moral to use drugs to reduce people’s wight. A lot of people do not have a choice about their weight, and they are now discovering that a small dose of hormonal drugs helps them to control their desire to eat. The long-term effects of obesity on the country’s health, and on the pressure on the NHS, will be reduced. When I become 7 stone lighter than I was back in September, there is no doubt that my health situation will have a far better outlook than it did, and that is the conversation we should be having when it comes to adults. There has been enough commenting on whether somebody is stick thin or really fat, and enough advice about what people should do to lose weight. We now have some answers that will actually make a difference, and we have to say, “These are the right things to do,” as we do with so many other drugs that help people get through their lives. We do not comment on people using nicotine patches or nicotine gum, yet we do talk about people who are trying to do things to help them lose weight.

• 5 Dec 2024 · Cumberlege Review: Pelvic Mesh · Hansard source

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  This is such an important debate, and many of us in this room have been working on this issue for a very long time. I point the hon. Gentleman to the Government’s review of the NHS. We only have nine centres. We have to emphasise how important it is that the review addresses the need for more surgeons in these areas. The issues that he is outlining are so common, yet we only have nine centres.

• 5 Dec 2024 · Cumberlege Review: Pelvic Mesh · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I congratulate the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince); it is encouraging that new-intake MPs are already raising this issue. As he said in his opening remarks, constituents have been to see their Members of Parliament because of the pain, suffering and injustice that they have gone through, and they are still not getting anywhere. I am not sure who the lady is, but it is very nice to see her in the Gallery because it is an exceptionally important issue for women. Can we get back to one very important fact about this? We are dealing with people who have had their lives destroyed in the prime of life because of something they were recommended by the NHS. In all honesty, if we were at, say, the dentist’s and they said, “We need to do this to your tooth”, we would say, “Okay.” We would not say, “Can I come back tomorrow?” and then google for any issues. We trust the clinicians and listen to what they say. Let us flip that coin and give the other side: at the time, a lot of those clinicians genuinely thought that vaginal mesh was, for want of a better description, a bit of a miracle cure. As time has gone on, it has become apparent that it was one of the worst procedures that could ever have taken place, and it is the time lag that has created the problem. I have spoken about this topic many times. I have described some of the things that have happened to some of my constituents, including people who were once extremely active now not being able to stand up. When my constituent came to see me, she had to do the entire surgery stood up and leant over the table because she could not sit. She was younger than I am now. She eventually managed to take out private loans and have the mesh removed. There lies one of the big injustices: this was something done by the NHS, and the NHS has run away from its responsibility to solve the problem. I accept that it is difficult for someone who has had the procedure to accept that the surgeon who put the mesh in might be the person who will remove it. But we do not have enough experts in this area, which goes back to the intervention I made on the hon. Member for Harlow: as the review of the NHS comes forward, resourcing must be considered. I have said it before and I will say it again: I believe the NHS to be a misogynistic and sexist institution that was too quick to pat women on the head and say, “Oh well, it’s just what women go through,” in so many aspects of gynaecological health, as well as other things. I have known the Minister for a long time. I consider him to be a friend, and I know that he is in the job because he fundamentally believes in people’s rights. He has a hard task ahead of him. That hard task is not because of what the Minister wants to drive into place; it is because of the pushback that he is going to get from the NHS and the Treasury, which will say that it cannot be done. He is going to have a tough time, but we can already see that this is not a party political issue in the House. Many of us on the Conservative side criticised our own Government in debates on this subject, because they were getting the pushback from the Department of Health and Social Care and the Treasury—and we said that it was not good enough. Removing mesh is like taking hair out of chewing gum. It is not a simple operation. It is not just that it breaks up and starts to infect other organs in the body, which is what can cause the incontinence, as it makes its way into the gut; it has now been shown that there are low-level infections within the mesh. My constituent who finally had mesh removed had a period for the first time in 10 years. Think about that for a moment—being told, “Well, we’re not quite sure what is wrong,” and then, when the mesh is removed, suddenly having periods again after a decade. That shows how much the issue has not been taken as seriously as it should have been. The shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson), and I were speaking only last week about a constituent who has a similar issue. Where could she find the mesh centres? There are nine mesh centres, but the issue affects the entire country. The hon. Member for Shipley (Anna Dixon) mentioned the NHS compensation scheme. We moved on from that because it simply was not working. People were not getting the compensation from the scheme because it was not really accessible, and it was confrontational. That comes back to the point of the NHS doing something but not wanting to take responsibility for it. I am afraid that the Minister will be under pressure from people saying, “You must defend the NHS. That is your job. You represent the NHS. When people criticise the NHS, they are criticising you and the Government.” But that is not true: the Minister will have our full support for pushing back in that way. This is the Thalidomide situation again—it is as controversial and, frankly, as scandalous as Thalidomide. We are talking about the “miracle drug” that women took in pregnancy to stop them from getting morning sickness, and it took years before it was banned; in some countries, it was used for several years after that. We pay compensation to victims of Thalidomide for the rest of their lives. I am proud to have been the Member of Parliament who in 2012 got the health grant extended for another 10 years. It is now a lifetime health grant. I am proud of that; it is something we did in this House. People turn around and say, “Redress is something we have to assess because there are so many people,” but why is that? There are so many people because the procedure was done willy-nilly and now those involved do not want to take responsibility. Many other Members want to speak, and I will let them have their say. The Minister has my full support and, I am sure, the full support of many Members here—and he is going to need it. I ask him to stay strong, to keep in mind why we are doing this and to remember the victims who have had their lives destroyed in every single aspect. They must have the redress and the ability through the NHS to have the situation rectified so that they are not borrowing £25,000 to go privately to the same surgeon they would see on the NHS.