Baroness Parminter: My Lords, I wish to focus my remarks on children and young people suffering from eating disorders, which are the most deadly of all mental health illnesses and which are affecting a rising number of young girls and boys. I shall use the illustration of one young teenager suffering from anorexia to highlight the historic underfunding in this area. When she got to crisis point last year and...
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering; I echo, but shall not repeat, all her comments. I have two further supplementary questions that I hope the Minister might address in his summing up. First, in the previous statutory instrument the Minister was able to outline to the House an indication of some of the bodies which will be replicating...
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, I thank the Minister for his opening remarks and for agreeing to a meeting with myself and the Labour Front Bench prior to the introduction of this statutory instrument, given that it is the first of what we know will be many for Defra. As might be expected in those circumstances, we on these Benches regret the necessity of these statutory instruments should we exit the EU. However,...
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, I sincerely thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for that powerful introduction to this important debate. Over the past couple of weeks, I have had the privilege of meeting a number of equally forceful campaigners on plastics, including a delegation of women from the tiny Pacific state of Palau who have launched a pledge to tackle the manmade pollutants in their oceans and...
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, Dame Glenys Stacey’s review of farmland inspection and regulation shows that farmers currently face a one-in-200 chance of being inspected because the Environment Agency has only 40 such officers nationwide. In the future, how will the Government ensure—particularly since the RPA will not be around to monitor cross-compliance—that the regulation of farming is properly funded...
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, have the Government made an assessment of the number of children and young people referred to community eating disorder services? Given that anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental health disease, how many of those referrals do not go on to get treatment?
Baroness Parminter: To ask Her Majesty’s Government, following the publication of research in the Postgraduate Medical Journal that on average medical students receive less than two hours of training on eating disorders, whether they plan to make representations to the General Medical Council on conducting a review of the training on this subject provided to medical students and junior doctors; and if so, when.
Baroness Parminter: The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s recent report, How NHS eating disorder services are failing patients, concluded that the GMC should conduct a review of all medical training for junior doctors on eating disorders. Does the Minister agree with the independent ombudsman?
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, like other members of the Select Committee, I add my thanks for the skills of our chairman: we are indeed fortunate to have his expertise, his passion and his good-natured chairmanship. As the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, both alluded to, it is not always the easiest job to chair Members of this House, and I thank him for it. I will also say how...
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, we on these Benches support the proposal. In the unavoidable absence of my noble friend Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, I thank the Minister most profusely for the opportunity he provided her and others last week to talk through this proposal and give some further insight into it. It is a set of proposals that are important to alleviate some of the well documented weaknesses...
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Marks, for bringing forward this regret Motion and exemplifying what this House does so well—standing up for the democratic rights of citizens to challenge authority and, as in this case, do so in the face of what is clearly an attempt by the Government to price people out of the opportunity to get environmental justice. As the noble Baroness, Lady...
Baroness Parminter: Given the latest successful prosecution by the police of three members of the Grove and Rufford hunt, does the Minister agree with me that the Hunting Act is both enforceable and effective?
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, according to WRAP’s annual tracker survey, two-thirds of households say that they are unsure how to correctly dispose of items. Does the Minister agree that significant cuts to local authority communication budgets driven by central government cuts are contributing to falling household recycling rates?
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, our fishing industry contributes less than 0.5% to our country’s GDP, yet it is hard to think of any industry that will be affected more by Brexit, along with the rural communities that fishermen come from. How are the Government going to guarantee that our fishermen and their industry are not used as a bargaining chip in the Brexit negotiations?
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, I live in Godalming, where we have one of the largest soft fruit farms in the country, employing 2,500 people. The owner has said that the business will collapse without access to EU workers. Does the Minister agree with me that retaining access to the single market is the best way to ensure that we have a future supply of affordable homegrown soft fruits?
Baroness Parminter: About one-quarter of all EU legislation deals with environmental protection—environmental regulations that have given us safe food, clean rivers and beaches, homes for our wildlife and life support for our beleaguered bees. The Government have committed—through the great repeal Bill, as alluded to in the gracious Speech—only to incorporating EU regulations into UK law wherever...
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, this is clearly a public health crisis, with 40,000 people dying prematurely in the UK every year because of air pollution and many more suffering from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The reason that the Minister has given why this needs to be delayed does not stand proper scrutiny, because here we face a genuine public health crisis, which is a legitimate reason for the...
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, the Minister mentioned the welcome but ambitious packaging recycling targets set in the recent Budget. Given that household waste recycling targets are going backwards, how do the Government expect to meet them?
Baroness Parminter: To ask Her Majesty’s Government, in the light of the Department for International Development’s Economic Development Strategy, whether they plan to commit to supporting forest programmes across the globe to improve forest governance and reduce deforestation.
Baroness Parminter: My Lords, I pay tribute to the work of both this Government and previous Governments in the fight against global deforestation. Given that we are losing an area the size of a football pitch every two seconds, and that deforestation accounts for 10% of our global carbon emissions, will the Minister commit to the fact that the Government will not lose any further funding to take forward this...