[00:00:00] Jenny Ousbey: Hello, and welcome to the Health Change Makers podcast. I'm Jenny Ousbey, founder and CEO of Ovid Health, a global healthcare communications consultancy, also known as the Health Change Makers. In this new series, I'll be interviewing experts from politicians and patients to tech founders and CEOs. All with a shared passion for improving the wellbeing of people and driving meaningful change. Join me as I meet incredible Change Makers and be inspired to become a Change Maker yourself.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Health Change Makers podcast. Today, I am joined by Baroness Margaret Ritchie. Baroness Margaret Ritchie was previously leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, SDLP.
She's been a Minister for Social Development in the Northern Ireland Executive. She also has done a lot of change making in healthcare over the years, both from the perspective of an advocate, but also perspective of a patient herself having been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018. Margaret is also the Allergy UK's parliamentary champion and has also done a lot of work pressing for improvements in vaccinations. So welcome, Margaret.
[00:01:28] Margaret Ritchie: Thank you very much. Delighted to be here. Delighted to talk about these subjects that mean a lot to me.
[00:01:35] Jenny Ousbey: Brilliant. Thank you. And I think the first thing that I really felt when I was looking into all the things that you've achieved in life is that you have a life of public service, and that's something that you've talked about before, about service being something that drives you to achieve and to do all of these things. And I think service is a underused phrase nowadays. So, I was really interested to ask you about whether you think service is still relevant? Do you think that the concept of service in life is something that, you know, you see younger generations aspiring towards?
[00:02:14] Margaret Ritchie: Yes, I do firmly believe in service, but I think the nature of career politics has changed in the nature of service. Whenever I was elected as a district councillor way back in 1985, some 39 years ago, service was key to political development. It was key to political representation, because politics is about people and about serving people and providing for them and improving their lives, whether through an individual representation, whether they want a new door on their property if they live in social housing, whether they need better accessibility to hospital services or in terms of serving your community and I did that in terms of being Chair of the Council's Health Committee for several years about the provision of a new hospital service and the principle therefore of local accessibility to the delivery of service at the point of need, is an important principle for me.
But I do think the actual issue of service has changed because people now come into politics at a much younger age. It's easier for them to get elected, it's seen as a career, and I take that as a Northern Ireland example. But I feel the people don't take the issue of service as seriously as I believe it should.
It's not a nine to five position. It is very much a 17, 18 hour position and you have to be available after work to people if you're not at meetings or if you're not in the chambers dealing with whether it's legislation or whether it's dealing with motions or whatever. Because many people are working, they will have accessibility to all forms of social platforms, but some do not.
So therefore they need to contact you by another means. So I think you have to be available. I think this crop of politicians sees themselves very much in terms of a career. It's nine to five, it's Monday to Friday. Politics is not nine to five, Monday to Friday. It is a seven day week job.
[00:04:36] Jenny Ousbey: So how have you managed to maintain that drive, that fire to do, as you quite rightly put it, I think, put in those 17, 18 hour days? What sits beneath that, that keeps you going?
[00:04:48] Margaret Ritchie: I think it's simply a drive to assist, to help, to change society, to improve society. Whether it is whenever I was in an elected position, which I ceased being whenever I lost my seat in Parliament in June 2017, or whether I'm now in the House of Lords, reviewing legislation and seeking to improve it.
So it's that principle of driving, principle of improving people's lives, and the principle of ensuring that a better way of life is available to all of the public. Who require your assistance, and those who don't.
[00:05:29] Jenny Ousbey: Did you feel like when you went to the House of Lords, did you feel more or less connected to that principle of helping people.
[00:05:38] Margaret Ritchie: Totally, because that was my raison d'etre, so to speak. Albeit, in the House of Lords it's in a totally different format, because it is an institution. Parliament itself is bicameral, and the House of Lords reviews, improves, and scrutinises legislation. Always the Commons is the boss. We fully appreciate that, we respect that and we honour that, but in so doing, we seek to improve that legislation because most instances we don't agree with it and that there becomes the tension of the ping pong process and that can last for a couple of weeks until you achieve that better form of legislation, whether it's in health or any other political sphere.
[00:06:28] Jenny Ousbey: I'm going to ask a cheeky question because I think one of the debates with the House of Lords is that some peers are more active than others, shall we say, and you're clearly in the camp that is actively engaging and scrutinizing the legislation. Does it ever frustrate you when you see that there are peers who maybe are turning up a couple of times in a year or are not actively engaging and using the kind of privileges afforded to them to be able to scrutinize the legislation.
And if you do get frustrated, then what do you think we could do about it?
[00:06:59] Margaret Ritchie: There is a level of frustration with that, but you have to realise the House of Lords consists of a lot of older people, and as one of my colleagues said to me a couple of weeks ago, it's one place where you'll be that people no longer come and then they die. So it's because people are appointed maybe, by and large, at an older age.
Therefore they try to afford as much of themselves to the process as they possibly can. I don't disagree with reform of House of Lords. That was started by Tony Blair, and it was the right thing to do. I think more needs to be done in terms of of reforming the whole hereditary sphere. I think the House of Lords should be a reflection of the UK in all its aspects and in its regions and nations.
And it's as simple as that, if you want to reflect the needs of the wider public.
[00:07:55] Jenny Ousbey: If you had to pick a moment in your political career that was a turning point for you, could you tell me a bit about that moment?
[00:08:04] Margaret Ritchie: Well, I suppose it's difficult to pick out any particular thing, but one of the most important things for me was whenever I was a minister in the Northern Ireland Executive, which wasn't an easy job because I was one minister from the SDLP around the executive table and the nature of power sharing executive and the larger parties, shall we say.
And there's a level of political bullying there. And therefore you have to wait for your turn, whether your executive papers have been examined. But I was in the Department for Social Development. That dealt with social and affordable housing and the benefits system, which by and large is translated from London with the budget and to Belfast.
So there's little room, I suppose, for flexibility in the exercising and in the administration of it or interpretation of the rules because the legislation by and large is karaoke and it's the same. And I also have community and sort of social Development and Urban Regeneration. One of my first priority in that was a new housing strategy.
Housing was my number one priority. There were a significant number of people at that stage on the social housing list and the level of homelessness in Northern Ireland in 2007 was quite high. And housing is very much equated with health because if you have a good sense of a house, you have an access to a roof over your head, an access to a job, access to proper health care, then I think your general health and wellbeing will be that much better.
So, therefore, I made that my priority with a budget attached, and as a consequence, I was able to build more houses that had been built before that by previous ministers in the direct rule scenario, and probably since that. Because we stated quite clearly, housing is our number one priority.
That's what we want to do. And that, to me, was a major changing moment. To see those houses, whether through new build or through purchase of the shelf because we bought some old army housing and renovated it and made it available and I think that was a good use of public money. You were using brownfield sites and you were saving money.
You were using government money in the best possible way, and you also were levering money from other sources like banking institutions. And in fact, whenever I made housing my number one priority, I sought the assistance of Baroness Ford, who was already in the House of Lords, and who was an economist and a financial expert.
And she showed us how to do it to make better use of the money that was available to us and how we could leverage private funds. And in fact, I meet Margaret quite often now in the House of Lords and have interesting discussions about those days, albeit 17 years ago.
[00:11:11] Jenny Ousbey: I love that example and I think that housing is oft overlooked in terms of the health and wellbeing strategies generally, I think, of governments and, you know, I think there's lots of really interesting things other countries are doing in that regard. And I was also, it's interesting about kind of forging those more informal alliances with different politicians in terms of getting the job done.
But you also referenced Margaret as being an expert. And that really made me think of, I think it was during the, the pandemic that I think it was Michael Gove who said the public doesn't want to hear from experts anymore. And I thought that that really kind of struck a chord in terms of the media discourse around, does the public believe experts any longer?
And I'd be interested in your thoughts. From the start of your political career to now in terms of whether you think that's fair or not.
[00:12:04] Margaret Ritchie: Well, I think fair wouldn't come into it. I do think we need experts because we need advice. You can't implement, you can't develop, you can't process a policy unless you've got the best possible advice available to you. And that advice will come from people who are experts in the field. And always remember, experts and advisors advise, politicians implement.
And I think that's the difference. You're seeking to make change, but you want to make change and improvement in your society, whether it's in health, housing, education, the economy. But to do that, you need assistance, you need advice, you need information, you need to be better informed. And what better way to do that, than not to close your mind to this expert advice, but to take it on board and use it in the best possible way.
[00:12:58] Jenny Ousbey: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the challenge is the politicians persuading the public that they are using the advice in the best possible way. And I think we're seeing mixed results, aren't we? I think in both in Westminster and in the Northern Ireland Executive at the moment. I'm going to take you on to a slightly different subject.
So thinking about your change making in healthcare. So when you were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018, I think that was soon after losing your Westminster seat, about nine months after. And I think that, you know, I've talked to politicians before about that period of time after they've lost their seat.
There's a grieving process, you know, processing that goes on. So I was really interested about how, you know, clearly the news that you have breast cancer must have been really shocking. But in the context of also that other process that was going on in the background, I'm interested to hear how you managed dealing with that personal news with, I suppose, the professional news around losing your seat and what was going to happen next in your political career.
[00:14:06] Margaret Ritchie: Well, obviously I lost my seat in that ill-fated Theresa May election of the 8th of June, 2017, I think that election was defined by Brexit, defined by right-wing economics, and particularly here in Northern Ireland, defined by no hard borders issue. We came from the fact in the SDLP, we didn't want borders anywhere.
We wanted Northern Ireland to be treated as a special region, hence you got the Theresa May's backstop, then you got the protocol, and then you got the Windsor Framework. Because of our unique circumstances with having a border on the island of Ireland, in the south, Ireland was going to still be in the European Union.
We did need those open borders and we did need the free movement of people, which has been slightly inhibited by immigration policies, but also for the free movement of goods and services. That was vitally important. And obviously, the protocol and the Windsor Framework cover the issue of goods. So, in that respect, Brexit defined that election.
It was quite bitter and it was also where extremes dominated, and I think that's the production, in terms of Northern Ireland, of the results and the outcomes showed that and I think we're still on that journey and whilst we now have a Windsor framework, it doesn't complete our process because there are several outstanding issues like veterinary medicines and in fact, I recently joined the veterinary medicines working group because that issue needs to be satisfactorily resolved to suit the veterinarians. But also the farming and agri food industry and mustn't interfere with the cross border nature of the dairy industry. So that's a long answer to what you originally asked me.
It did have an impact on me. It is like a grieving process. It is like a bereavement in your life because you close down your office, you close down your contacts and you get your file shredded. So that's where your contact with the public gone. And that's very difficult because that's the instruction from Parliament.
It has to happen. And most of all, on a very personal level, your staff lose their jobs. Albeit they get some form of compensation, but nothing can ever compensate you for the loss of your job. So I had a concern there that they would all get new jobs and they'd be satisfactorily placed and thankfully that did happen.
But because I was 58, 59 at that stage, it was impossible for anybody to even want to employ me because in the Northern Ireland context, you don't want people involved in politics because you've, I'm coming as a democratic Irish nationalist. People would be deeply sceptical. So, therefore, because of age, because of my political identity, that wasn't possible.
So therefore, all of this, shall we say anxiety, reflected itself in my health. And I think the breast cancer surgeon reflected that to me whenever he spoke to me. He said, you have no history of this in your family. There's no genetic reason for it. But he said, I'm going to suggest a reason to you that this is probably what happened.
And that was quite a satisfactory explanation, but it does take nearly a year out of your life because you have to have surgery. I had a mastectomy, then I had chemotherapy, and then I had radiotherapy followed by medication. And that in itself meant that I wasn't able to do very much. I had set up a small consultancy business that allowed me to do things that were albeit political.
I was organizing speakers for events associated with peace and reconciliation. So I was able to do that. I was able to consider my breast cancer diagnosis as a project, believe it or not, because I realized that I had to go through the stages of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and post medication care.
So I'm still on that process. Some six and a bit years down the road, still in some form of medication, but I realised that the one thing I wanted to do in life was that part of public service. I want to be able to do things in terms of legislation, and I believe that format for me was through the Parliamentary Forum.
So I grasped at the opportunity whenever I was able to be appointed to the House of Lords. And that appointment, I was introduced, appointed in the Theresa May list in September 2019, introduced in November 2019. The day of the Parliament was paroled for the General Election. So therefore, I was back at the, third week of December, made my maiden speech in January, 2020.
And of course some six, seven weeks later, COVID came and we operated from our home bases. I did that for 18 months through the various lockdowns and then Parliament said, look, we all had to get back into the chambers and the account. Be a proper Parliamentarian, unless you're in a debating chamber. You can do committees, yes, but through hybrid means, but I think they're going to try to wean us off that as well.
[00:19:48] Jenny Ousbey: And as you put it, the project of being diagnosed with breast cancer. In projects, you have learnings. So what have you learnt from the project of going through that process of being a patient and therefore what changes do you want to see as a result of going through that experience as a patient rather than a politician?
[00:20:09] Margaret Ritchie: As a patient, I believe firmly in screening. I believe that everybody should take up their screening opportunities, whether it's for breast cancer, bowel cancer, or any other form of screening that is available. If there's no screening or you aren't aware of screening, therefore you should go and find out about it.
And I think I found out through the whole process that I was a very determined, resilient individual. And I was able to, I had applied that in practice before in my career, and I was doing that through my illness. And I think as well as drinking loads and loads of water to wash the chemo and toxins out of my system, I was able to do that.
And I must say, so far I am cancer free and I hope to remain like that through the application of a good diet and healthy living.
[00:21:05] Jenny Ousbey: Well touch wood, I hope you remain cancer free as well and I think a lot of people would want to know how to bottle up that resilience. Because I think that, you know, I have a seven year old daughter and in school, I think they talk to them about resilience and how to foster it. But I think that it's a debate that happens quite a lot at the moment in terms of how can we bottle up resilience in younger generations so that they're ready to face whatever life has to throw at them.
[00:21:33] Margaret Ritchie: What I think the easiest thing to do is to find a project that you can implement, that you can follow and that you can enjoy. I think that's the most important thing because good health equals a good enjoyed life. And I think those are vital ingredients, but the issue is to keep busy. It's not to be sitting about not doing anything.
The other thing I found was vitally important was to get involved in an exercise program, which took your mind off yourself. You met other people who had similar cancer type condition that never ever talked about their condition. But the vital thing was participation, enjoyment, and at the same time, getting moving again and realizing that there are things and there are opportunities.
And the House of Lords was that opportunity and I took it with open arms. Notwithstanding the vicissitudes of fortune with terrible COVID pandemic, but that also taught me that other pandemics are possible, and that also told me that it was vitally important that the NHS and the government should be ready, whether it's micro, you know, the whole antibiotic resistance, and that's where the whole area of vaccines come into play and all the learnings from COVID must be implemented to ensure that other vaccines are accelerated onto the National Immunization Program through that whole horizon scanning.
[00:23:12] Jenny Ousbey: I'm really interested, in what you were saying about building up our resilience as a national health service and how vaccination plays a role in that. And I know that you've been doing some work recently with regards to respiratory syncytial virus. So tell me a bit about that.
[00:23:29] Margaret Ritchie: Well, obviously, during the whole COVID pandemic, I was contacted by some of the pharma companies about the need for a vaccination process to be implemented for RSV, for Respiratory Syncytial Virus. And this coincided with the fact I'm also an asthmatic and, as a child, I had pneumonia, which is a deep seated chest infection.
RSV in infants is fairly prevalent and I thought, yes, there is a case here. So I kept raising this in Parliament and kept prodding the Department of Health and Social Care. And I think they're quite used now to my oral questions and written questions on this particular topic. So much so that we're probably going to get a vaccination process for this coming winter, but the bottom line is they're trying to sort out the cohort nature of this, whether it will be to pregnant mums or whether it will be to young infants and then older adults, because those are the weak areas that need to be addressed from a medical clinical perspective.
I hope that that can happen and that we're first way down the road. But the second thing is in relation to the general vaccination, there have been so many learnings in terms of the expertise deployed for the COVID pandemic and how that can be done fairly expeditiously, and now there's various variants of COVID.
So therefore they've had to tweak the vaccine. But with that particular expertise now available. Why can there not be exploration of vaccinations for things like cancer and other serious illnesses so that they can be dealt with? Because there's an economic opportunity here. It helps to unburden the National Health Service, which is severely overburdened at all strands of society and therefore is a cost burden.
It's a human burden and also create our long waiting lists and all of those things. So I think there needs to be an economic opportunity realized. I think government realizes that because I've been involved in some of the horizon scanning round table and I see that government is currently looking at that.
[00:25:50] Jenny Ousbey: So a lot of people would consider you a Change Maker, Margaret, but who do you consider to be a Change Maker? So who do you look up to? Who inspires you?
[00:25:59] Margaret Ritchie: Well, I suppose in my Irish context, and because I was a member and joined the SDLP in 1980. People liked John Hume because he believed that it wasn't just a straightforward solution that was required. You had to define the nature of the problem and the nature of the problem for us was the three sets of relationships between Unionists and Nationalists in Northern Ireland, between North and South of the island, and then between Britain and Ireland.
And then you had to apply a solution to that. And the solution was based around the Good Friday Agreement, which is the three sets of relationships and the political institutions that as a result there. And obviously they've been pretty shaky, but perhaps in some instances, the parties that are running the show now were never the parties that believed in that framework for a solution.
But having said that, that's somebody that I looked up to because he had a new way of thinking and it was about solutions focused, defining the problem and then solutions. Similarly with illness. And define the nature of the problem and what is the solution. One possible solution to the current difficulties experienced by the NHS could be a more intensive vaccination program.
[00:27:19] Jenny Ousbey: And one of the things that really strikes me is that you talk about service and you talk about projects. So, I'm interested to hear whether you have any new projects on the horizon, or what's the next project that you want to get your teeth into?
[00:27:34] Margaret Ritchie: Well, I don't have any, I suppose, new projects in the line at the moment. I'm currently in three committees in the House of Lords. The first one is obviously the Windsor Framework Committee, which is a sub committee of the European Affairs Committee. There's quite a lot of scrutiny involved of European legislation coming to Northern Ireland and still via the UK into Northern Ireland, but also as particular because we have the Windsor Framework solution.
I'm also on the Secondary Committee for Statutory Regulations. As you know, most of the legislation in the UK and in Westminster is largely skilegal and therefore the real legislation comes through in secondary form and you find out through those regulations that the explanatory memorandums, the impact assessment and also the lack of consultation is quite appalling and quite unacceptable because people aren't being served properly.
I'm also on a specialist committee to do with food, diet, and obesity, and that is quite clearly very much health related, it's education related, and it goes back to children at a very early age and the availability of food and how you cook the food, it's an education process, but it's also to do with our cost of living crisis and the availability of that resource to purchase good quality food.
[00:29:01] Jenny Ousbey: I think a lot of people think that if Labour come into power then there'll be plenty of secondary legislation for you to scrutinise, because I think that's, one of the ways in which, they're going to make a lot of their policies happen in the first kind of hundred days so.
[00:29:15] Margaret Ritchie: And obviously there will be repealing, obviously, I hope, of the Rwanda legislation. I hope there will also be a repeal of the legacy legislation to do with Northern Ireland in the care and reconciliation of victims and survivors.
[00:29:30] Jenny Ousbey: What do you think is the likelihood of those being repealed?
[00:29:33] Margaret Ritchie: Well, I think Labour and also the Lord's Vernon Coker, Lord Coker said that it was their intention to repeal the Rwanda legislation. And I think we got indications of that from Keir Starmer. Obviously the doing is always more difficult than the saying as we know in terms of legislation and in terms of new government's priorities.
So I think that is probably the issue. In terms of the legacy legislation, Labour said that they will repeal that. I think they will repeal the immunity provisions and they will ensure that inquests are reinstated and that the Independent Commission for Reconciliation as a body will have those extra facilities available to it.
[00:30:21] Jenny Ousbey: Thank you. I've got two last questions, Margaret, and I debated asking you this because as a female CEO, I sometimes shy away from asking somebody what, what is it like to be a woman in XYZ job because it's just an annoying question. So I'm going to try and think of a different way to phrase it because I'm really conscious that as the first kind of female leader of a major political party in Northern Ireland, you must have some insights in terms of whether things have improved or not for women wanting to enter politics.
[00:30:51] Margaret Ritchie: Well, I do think things have improved considerably because I became a leader in 2010. And I, I was the first woman to be a leader of a political party in Northern Ireland. Now you have the leader of Sinn Féin is a woman. The leader of the Alliance Party is a woman. So the thing, and our deputy leader in terms of the SDLP is a woman, Claire Hanna MP.
So I do think in those instances it had be easier, but those issues still exist. There's a level of misogyny in society. But there's also a level of a woman having to do two jobs, and there's a greater understanding now that men have to perform all types of roles in the home environment. And I think that has been a major change from my time, but also from my parents' generation. And I think that is only for the better.
[00:31:50] Jenny Ousbey: 100 percent agree. And final question, Margaret, if people are listening to our conversation and thinking, I have no idea where to even start in terms of making change happen, what advice would you give them?
[00:32:04] Margaret Ritchie: I think you have to be strong, you have to be resilient, and you have to have an inner zeal to want to do things, and you want to change things, you want to improve things, so you start off and you define, what do I want to do? And then, how do I go about it and what do I need to achieve that change?
Whether it's through a political perspective, whether it's through your own job or your own organization that you're a member of or that you're employed by.
[00:32:37] Jenny Ousbey: Baroness Margaret Ritchie, it's been an absolute pleasure. We will all take that advice and find our inner zeal and go off into the world and try and be Change Makers. Thank you so much.
[00:32:48] Margaret Ritchie: Thank you for having me and for having this opportunity to say my few words on this podcast.
[00:32:55] Jenny Ousbey: Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Health Change Maker podcast. If you enjoyed it, why not share with a friend and subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Health Change Makers podcast. Today, I am joined by Baroness Margaret Ritchie. Baroness Margaret Ritchie was previously leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, SDLP.
She's been a Minister for Social Development in the Northern Ireland Executive. She also has done a lot of change making in healthcare over the years, both from the perspective of an advocate, but also perspective of a patient herself having been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018. Margaret is also the Allergy UK's parliamentary champion and has also done a lot of work pressing for improvements in vaccinations. So welcome, Margaret.
[00:01:28] Margaret Ritchie: Thank you very much. Delighted to be here. Delighted to talk about these subjects that mean a lot to me.
[00:01:35] Jenny Ousbey: Brilliant. Thank you. And I think the first thing that I really felt when I was looking into all the things that you've achieved in life is that you have a life of public service, and that's something that you've talked about before, about service being something that drives you to achieve and to do all of these things. And I think service is a underused phrase nowadays. So, I was really interested to ask you about whether you think service is still relevant? Do you think that the concept of service in life is something that, you know, you see younger generations aspiring towards?
[00:02:14] Margaret Ritchie: Yes, I do firmly believe in service, but I think the nature of career politics has changed in the nature of service. Whenever I was elected as a district councillor way back in 1985, some 39 years ago, service was key to political development. It was key to political representation, because politics is about people and about serving people and providing for them and improving their lives, whether through an individual representation, whether they want a new door on their property if they live in social housing, whether they need better accessibility to hospital services or in terms of serving your community and I did that in terms of being Chair of the Council's Health Committee for several years about the provision of a new hospital service and the principle therefore of local accessibility to the delivery of service at the point of need, is an important principle for me.
But I do think the actual issue of service has changed because people now come into politics at a much younger age. It's easier for them to get elected, it's seen as a career, and I take that as a Northern Ireland example. But I feel the people don't take the issue of service as seriously as I believe it should.
It's not a nine to five position. It is very much a 17, 18 hour position and you have to be available after work to people if you're not at meetings or if you're not in the chambers dealing with whether it's legislation or whether it's dealing with motions or whatever. Because many people are working, they will have accessibility to all forms of social platforms, but some do not.
So therefore they need to contact you by another means. So I think you have to be available. I think this crop of politicians sees themselves very much in terms of a career. It's nine to five, it's Monday to Friday. Politics is not nine to five, Monday to Friday. It is a seven day week job.
[00:04:36] Jenny Ousbey: So how have you managed to maintain that drive, that fire to do, as you quite rightly put it, I think, put in those 17, 18 hour days? What sits beneath that, that keeps you going?
[00:04:48] Margaret Ritchie: I think it's simply a drive to assist, to help, to change society, to improve society. Whether it is whenever I was in an elected position, which I ceased being whenever I lost my seat in Parliament in June 2017, or whether I'm now in the House of Lords, reviewing legislation and seeking to improve it.
So it's that principle of driving, principle of improving people's lives, and the principle of ensuring that a better way of life is available to all of the public. Who require your assistance, and those who don't.
[00:05:29] Jenny Ousbey: Did you feel like when you went to the House of Lords, did you feel more or less connected to that principle of helping people.
[00:05:38] Margaret Ritchie: Totally, because that was my raison d'etre, so to speak. Albeit, in the House of Lords it's in a totally different format, because it is an institution. Parliament itself is bicameral, and the House of Lords reviews, improves, and scrutinises legislation. Always the Commons is the boss. We fully appreciate that, we respect that and we honour that, but in so doing, we seek to improve that legislation because most instances we don't agree with it and that there becomes the tension of the ping pong process and that can last for a couple of weeks until you achieve that better form of legislation, whether it's in health or any other political sphere.
[00:06:28] Jenny Ousbey: I'm going to ask a cheeky question because I think one of the debates with the House of Lords is that some peers are more active than others, shall we say, and you're clearly in the camp that is actively engaging and scrutinizing the legislation. Does it ever frustrate you when you see that there are peers who maybe are turning up a couple of times in a year or are not actively engaging and using the kind of privileges afforded to them to be able to scrutinize the legislation.
And if you do get frustrated, then what do you think we could do about it?
[00:06:59] Margaret Ritchie: There is a level of frustration with that, but you have to realise the House of Lords consists of a lot of older people, and as one of my colleagues said to me a couple of weeks ago, it's one place where you'll be that people no longer come and then they die. So it's because people are appointed maybe, by and large, at an older age.
Therefore they try to afford as much of themselves to the process as they possibly can. I don't disagree with reform of House of Lords. That was started by Tony Blair, and it was the right thing to do. I think more needs to be done in terms of of reforming the whole hereditary sphere. I think the House of Lords should be a reflection of the UK in all its aspects and in its regions and nations.
And it's as simple as that, if you want to reflect the needs of the wider public.
[00:07:55] Jenny Ousbey: If you had to pick a moment in your political career that was a turning point for you, could you tell me a bit about that moment?
[00:08:04] Margaret Ritchie: Well, I suppose it's difficult to pick out any particular thing, but one of the most important things for me was whenever I was a minister in the Northern Ireland Executive, which wasn't an easy job because I was one minister from the SDLP around the executive table and the nature of power sharing executive and the larger parties, shall we say.
And there's a level of political bullying there. And therefore you have to wait for your turn, whether your executive papers have been examined. But I was in the Department for Social Development. That dealt with social and affordable housing and the benefits system, which by and large is translated from London with the budget and to Belfast.
So there's little room, I suppose, for flexibility in the exercising and in the administration of it or interpretation of the rules because the legislation by and large is karaoke and it's the same. And I also have community and sort of social Development and Urban Regeneration. One of my first priority in that was a new housing strategy.
Housing was my number one priority. There were a significant number of people at that stage on the social housing list and the level of homelessness in Northern Ireland in 2007 was quite high. And housing is very much equated with health because if you have a good sense of a house, you have an access to a roof over your head, an access to a job, access to proper health care, then I think your general health and wellbeing will be that much better.
So, therefore, I made that my priority with a budget attached, and as a consequence, I was able to build more houses that had been built before that by previous ministers in the direct rule scenario, and probably since that. Because we stated quite clearly, housing is our number one priority.
That's what we want to do. And that, to me, was a major changing moment. To see those houses, whether through new build or through purchase of the shelf because we bought some old army housing and renovated it and made it available and I think that was a good use of public money. You were using brownfield sites and you were saving money.
You were using government money in the best possible way, and you also were levering money from other sources like banking institutions. And in fact, whenever I made housing my number one priority, I sought the assistance of Baroness Ford, who was already in the House of Lords, and who was an economist and a financial expert.
And she showed us how to do it to make better use of the money that was available to us and how we could leverage private funds. And in fact, I meet Margaret quite often now in the House of Lords and have interesting discussions about those days, albeit 17 years ago.
[00:11:11] Jenny Ousbey: I love that example and I think that housing is oft overlooked in terms of the health and wellbeing strategies generally, I think, of governments and, you know, I think there's lots of really interesting things other countries are doing in that regard. And I was also, it's interesting about kind of forging those more informal alliances with different politicians in terms of getting the job done.
But you also referenced Margaret as being an expert. And that really made me think of, I think it was during the, the pandemic that I think it was Michael Gove who said the public doesn't want to hear from experts anymore. And I thought that that really kind of struck a chord in terms of the media discourse around, does the public believe experts any longer?
And I'd be interested in your thoughts. From the start of your political career to now in terms of whether you think that's fair or not.
[00:12:04] Margaret Ritchie: Well, I think fair wouldn't come into it. I do think we need experts because we need advice. You can't implement, you can't develop, you can't process a policy unless you've got the best possible advice available to you. And that advice will come from people who are experts in the field. And always remember, experts and advisors advise, politicians implement.
And I think that's the difference. You're seeking to make change, but you want to make change and improvement in your society, whether it's in health, housing, education, the economy. But to do that, you need assistance, you need advice, you need information, you need to be better informed. And what better way to do that, than not to close your mind to this expert advice, but to take it on board and use it in the best possible way.
[00:12:58] Jenny Ousbey: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the challenge is the politicians persuading the public that they are using the advice in the best possible way. And I think we're seeing mixed results, aren't we? I think in both in Westminster and in the Northern Ireland Executive at the moment. I'm going to take you on to a slightly different subject.
So thinking about your change making in healthcare. So when you were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018, I think that was soon after losing your Westminster seat, about nine months after. And I think that, you know, I've talked to politicians before about that period of time after they've lost their seat.
There's a grieving process, you know, processing that goes on. So I was really interested about how, you know, clearly the news that you have breast cancer must have been really shocking. But in the context of also that other process that was going on in the background, I'm interested to hear how you managed dealing with that personal news with, I suppose, the professional news around losing your seat and what was going to happen next in your political career.
[00:14:06] Margaret Ritchie: Well, obviously I lost my seat in that ill-fated Theresa May election of the 8th of June, 2017, I think that election was defined by Brexit, defined by right-wing economics, and particularly here in Northern Ireland, defined by no hard borders issue. We came from the fact in the SDLP, we didn't want borders anywhere.
We wanted Northern Ireland to be treated as a special region, hence you got the Theresa May's backstop, then you got the protocol, and then you got the Windsor Framework. Because of our unique circumstances with having a border on the island of Ireland, in the south, Ireland was going to still be in the European Union.
We did need those open borders and we did need the free movement of people, which has been slightly inhibited by immigration policies, but also for the free movement of goods and services. That was vitally important. And obviously, the protocol and the Windsor Framework cover the issue of goods. So, in that respect, Brexit defined that election.
It was quite bitter and it was also where extremes dominated, and I think that's the production, in terms of Northern Ireland, of the results and the outcomes showed that and I think we're still on that journey and whilst we now have a Windsor framework, it doesn't complete our process because there are several outstanding issues like veterinary medicines and in fact, I recently joined the veterinary medicines working group because that issue needs to be satisfactorily resolved to suit the veterinarians. But also the farming and agri food industry and mustn't interfere with the cross border nature of the dairy industry. So that's a long answer to what you originally asked me.
It did have an impact on me. It is like a grieving process. It is like a bereavement in your life because you close down your office, you close down your contacts and you get your file shredded. So that's where your contact with the public gone. And that's very difficult because that's the instruction from Parliament.
It has to happen. And most of all, on a very personal level, your staff lose their jobs. Albeit they get some form of compensation, but nothing can ever compensate you for the loss of your job. So I had a concern there that they would all get new jobs and they'd be satisfactorily placed and thankfully that did happen.
But because I was 58, 59 at that stage, it was impossible for anybody to even want to employ me because in the Northern Ireland context, you don't want people involved in politics because you've, I'm coming as a democratic Irish nationalist. People would be deeply sceptical. So, therefore, because of age, because of my political identity, that wasn't possible.
So therefore, all of this, shall we say anxiety, reflected itself in my health. And I think the breast cancer surgeon reflected that to me whenever he spoke to me. He said, you have no history of this in your family. There's no genetic reason for it. But he said, I'm going to suggest a reason to you that this is probably what happened.
And that was quite a satisfactory explanation, but it does take nearly a year out of your life because you have to have surgery. I had a mastectomy, then I had chemotherapy, and then I had radiotherapy followed by medication. And that in itself meant that I wasn't able to do very much. I had set up a small consultancy business that allowed me to do things that were albeit political.
I was organizing speakers for events associated with peace and reconciliation. So I was able to do that. I was able to consider my breast cancer diagnosis as a project, believe it or not, because I realized that I had to go through the stages of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and post medication care.
So I'm still on that process. Some six and a bit years down the road, still in some form of medication, but I realised that the one thing I wanted to do in life was that part of public service. I want to be able to do things in terms of legislation, and I believe that format for me was through the Parliamentary Forum.
So I grasped at the opportunity whenever I was able to be appointed to the House of Lords. And that appointment, I was introduced, appointed in the Theresa May list in September 2019, introduced in November 2019. The day of the Parliament was paroled for the General Election. So therefore, I was back at the, third week of December, made my maiden speech in January, 2020.
And of course some six, seven weeks later, COVID came and we operated from our home bases. I did that for 18 months through the various lockdowns and then Parliament said, look, we all had to get back into the chambers and the account. Be a proper Parliamentarian, unless you're in a debating chamber. You can do committees, yes, but through hybrid means, but I think they're going to try to wean us off that as well.
[00:19:48] Jenny Ousbey: And as you put it, the project of being diagnosed with breast cancer. In projects, you have learnings. So what have you learnt from the project of going through that process of being a patient and therefore what changes do you want to see as a result of going through that experience as a patient rather than a politician?
[00:20:09] Margaret Ritchie: As a patient, I believe firmly in screening. I believe that everybody should take up their screening opportunities, whether it's for breast cancer, bowel cancer, or any other form of screening that is available. If there's no screening or you aren't aware of screening, therefore you should go and find out about it.
And I think I found out through the whole process that I was a very determined, resilient individual. And I was able to, I had applied that in practice before in my career, and I was doing that through my illness. And I think as well as drinking loads and loads of water to wash the chemo and toxins out of my system, I was able to do that.
And I must say, so far I am cancer free and I hope to remain like that through the application of a good diet and healthy living.
[00:21:05] Jenny Ousbey: Well touch wood, I hope you remain cancer free as well and I think a lot of people would want to know how to bottle up that resilience. Because I think that, you know, I have a seven year old daughter and in school, I think they talk to them about resilience and how to foster it. But I think that it's a debate that happens quite a lot at the moment in terms of how can we bottle up resilience in younger generations so that they're ready to face whatever life has to throw at them.
[00:21:33] Margaret Ritchie: What I think the easiest thing to do is to find a project that you can implement, that you can follow and that you can enjoy. I think that's the most important thing because good health equals a good enjoyed life. And I think those are vital ingredients, but the issue is to keep busy. It's not to be sitting about not doing anything.
The other thing I found was vitally important was to get involved in an exercise program, which took your mind off yourself. You met other people who had similar cancer type condition that never ever talked about their condition. But the vital thing was participation, enjoyment, and at the same time, getting moving again and realizing that there are things and there are opportunities.
And the House of Lords was that opportunity and I took it with open arms. Notwithstanding the vicissitudes of fortune with terrible COVID pandemic, but that also taught me that other pandemics are possible, and that also told me that it was vitally important that the NHS and the government should be ready, whether it's micro, you know, the whole antibiotic resistance, and that's where the whole area of vaccines come into play and all the learnings from COVID must be implemented to ensure that other vaccines are accelerated onto the National Immunization Program through that whole horizon scanning.
[00:23:12] Jenny Ousbey: I'm really interested, in what you were saying about building up our resilience as a national health service and how vaccination plays a role in that. And I know that you've been doing some work recently with regards to respiratory syncytial virus. So tell me a bit about that.
[00:23:29] Margaret Ritchie: Well, obviously, during the whole COVID pandemic, I was contacted by some of the pharma companies about the need for a vaccination process to be implemented for RSV, for Respiratory Syncytial Virus. And this coincided with the fact I'm also an asthmatic and, as a child, I had pneumonia, which is a deep seated chest infection.
RSV in infants is fairly prevalent and I thought, yes, there is a case here. So I kept raising this in Parliament and kept prodding the Department of Health and Social Care. And I think they're quite used now to my oral questions and written questions on this particular topic. So much so that we're probably going to get a vaccination process for this coming winter, but the bottom line is they're trying to sort out the cohort nature of this, whether it will be to pregnant mums or whether it will be to young infants and then older adults, because those are the weak areas that need to be addressed from a medical clinical perspective.
I hope that that can happen and that we're first way down the road. But the second thing is in relation to the general vaccination, there have been so many learnings in terms of the expertise deployed for the COVID pandemic and how that can be done fairly expeditiously, and now there's various variants of COVID.
So therefore they've had to tweak the vaccine. But with that particular expertise now available. Why can there not be exploration of vaccinations for things like cancer and other serious illnesses so that they can be dealt with? Because there's an economic opportunity here. It helps to unburden the National Health Service, which is severely overburdened at all strands of society and therefore is a cost burden.
It's a human burden and also create our long waiting lists and all of those things. So I think there needs to be an economic opportunity realized. I think government realizes that because I've been involved in some of the horizon scanning round table and I see that government is currently looking at that.
[00:25:50] Jenny Ousbey: So a lot of people would consider you a Change Maker, Margaret, but who do you consider to be a Change Maker? So who do you look up to? Who inspires you?
[00:25:59] Margaret Ritchie: Well, I suppose in my Irish context, and because I was a member and joined the SDLP in 1980. People liked John Hume because he believed that it wasn't just a straightforward solution that was required. You had to define the nature of the problem and the nature of the problem for us was the three sets of relationships between Unionists and Nationalists in Northern Ireland, between North and South of the island, and then between Britain and Ireland.
And then you had to apply a solution to that. And the solution was based around the Good Friday Agreement, which is the three sets of relationships and the political institutions that as a result there. And obviously they've been pretty shaky, but perhaps in some instances, the parties that are running the show now were never the parties that believed in that framework for a solution.
But having said that, that's somebody that I looked up to because he had a new way of thinking and it was about solutions focused, defining the problem and then solutions. Similarly with illness. And define the nature of the problem and what is the solution. One possible solution to the current difficulties experienced by the NHS could be a more intensive vaccination program.
[00:27:19] Jenny Ousbey: And one of the things that really strikes me is that you talk about service and you talk about projects. So, I'm interested to hear whether you have any new projects on the horizon, or what's the next project that you want to get your teeth into?
[00:27:34] Margaret Ritchie: Well, I don't have any, I suppose, new projects in the line at the moment. I'm currently in three committees in the House of Lords. The first one is obviously the Windsor Framework Committee, which is a sub committee of the European Affairs Committee. There's quite a lot of scrutiny involved of European legislation coming to Northern Ireland and still via the UK into Northern Ireland, but also as particular because we have the Windsor Framework solution.
I'm also on the Secondary Committee for Statutory Regulations. As you know, most of the legislation in the UK and in Westminster is largely skilegal and therefore the real legislation comes through in secondary form and you find out through those regulations that the explanatory memorandums, the impact assessment and also the lack of consultation is quite appalling and quite unacceptable because people aren't being served properly.
I'm also on a specialist committee to do with food, diet, and obesity, and that is quite clearly very much health related, it's education related, and it goes back to children at a very early age and the availability of food and how you cook the food, it's an education process, but it's also to do with our cost of living crisis and the availability of that resource to purchase good quality food.
[00:29:01] Jenny Ousbey: I think a lot of people think that if Labour come into power then there'll be plenty of secondary legislation for you to scrutinise, because I think that's, one of the ways in which, they're going to make a lot of their policies happen in the first kind of hundred days so.
[00:29:15] Margaret Ritchie: And obviously there will be repealing, obviously, I hope, of the Rwanda legislation. I hope there will also be a repeal of the legacy legislation to do with Northern Ireland in the care and reconciliation of victims and survivors.
[00:29:30] Jenny Ousbey: What do you think is the likelihood of those being repealed?
[00:29:33] Margaret Ritchie: Well, I think Labour and also the Lord's Vernon Coker, Lord Coker said that it was their intention to repeal the Rwanda legislation. And I think we got indications of that from Keir Starmer. Obviously the doing is always more difficult than the saying as we know in terms of legislation and in terms of new government's priorities.
So I think that is probably the issue. In terms of the legacy legislation, Labour said that they will repeal that. I think they will repeal the immunity provisions and they will ensure that inquests are reinstated and that the Independent Commission for Reconciliation as a body will have those extra facilities available to it.
[00:30:21] Jenny Ousbey: Thank you. I've got two last questions, Margaret, and I debated asking you this because as a female CEO, I sometimes shy away from asking somebody what, what is it like to be a woman in XYZ job because it's just an annoying question. So I'm going to try and think of a different way to phrase it because I'm really conscious that as the first kind of female leader of a major political party in Northern Ireland, you must have some insights in terms of whether things have improved or not for women wanting to enter politics.
[00:30:51] Margaret Ritchie: Well, I do think things have improved considerably because I became a leader in 2010. And I, I was the first woman to be a leader of a political party in Northern Ireland. Now you have the leader of Sinn Féin is a woman. The leader of the Alliance Party is a woman. So the thing, and our deputy leader in terms of the SDLP is a woman, Claire Hanna MP.
So I do think in those instances it had be easier, but those issues still exist. There's a level of misogyny in society. But there's also a level of a woman having to do two jobs, and there's a greater understanding now that men have to perform all types of roles in the home environment. And I think that has been a major change from my time, but also from my parents' generation. And I think that is only for the better.
[00:31:50] Jenny Ousbey: 100 percent agree. And final question, Margaret, if people are listening to our conversation and thinking, I have no idea where to even start in terms of making change happen, what advice would you give them?
[00:32:04] Margaret Ritchie: I think you have to be strong, you have to be resilient, and you have to have an inner zeal to want to do things, and you want to change things, you want to improve things, so you start off and you define, what do I want to do? And then, how do I go about it and what do I need to achieve that change?
Whether it's through a political perspective, whether it's through your own job or your own organization that you're a member of or that you're employed by.
[00:32:37] Jenny Ousbey: Baroness Margaret Ritchie, it's been an absolute pleasure. We will all take that advice and find our inner zeal and go off into the world and try and be Change Makers. Thank you so much.
[00:32:48] Margaret Ritchie: Thank you for having me and for having this opportunity to say my few words on this podcast.
[00:32:55] Jenny Ousbey: Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Health Change Maker podcast. If you enjoyed it, why not share with a friend and subscribe so you never miss an episode.
