Bread and Flour Regulations (Folic Acid) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2016-07-08
Topic: Health
Helene Valerie Hayman (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, the House owes a debt of gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, for his persistence in pursuing this case. I should tell the Minister at the Dispatch Box that I was a colleague of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, in the days when we were both young MPs in a hurry, and he is a formidable opponent. We are, in our later years, perhaps old Peers in a hurry, but that does not mean that we are any less determined on this issue. Today, the noble Lord has provided the House with irrefutable evidence of the case for supporting his Private Member’s Bill, and in fact I think he has done more than that. A Private Member’s Bill is not the way to implement a measure that is so self-evidently important for public health. He argued for a change in government policy, and I hope that the Minister will not be put in what I know to be the profoundly uncomfortable position on the Front Bench of once more defending the indefensible on this issue Last night I was telephoned by my son, who told me of his frustration over the length of time it was taking to get the Government to respond on a completely different, although equally important, issue. It is an issue supported by five Select Committee chairs and committees and over 90% of parents—that of making PSHE a statutory subject in the national curriculum so that all our young people are given the means to protect themselves in today’s world. I fear that, when I explained to him that today I would be talking about an issue on which I had been campaigning for 25 years, that did not add to his optimism or enthusiasm. However, I also told him that one thing I had learned in politics was never to take no for an answer, and that applies to this issue and to his As I said, I first became aware of this matter in 1991. I was involved then, as I am now, in the ethics of medical research. The MRC trial, to which the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, referred, was the first trial I had ever known to end early. That was because the results were so clear that it was considered to be unethical to continue to allow one half of the group—the control group—not to receive the folic acid supplement which the other half was getting. The evidence that has had such a profound effect in the rest of the world, but not in the UK, is based on that trial A second reason for my concern was that in the preceding years I had helped to found an organisation called the Maternity Alliance. It was particularly involved in pre-conception care—in the health of mothers and babies. It was absolutely clear that the fortification of flour with folic acid was the most effective mechanism for delivering pre-conception and early pregnancy care, as has been demonstrated by the ineffectiveness of the supplement route, as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has demonstrated However, the main reason for my interest was that I had been having babies myself. I knew the intense anxiety of waiting for antenatal checks and then the birth, worrying about whether the baby was healthy, and thinking through what I would do in the case of an in utero diagnosis of an abnormality and having to face up to the question of whether to undergo a late termination. A generation has gone by; I am no longer having babies, but I am having grandchildren and I see my sons, their wives and partners going through exactly the same anxieties. It is no wonder that the British Pregnancy Advisory Service says that this one measure would ensure that some of the saddest cases it sees would not need to come through its doors, and women in the devastating situation of ending a wanted pregnancy because of foetal abnormality would no longer have to do so. Beyond that, many families would not have to deal with the devastating and heart-breaking situation described by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, of one of our colleagues and of having to support children who endure short and painful lives because of the burden of preventable disease In those 25 years, we have had the opportunity in this country to see not just pilot schemes of fortification of flour with folic acid but mass implementation of it. We have had the opportunity to see the effect—an up-to-50% reduction in the incidence of the neural tube defects—and to see that the theoretical risks of the policy have been investigated and not come to fruition The question for the Government now is how they can in all conscience continue to ignore the evidence before them and not accept what their own Chief Medical Officer, the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, the other Administrations of the United Kingdom and the rest of the world accept. I cannot believe that they maintain their position given the conclusions of every piece of research—ending with that which found in December last year: "Failure to implement folic acid fortification in the UK has caused, and continues to cause, avoidable terminations of pregnancy, stillbirths"— and permits "serious disability in … children". That situation should not be allowed to continue. This Bill would not solve every instance of it, but it would do a great deal. Not to do what we can do is a dereliction of duty.