Health and Social Care Secretary's speech on men's health
Wes Streeting spoke at the launch of the Centre for Policy Research for Men and Boys (CPRMB).
It is a genuine pleasure to be here alongside so many friends - people I don’t yet know, but people we want to work with.
It’s great to have such a wide range of people and organisations represented around the room, who are creating spaces for men to fight loneliness.
Encouraging open conversations about masculinity and providing positive role models for boys across our country.
I want to thank you, Richard, for picking up this agenda and helping to force it into the mainstream.
Society has been slow to wake up to the fact that a lot of men and boys are really struggling today, and you’re playing a big role in correcting that.
And, as you alluded to in your remarks, making sure that this is a mainstream agenda and not one that is surrendered to the margins and the extremes.
So, I’m looking forward to working with you and your institute as we begin to develop solutions to the inequalities and injustices that men and boys face in our country today.
The truth is it can be quite tough to be a young man in today’s society.
Lots of boys, particularly those from working class backgrounds like mine, are falling behind at school and are worried about their futures.
The proliferation of toxic influences and content on social media is leading a lot of boys astray.
A lot of content on social media that provided a real challenge for girls in terms of positive body image and what it meant to be a perfect girl or a woman in our society - those challenges are now applying to men and boys in similar if sometimes different ways.
And all of this is contributing to a crisis in masculinity.
Since taking on the health and social care brief in opposition 3 and a half years ago, I’ve been very outspoken about the fact that it takes 7 and a half years for women to receive a diagnosis for a common condition like endometriosis, or that a universal experience like menopause is still treated as if it’s a rare condition affecting alien species.
And I feel just as enraged about the inequalities in men’s health, frankly.
Men are living 4 years less than women.
The gap widens if you just look at working class communities.
Men are disproportionately affected by cancer, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.
The tragedy is that many of these conditions are treatable and even preventable.
Black men are twice as likely to die from prostate cancer as White men.
And suicide is the number one killer of men under the age of 50, which was a fact so shocking that I nearly fell off my chair when I first heard it and actually asked for the statistic to be checked. And the fact that it’s now more commonly cited should not make the fact itself less shocking or outrageous.
Nothing frustrates me more than when men’s health and women’s health are pitted in opposition to each other, as if by focusing on the men’s health strategy, we are in any way detracting from the work we’re doing on women’s health.
This is not an either or.
It very much has to be hand in hand, and we will address both.
And it also does a disservice to lots of women in our society, as if somehow women don’t care about their fathers and grandfathers, their brothers, their sons, their nephews any less than we care about our mothers or grandmothers, our sisters.
It’s really serious.
So I actually think that we are all in this together, and we will succeed as a society if we’re working together to tackle the injustices and inequalities that affect men and women.
There’s a common problem across the NHS that women’s voices are not heard, and women are not listened to.
When it comes to men, I think the problem is often we’re more reluctant to speak up in the first place.
One in 3 men have never had a conversation with a brother, father or grandfather about their health.
The same number would prefer to suffer in silence than go to the doctor about their mental health.
So, I think we’ve got to teach men from a young age that it’s okay to feel, to hurt and to ask for help.
Doing so doesn’t make you any less of a man.
And I think that making sure this generation of young men and boys are aware of that fact is how we make them less likely to channel their emotions into anger, aggression or depression.
This is all why we’re doing the first ever men’s health strategy.
I announced this last year at the Emirates Stadium to coincide with Movember, alongside a large number of men’s groups and organisations, charities and men’s health ambassadors.
It was a great event, but one of the things that came out of it on the day and since has never ceased to amaze me. And that is just how many people said, “thank you”.
That’s not just because as a politician, it’s rare for someone to say thank you.
I mean, to be fair, we’ve got to give people something to be grateful about.
But, actually, I was saying to people, look, you can thank us when we’ve done something.
All I’ve done is say we’re going to have a strategy.
We hadn’t even launched the call for evidence at that point.
When we’ve done something, when we’ve had an impact and we’ve started to change those statistics and change things about their lives and futures.
But actually the pushback I got was, no, actually, we’re genuinely grateful because we’ve been fighting for this for so many years and haven’t had a hearing, let alone someone being prepared to launch a call for evidence that will lead to a strategy.
And that tells us something about the extent to which men’s health has been overlooked, and particularly men’s mental health.
So we launched our call for evidence for the men’s health strategy in April, and I was about to say, I want to ask everyone who hasn’t responded yet to do so and spread the word further.
But actually, we have been really overwhelmed and really struck by just how positive and engaged such a large number of organisations have been.
But nonetheless, we want to make sure we engage as many men, as many organisations and as many different types of men and different parts of the country from different communities as we have.
Which is right.
We have to look at the data and we will take an evidence-based approach.
But as we know, statistics paint a picture to an extent, but what we also need to do is understand the story that we want to tell.
We’re talking about the experience of men and boys today and how we’re going to make it so much better, so we could do with more insight as well as data, especially from those grassroots organisations in this room and beyond, in a range of communities across the country, whether on physical health or mental health, whether we’re talking about White men or Black men, whether we’re talking about class inequality as well, which is at the heart of a lot of mental health. Any serious attempt to address mental health must confront these inequalities head on.
So, we’ve got our work cut out for us. Doing is a lot more important than talking.
We’ve done the easy bit, in my view.
We’ve committed to having a strategy to making a difference and making sure that we’re proud of the impact.
But in order to be successful, this isn’t just a challenge that government can address.
This is about government playing its part, but working in partnership with civil society, with businesses, with all of us as citizens to try and tackle what are a wide range of challenges and problems facing men and boys.
And that’s why this gathering is really important to me, the department and the government, because we need to do this with you rather than to you. And with this level of enthusiasm, this level of energy, we genuinely think we can do something impactful that we’ll be able to look back on for the rest of our lives with pride, knowing that we were prepared to confront the problems and the challenges head on, and make sure that boys growing up in this country today, whoever they are, whatever their background, can achieve their fullest potential and look forward to a life well lived, rather than experience the deep anxiety and despair far too many boys in our country are experiencing today.
So thank you very much in advance.