We must learn the lessons of the medical emergency in BAME communities

I was pleased to join Liam Byrne MP and my co-chairs yesterday to launch our report into the West Midlands inquiry into Covid-19 fatalities in the BAME community. This report is a culmination of two-and-a-half months of work gathering evidence, collating data, researching, understanding and writing a report that would support our call for a public inquiry. It details ten key observations from the testimony we heard and contains 35 recommendations variously targeted to ministers, MPs, the West Midlands metro mayor, the NHS and social care system and health and wellbeing boards. And this work will further feed into Labour’s national inquiry being led by Baroness Doreen Lawrence.

I want to thank my co-chairs: Khalid Mahmood MP, Taiwo Owetami MP and councillors Paulette Hamilton, Aftab Nawaz, Sandra Samuels OBE and Mohammed Yaseen – who have been inspirational in their passion for our community – and Liam Byrne MP for the leadership he has shown and his unrelenting calls for change to happen. But perhaps the thing that will remain with me most is the harrowing evidence we heard from family members of those who lost their lives too soon.

This report must not be ignored. The change we demand must happen immediately. We must the learn the lessons of the failure of leadership; of longstanding and structural inequalities; of inadequate resources for our health and care services; of cuts that fall hardest on areas with the most BAME communities; of a lack of BAME faces amongst key decision makers, of inadequate data collection and monitoring. We must learn the lessons of what is an urgent medical emergency before it is repeated and more lives are needlessly lost.

We now know that BAME communities were the hardest hit. We are becoming increasingly aware that there are a range of factors that led to this. Chronic disease is higher amongst BAME people, they live in some of the most deprived areas with poorer housing conditions and environment leading to lowest life expectancy, they are less likely to use GP services and they are disproportionately represented amongst frontline key workers including NHS staff, carers, bus and taxi drivers.

Yet our understanding continues to be limited as we are still not collecting the data we need to support better understanding – e.g. ethnicity is not collected on death certificates, as it has been in Scotland for over ten years. We are also aware that our most diverse areas have suffered massively disproportionate cuts in public health funding. The three most diverse areas in the West Midlands – Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Sandwell – have had cuts to public health budgets over the last five years of 9%, 8% and 15% respectively, compared to an average of 5% across England.

Government guidance still doesn’t reflect the urgency for BAME people in our community. Where is the focus on BAME people in the governments testing strategy? Why isn’t there a focus on BAME teachers, support staff and families as schools prepare to reopen in a couple of weeks? Where is the investment into research to help better understand the causes and solutions for our BAME residents? And this is the most unforgivable tragedy of all – the total failure of leadership by the government and, in the West Midlands, our metro mayor who have all been wholly absent in the hour of need for our BAME communities.

The importance and challenge of understanding and dealing with inequalities is appearing in our public discourse almost on a daily basis – be it with Covid-19, the disgraceful application of algorithms in our school exam systems over the last few days or with longstanding challenges across our public services. With the virus likely to remain as a feature of life for some time to come, and the risks for our BAME communities still persisting, we must deal with these challenges before a second phase.

Change must happen immediately, we cannot wait. We owe it to all the frontline workers who – despite knowing only some of the risks and often not having the personal protective equipment required – still turned up to care for others; we owe it to the memory of the 35-year-old new mum who died after childbirth, never having the chance to hold her new-born son; we owe it to the son who said goodbye to his dad via WhatsApp while a doctor sat stroking his dad’s hand and holding him close “as if he was his own”. It’s about time we started seeing all as our own.

You can read the report in full here.