Richard Foord

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Betts. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) for securing this debate. Disabilities impact the lives of many people in the south-west of England, with older people some of the most affected. Age UK says that disabilities affect 40% of people over 60 but 75% of people over 80, and they are a particularly pressing concern for people in mid and east Devon, where a third of residents are aged 65-plus. Hearing loss is one such disability. It is all too common among older people and has some serious consequences. The Royal National Institute for Deaf People and SignHealth report how people with hearing impairments are less able to take advantage of other health treatments. Access to healthcare is obviously necessary for older people, and any obstacle is a great concern. Devon’s provision of hearing aids faced a major shake-up last year, when Chime Social Enterprise, which had been praised by its users, stopped providing NHS audiology services in Devon. Chime had provided rechargeable hearing aids, along with drop-in clinics for emergency repairs, based out of community hospitals. Since Chime’s departure, there has been frustration about the provision. A constituent in Honiton whose ears were damaged when he was doing national service with the Royal Artillery, wrote of being redirected endlessly to different bodies for a simple hearing aid repair. A constituent from Seaton told me that models offered by the new providers are “shoddy”. He has already had two hearing aids become unusable because the tubes slip out of the rubber mould. That would have been a simple £60 replacement with Chime, but now, he wrote, he wonders whether the “next stage is a conch shell”. I wish to draw particular attention to the case of Mary Dickinson. I met Mary last year at a remembrance service in Sidmouth. She is aged 92. She was an NHS nurse for most of her life and to this day volunteers at Sidmouth Hospice at Home. For those acts of service, she was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the British Red Cross. Mary, like many others, was provided by Chime with rechargeable hearing aids, which worked very well. She has paraesthesia and arthritis in both hands, so the idea that she should now be able to replace the batteries in her hearing aids is really quite wild. She said that if I wanted to obtain batteries for hearing aids, the best place I could look would be down the side of her settee, because there are many down there. The NHS stated that it cannot offer Mary the rechargeable hearing aids any more, despite them being the only ones that she can use at the age of 92. Mary is a pensioner with no savings, yet she was told that her only solution, if she was adamant that she wanted rechargeable hearing aids, was to buy them herself. Given that she is in receipt of only a small pension she appealed to the NHS board, but without success. Scrivens, the new provider in Devon, has likewise refused to offer her the rechargeable hearing aids. If Mary is sat with somebody in the course of her work at Hospice at Home, she wants to be able to hear them speak and to be able to speak with them, much as she has done with patients throughout her life. If NHS Devon in particular, and the NHS more broadly, wants to ensure that everyone has access to disability provision such as hearing aids, it must really ensure that the equipment it provides is appropriate each and every time.