Shockat Adam

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am a practicing optometrist and an officer for the APPG for eye health and visual impairment. Sight is precious and none of us would like to lose it—but, sadly, 2 million people in this country are living with some form of sight loss today. On the Department’s own projection, that figure will rise to 2.7 million by 2030. Every day, 250 people in the UK start to lose their sight—one person every six minutes. Left unaddressed, that number is set to more than double to over 4 million by 2050. We are witnessing a growing problem, which, sadly, the Bill does not treat with the urgency it deserves. Tonight, I urge the Government to strengthen this legislation in some specific ways. On governance, clause 21 rightly ensures that ICBs reflect local political accountability, but it says absolutely nothing about clinical accountability. Optometrists have no guaranteed voice in the rooms where commissioning decisions affecting their patients are made. It would be unthinkable to build localised healthcare without GPs at the table. It would be equally unthinkable to do so without pharmacists. I say to the Government plainly: optometrists have the expertise, the infrastructure and the systems already in place to relieve pressure on our hospitals, yet this Bill says nothing about it. I want to see eyecare—glaucoma monitoring in particular, along with the management of minor eye conditions—commissioned consistently by every ICB in England and not left to a postcode lottery. Optometry already has what I call the TAC effect: it is trusted, accessible and capable. Commissioning it properly would reduce unnecessary demand on emergency departments, freeing them to focus on genuinely specialist cases while improving patients’ access to specialist eyecare where they need it. A recent report by the Association of Optometrists has found that right now, 780,000 people—the equivalent of the entire population of Greater Nottingham—attend A&E with eye problems annually, at an average cost of £145 to the NHS per A&E presentation. That is £113 million a year. At least seven out of 10 of those people with eye problems could be successfully managed in a community optometry setting with the right service commissioning. Those stats reflect a lived reality for many across our country. If the new Government want to make smarter decisions with public money, they must consider that. Finally, I turn to the single patient record. Proposed new subsection (7) to clause 51 should be amended so that it explicitly includes optometry in the single patient record framework, ensuring that optometrists have appropriate access to relevant patient information. This Bill takes real and welcome steps in many areas, but more than 2 million people have already lost their sight—a number that none of us wants to see double to more than 4 million by 2050. Fundamentally, seeing should be a right, not a privilege, so I ask the Government to look again.