Speech delivered at Sands Films Studio event for THE MAN WITH THE PLAN on 12th and 13th April 2025.
A Campaign film produced by Sands Films studio in London.
The Man With The Plan is a new film about William Beveridge, written and directed by Christine Edzard and starring Simon Callow. Contact: ostockman@sandsfilms.co.uk
A Campaign film produced by Sands Films studio in London.
The Man With The Plan is a new film about William Beveridge, written and directed by Christine Edzard and starring Simon Callow. Contact: ostockman@sandsfilms.co.uk
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00It's a remarkable chap. He actually founded the East Brighton Food Cult and managed to get...
00:07When I say he founded the East Brighton Food Cult, what he did was he squatted a kitchen.
00:12Right? He squatted a kitchen during COVID, rounded up a whole load of volunteers,
00:18who every day broke the law by squatting a kitchen to go and feed people during lockdown.
00:24That is remarkable. That is remarkable.
00:27Please welcome up Brian Coyne.
00:31Welcome him up here.
00:37Thank you, Mark.
00:44Wow, I'm just so honoured to be here today with so many wonderful people.
00:50So, back to what I'm here for, East Brighton Food Co-op.
00:54Now, we started a meal service during COVID for everyone.
00:57But it's now specialised in elderly people.
01:01We've discovered that 90% of meals and meals services since austerity 2010 have disappeared in this country.
01:08Yeah, unbelievable.
01:11We've literally got elderly people dying of malnutrition behind closed doors.
01:15And nobody seems too bothered about it, to be honest with you.
01:18Which is a great shame, but...
01:20Let me help.
01:22Sorry, sorry, I've got everything.
01:23Let me get this.
01:24I think my voice is loud enough, Mark.
01:27Without doubt, but I think...
01:28There we go.
01:29Good, thank you.
01:30Yeah, so basically, we've got a situation in this country now where we are spending £22 billion a year treating malnutrition.
01:41Now, £22 billion...
01:43And you know what?
01:43There's not a cure for cancer, but there is a cure for malnutrition.
01:47It's called giving someone a nutritious meal.
01:49It really is that simple.
01:50And so, yeah, so we've found a cure for malnutrition.
01:57So what we've got, we've got a situation in this country where we've got...
02:03Today, as I speak, in England, there's 12,500 beds being occupied by people well enough to be discharged.
02:11And they're not being discharged because there's not a care package in the community for them.
02:15A lot of these care packages involve food.
02:17But there's 12,500 in England.
02:20In my local hospital alone, there's 332 beds being blocked a day just in my local hospital.
02:26Now, because of that, 20%, a lot of consultants can't even carry out appointments because the beds are blocked
02:31and they can't get the people through the hospital doors, etc, etc, etc.
02:35But if we sorted out getting people out of hospital, we could have 12,500 people being cheated every day.
02:44Yeah.
02:4522 billion.
02:46Now, the thing is, 22 billion today, in 2010, it was 19 billion annually.
02:55So there's nobody taking responsibility for wasting 22 billion a year.
02:59So we're bringing out a report.
03:01Hopefully we can get a minister with a government cabinet portfolio who will take responsibility for saving this.
03:07But to give you an example of a story, we've got a gentleman who's stuck in the hospital because he needs to eat soup.
03:13He's got cancer, he can't swallow.
03:15Now, he wrote me an email saying, if I sign up for your meal service, will you get me out of hospital?
03:20Because he couldn't get out of hospital because the care company that does the care package would not provide him soup.
03:26So I've said to care staff as parliamentary private secretary, if you tweak the care law where anyone with a care plan must involve food if they're suffering from malnutrition, that would save the crisis overnight.
03:39And this gentleman was stuck in hospital for three weeks because he didn't have a bowl of soup.
03:47Three weeks.
03:49Now, that is a minimum of £500 a day.
03:52Now, malnourished patients are four times more likely to need medical help.
03:58And it takes three times longer to get them out of hospital.
04:01So the average malnourished patient will spend three days extra in hospital.
04:05And, funny enough, three days in hospital cost the same amount as community meals and wills delivered for a whole year.
04:13So that's someone getting a hot, nutritious meal every day, getting the social interaction with people.
04:20You know, so it's combating social isolation.
04:22So we, as a country, have been wasting £22 billion a year for 15 years and nobody wants to take responsibility.
04:29It's absolutely incredible.
04:31But, on another note, we're working with our local hospital.
04:35It's the Royal Sussex County Hospital.
04:37And we've been working with hospital discharge now since last July.
04:41And we've actually had, is it 77 patients from the hospital discharge alone?
04:46They normally get discharged on a Friday.
04:49Now, they would actually be in hospital for an extra three days just without coming out to have something to eat.
04:54So one simple little thing alone is only a small thing.
04:57But those 77 patients, if you had a three-day stay, it saved our local hospital £110,000 in eight months.
05:04Just by giving them a meal.
05:06You put those figures across the country, we're talking billions, billions, billions.
05:11So we're making a report.
05:14It's called Malnutrition, the hidden problem.
05:19The malnutrition in the UK is the hidden problem.
05:24And so we're going to launch a report on St. George's Day after Easter.
05:27And it's going to be all about how malnutrition is costing us £22 billion a year.
05:32Little old ladies are stuck in the hospital.
05:34They can't get out.
05:35But, you know, and it's all about, so that's the campaign we're going.
05:39And the reason why we're doing this campaign is because nobody else is.
05:42You know, it's absolutely incredible.
05:44It's like, who's going to take responsibility for £22 billion?
05:47I met West Street in two years ago.
05:49I said, I could save you £20 billion a year, mate.
05:52I gave him the cards.
05:53I went, there you go, mate.
05:54We'll do it.
05:55He still ain't got back to me, but, but, this is a big buck.
06:02Keir Starmer's parliamentary private secretary is our local MP.
06:06So he's waiting for the report.
06:08So we're going to give Keir, I know, I mean, well, you know what?
06:12I'm still giving him the benefit of doubt because I'm hoping he's going to help me out
06:15with your own rules and wills.
06:16But, well, yes, I won't say any more about that.
06:21Yes, I live in hope, as Dr Marmot says.
06:23But, basically, yeah, so, basically, we've got, we do mills and wills.
06:29When we started mills and wills, I thought it would be about 10 local people.
06:33Within three days, it went to 50 people.
06:36The second week, it was up to 100 people.
06:38Come the third week, we're doing 300 people a day due to the lack of resources and demand.
06:44Now, we were trying to make mills and wills statutory a couple of years ago.
06:47We realised we ain't got no chance of that.
06:49But what we want is mills and wills to be prescribed to any patient suffering from malnutrition
06:55who doesn't have a local support network to look after them when they get released from a hospital.
07:00I mean, that would be a start.
07:02That would be a start.
07:04And, you know, we all know about Donald Trump and Ola Musk.
07:08They've taken a chainsaw to the government.
07:10They cut all these budgets.
07:12They were cutting the funding.
07:13And they went, oh, what about mills and wills?
07:15And this is just before Keir Starmer went to visit Trump.
07:19And I discovered they went, oh, mills and wills are safe.
07:22They've got a national association of voluntary care providers.
07:26In America, the most capitalist country in the world,
07:28the federal government pays a third of their expenses to mills and wills.
07:32Our government pays nothing.
07:35And then you've got Donald Trump, like, banging the job for mills and wills.
07:38And we realise how far we are behind the curve on this one, mate.
07:42It's absolutely shocking.
07:43But, yeah, I mean, we haven't discovered anything like Justin.
07:46We've just discovered that if someone's got more nutrition,
07:49it might help to give them something to eat.
07:51It really is that simple.
07:52But thank you.