Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford and Kate Green

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Will the Minister advise GP practices in my constituency, who have been massively inconvenienced by the chaos of the Capita contract, that full compensation will be available for the inconvenience they have been put through?

[Nicola Blackwood]

At the moment, NHS England and Capita are focusing very hard on improving service delivery, which I think must be the top priority, but we are also looking into exactly what inconvenience and costs GPs have suffered, along with dentists and optometrists, and that will be considered and discussed with GPs.

Capita Contract (Coventry)

Debate between Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford and Kate Green

Tuesday 8th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nicola Blackwood]

The hon. Gentleman’s point about scrutinising whether Capita was competent as part of the tendering process is purely common sense and obviously that should have been done as part of the process. If he will allow me, I will come to the other points in the course of my speech. I would like to concentrate on how we resolve the problem that we find. We need to make sure that GPs and their patients receive the service to which they are entitled.

We want to restore acceptable services, and the contract contains sufficient financial incentives to ensure that Capita shares that goal, which is an important part of the contract and process. Let us be clear that the problems encountered with medical record transfers and overdue payments are entirely unacceptable. The Department shares that view. Both Capita and NHS England are co-operating fully with the Information Commissioner’s Office to address the implications for information governance, and I accept the need for urgent action to address the impact that this is having on patients and practitioners. That is why I have been holding regular meetings with Capita’s chief executive for integrated services, Joe Hemming, its new managing director for primary care support, Simon England, and NHS England’s national director for transformation and corporate operations, Karen Wheeler, and I will continue to hold such meetings.

Both NHS England and Capita openly acknowledge that the service has not so far been good enough. NHS England has demanded and received rectification plans from Capita for the six most affected service lines and has embedded a team of seven experts within Capita to support it as it resolves these issues.

As the hon. Member for Coventry North West said, it is also about having the right resources in the right place at the right time. Capita has informed me that it is adding around 500 more full-time equivalent staff to the service, at its cost, and that it is improving the training provided to ensure that new staff understand the importance of the service to both patients and practitioners.

I know that these problems have caused great inconvenience and distress, but with reference to risk—the hon. Member for Bristol South raised this point—NHS England has assured me that it is not aware of any direct cases of patient harm that can be attributed to service issues. However, NHS England is working closely with regional and local medical directors, so that we can be assured of patient safety. In particular, Dr Raj Patel, medical director of NHS England Greater Manchester, has joined the embedded team to ensure that clinical risks and concerns are appropriately addressed.

The priority now is to deal with any backlogs, particularly with medical record requests, and to ensure that services are stabilised with the capacity to deal properly with new requests. There has been progress on that, which is encouraging. The backlog of medical record requests has reduced from 17,262 to 3,465 in the past two weeks. Capita assures me that it has an effective triage system in operation for new requests and is confident that the situation will not recur. However, I will be monitoring the situation closely.

[Kate Green]

On the point about reducing the backlog, which is something the Bodmin Road practice in my constituency has raised with me, it is not just Capita that needs to put in extra resources; the GP practice is now receiving an onslaught of incoming records, but it does not have the personnel to manage them.

UN Women

Debate between Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford and Kate Green

Thursday 10th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green]

I am sure my right hon. Friend would not wish to suggest that there is a continuum of exploitation and a point on that continuum at which women—or, indeed, men—ought to be satisfied to find themselves located. He raises an important issue about the relative roles women perform in paid work and the domestic sphere.

The economic justice questions that we are discussing are not just challenges for developing economies; they are a challenge for us here in the UK too. As we know, here in the UK women struggle to balance caring responsibilities with paid employment. The majority of child care is still undertaken by women, and although many men fulfil caring roles, it is women who are most likely to drop out of paid employment when they start to have caring responsibilities. Many male carers perform their caring responsibility alongside paid work however, and as a result do not suffer the same degree of economic disadvantage.

In recent years, the debate about the appropriate balance and recognition we should give to paid work, domestic responsibilities and caring responsibilities has become distorted, and we need to revisit that. That is not in order to trap women back in the domestic sphere, but to open up a debate about the value we should give to the caring role, and to make sure our societal structures properly recognise that role and offer both women and men a genuine choice about participating in paid work and wanting, and needing, to take time to fulfil domestic responsibilities. That is not an argument that, when I was as a young feminist in the 1980s, I would have believed I would have heard myself making. However, as I have watched that choice for women squeezed out by successive male-led Governments of both the left and the right, I have to say that a gender issue is a choice issue, and choice and economic independence go hand in hand.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that carers play a central and vital role in our society and that without their playing that role our social care system in this country would entirely collapse?

[Kate Green]

I certainly do and, together with the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys), I am very proud to be a parliamentary ambassador for carers week this year. I hope that we will have the opportunity to highlight exactly the sort of contribution that carers make and to which the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) refers.

I wish to take a moment to talk specifically about the position of lone parents, which was the subject of hot political debate 10 or 15 years ago. It has rather dropped off the political radar but, regrettably, that is not because their battle is entirely won. It is still the case that more than 90% of lone parents are women—lone mothers—but it is very important to recognise that very few women have set out to bring up their children alone. None the less, one in four children in this country will spend some time in a lone parent family, and those children and families face an exceptionally high risk of poverty. Of course it is right that we should do all we can to sustain sustainable relationships, but it is not the mark of a civilised society that we allow those who are growing up in households where relationships have ended to find that they do so in poverty.