Lord Bichard (CB)

I too acknowledge the commitment and effort being made, and also, of course, the commitment on the front line. I am not a health professional—and I feel particularly conscious of that, given some of the people in the Chamber this afternoon—but I have spent too much time in the last 12 months as a client and had much time to reflect upon the fact that the problems with the health service are much the same as the problems in most other public services. First of all, we do not design the service around the client and the patient, and, whatever I am told, that still seems to me to be so obvious. We do not join up the various services: pharmacies, GPs and district nurses, who I have got to know quite well. We do not make effective use of digital or AI, and we do not make good use of the community and voluntary sector and charities. Sometimes, we resent them, or they are resented. Of course, there is the issue of social care. I think we all know this, and I am hearing the right things coming out of government at the moment, but, actually, these things have been there for 20 years. They have been said about and talked about for 20 years, yet things have not really changed. I really want to be convinced that they are going to change, but I want to be convinced that we are learning from the lessons of past failures and that we are focusing on owning up to those failures, because that is the only way in which we will move on. Can the Minister reassure me that we are looking at why it has taken so long and that we are really determined to take on the barriers?