What are the chances of the IT outage setting the NHS back years? - Sarah Todd

The global IT shutdown also caused serious problems for the NHS including GP surgeries because they couldn’t access patients’ records or refer them on for tests and appointments at local hospitals.

Seen as some doctors’ surgeries still seem to be towing a light harrow after the Covid-19 outbreak and appear to have failed to get back to pre-pandemic working hours, they will probably be blaming this blip for poor service well into 2025.

Time and again, especially thinking about late grandmothers who often ended up in hospital, it is rare to witness joint-up thinking when it comes to medical records. Computers were supposed to make administration easier, promising that the click of a button would give healthcare professionals access to medical records wherever they may be. What rubbish.

Repeatedly, relatives in their 90s have been sat in hospital corridors being asked personal questions in front of all and sundry. Questions those asking should know the answers to from their blessed computer system. Do those who sit making a meal of tapping in details rather than actually interacting with patients never actually press save? Or maybe there is another button - share with the wider health service - that they have been on a day off and missed the training for?

Talking of training, there was an excellent opinion piece in the Farmers Weekly by Lancashire dairy farmer Cath Morley.

She said that now new Secretary of State Steve Reed MP has had a couple of weeks to meet his team at the Department for Education, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) he should start his training by “borrowing the general election battle bus and going on tour. Get on to farms and talk to farmers”.

Well said Cath, who continues: “I don’t just mean popping up for a quick photo opportunity, I mean really get out into the country… get your brand-new wellies out of the box and get them mucky. Chat to the farmers whose lives your policies affect. Listen to the people who live the experience every day - we know how this industry works and we understand the complexities of the job.”

She also urges Mr Reed not to “rip up perfectly good policy just for the sake of it” or try to make a statement with headline-grabbing radical decisions that will have serious knock-on effects for those out in the actual fields.

Talking of having little understanding of the way the countryside really works, what on earth is Ed Miliband doing?

Rural and farming communities feel rightly betrayed after the new Energy and Net Zero Secretary pushed through the massive Sunnica Solar Farm development within a whirlwind of something like three days.

His decision on one of the largest solar developments in Britain has caused huge upset to farming and rural communities who feel they are being pushed out of the countryside - with productive farmland being taken out of production – by big corporations. There is an old farming saying about there not being any more land made, which one day will prove to be very true. With all that’s going on in the world food security - meaning the country being able to feed its own people - has never been more vital and with such huge swathes of farmland lost to big business it’s looking unlikely we would be unable to manage without imports.

Suffolk County Council had opposed the construction of the £600m solar farm and battery storage that will span over 900 football pitches by renewable energy company Sunnica, saying it was wrong to take such huge swathes of good quality farmland out of production. What about all the old industrial parks and roofs on existing buildings first?

Meanwhile, over in Italy, the government has issued a new decree to completely ban solar from agricultural land.

The country’s Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida says changing the intended use of farmland isn’t on, instead pointing energy companies towards quarries, mines, land belonging to railways and airports, along with spare space alongside motorways and industrial plants. What a sensible sounding chap. Maybe he’s had a word with dairy farmer Cath Morley …?