Lord Kakkar (CB)

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for the thoughtful way in which he introduced this important report. I declare my own interests as chairman of the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research. This is not the first report of a Select Committee of your Lordships’ House that has identified important and common challenges attending ageing. A report in 2013 by a Select Committee on Public Service and Demographic Change, two committees chaired by my noble friend Lord Patel on the sustainability of the NHS and adult social care in 2017, and a Science and Technology Committee report on the science of ageing in 2021 all reached remarkably similar conclusions. As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has said, the increase in longevity is to be seen quite rightly as a tremendous success. But the real peril is the fact that healthy lifespan has not increased at the same rate, and that more and more of our population will be living with multiple co-morbidities and ill health for an extended period. That puts unsustainable pressure on the provision of healthcare, and it must now be addressed. Thirteen years of addressing this issue in your Lordships’ House has been attended by no meaningful government intervention or action; action is now urgently required. There is a good basis to act, because the science of ageing is now far better understood. The biological processes are better understood. We are now able to identify biomarkers associated with chronic inflammation that attend the development of many co-morbidities. Therefore, in a short time, we should be able to develop strategies to identify early in life those individuals at high risk for the development of multiple co-morbidities later in life, and to intervene in those in a targeted and precise way to reduce the occurrence of those diseases. In time, that will have a substantial impact on reducing the burden in the National Health Service. That burden manifests itself not only in the need to deliver care but in an ever increasing proportion of the population needing to deliver those services rather than being economically active in other parts of the economy. But all this requires a holistic strategy to be delivered somewhere in government that brings the elements of government together and, most importantly, ensures that elements attending the delivery of healthcare reflect the complexity of managing health in an ageing population and the need to ensure that those challenges are addressed appropriately for individuals, as well as across communities and more broadly in the system. We need substantial government investment to ensure that the move to prevention is properly financed now, rather than being talked about as a future requirement.