NHS ‘must prioritise spending on gipsies’
GIPSIES and travellers should get priority for NHS spending, a Tory-led committee of MPs said yesterday.
Health chiefs should be ordered to ‘direct resources towards gipsy, Roma and traveller communities who have the worst health outcomes of any ethnic group’, it said.
There should also be heavy public spending on a new national computerised database listing every school child, to ensure that traveller children do not disappear from school rolls, the Commons women and equalities committee said.
The register would be a revival of a system introduced in the 2000s. The £224million ContactPoint database was abolished in 2010 amid concerns about its cost and the possibility that paedophiles would use it to find details of children. The committee said technology has now improved.
Its 49 sweeping but uncosted recommendations, which would mean spending hundreds of millions, are necessary because gipsies and travellers suffer deeply from discrimination and disadvantage, a report by the MPs said.
It found: ‘Gipsy, Roma and traveller people have the worst outcomes of any ethnic group across a huge range of areas, including education, health, employment, criminal justice and hate crime.’
Committee chairman Maria Miller, Tory MP for Basingstoke and a former Cabinet minister, said: ‘Our inquiry has tried to shine a light on the issues that are rarely talked about by policymakers: gipsies and travellers are likely to die over a decade earlier than non-travellers, only a handful of gipsy and traveller people go to university every year and many Roma are being exploited by rogue landlords and paid far below the minimum wage.
‘Gipsy, Roma and traveller people have been comprehensively failed by policymakers and public services for far too long. The Government must stop filing this under “too difficult” and set out how it intends to improve health, education and other outcomes for these very marginalised communities who are all too often out of sight and out of mind.’
The report said there are likely to be at least six times as many travellers in the country as were recorded in the 2011 census, and called on ministers to count numbers and collect information through the NHS and Whitehall ministries.
While the census said there were 58,000 people classed as gipsies or travellers, the MPs said there are between 100,000 and 300,000 gipsies and travellers, plus up to 200,000 more Roma, mainly recent immigrants from Eastern Europe.
The committee recommended that the NHS collects information on travellers, and that midwives and maternity nurses should be told to direct traveller mothers towards immunisation services, dentists, mental health services and sexual health checks. It said extra NHS spending should go to help travellers under the law that requires public sector bodies to promote equality.
Mrs Miller was Culture Secretary and women and equalities minister in David Cameron’s government until she was forced to resign following an expenses scandal. Her committee has previously recommended granting everyone over 16 the right to change sex without consulting a doctor.
‘Out of sight and out of mind’