NHS Services (Access)

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Wednesday 15th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I want to make some progress.

The letter identifies six areas of major concern, and I shall focus on three of them today. The first is GP services. The letter states:

“A shortage of GPs means that patients are struggling to get an appointment to see their doctor.”

Paul Turner-Mitchell got in touch with me today to say that getting a GP appointment is now like trying to get sought-after concert tickets with the phone stuck on redial. I am sure that a lot of people watching this debate today will know exactly what he means. It is becoming the norm for people to ring the surgery early in the morning only to be told that there is nothing available for days. This year, 13 million people have either waited a week or more for a GP appointment or could not get one at all. That figure has gone up by 2.5 million since 2011.

Why is this happening? It is happening because the GP budget has been repeatedly cut under this Government, because Labour’s 48-hour appointment guarantee has been axed and because the Government—in the words of their own GP taskforce—have presided over a “GP workforce crisis”. The number of GPs per 100,000 population increased from 54 in 1995 to 62 in 2009. However, the figure has now gone back down to 59.5.

At Prime Minister’s questions today, the Prime Minister tried to claim that there were 1,000 more GPs in the NHS than under the last Government. This is simply not true. I wonder what we can do about it, Madam Deputy Speaker. We have a Prime Minister who regularly abuses statistics at that Dispatch Box, and even when he has been found out, as he has on many occasions—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. I am going to request that the right hon. Gentleman rephrases the point he just made about the use of the statistics, as he made an accusation against the Prime Minister and I do not think it is acceptable for him to say that. Will he rephrase it, please?

[Andy Burnham]

I will rephrase it, Madam Deputy Speaker, but we have had rulings from the Office for National Statistics in respect of these things. I shall say that the Prime Minister has misused statistics at that Dispatch Box and there is plentiful evidence that that is the case. Statistics have been misused, and I wish to give this example from today. Figures from the 2009-10 census—this was the final year of the previous Government —show that there were 32,426 GPs then. The most recent figures report 32,201 GPs, which is 226 fewer. So let us get some facts on the record.

The second area highlighted by the letter is accident and emergency, the classic barometer of the whole health and care system. The letter states:

“Major accident and emergency departments in England have failed to meet their waiting times targets for an entire year.”

An entire year! What have Ministers been doing? In fact, it is longer than a year, as the target has been missed for 63 weeks running. We must remember that we are talking about this Government’s own, lowered A and E target. Before the Secretary of State says that that is not the figure for the whole NHS because it excludes minor injury units and walk-in centres, I can tell the House that the NHS as a whole has missed the A and E waiting time target for five out of the past six weeks. Almost 95,000 people waited longer than four hours in A and E in September 2014, which compares with 70,000 in September 2013. So there has been a dramatic deterioration. A and E performance over the past six weeks has been worse than it was last winter. Loud alarm bells should be ringing in the Department about this coming winter, but instead of having a plan it seems that Ministers have given up on ever meeting their own target again. The annual winter A and E crisis is now a permanent spring, summer and autumn crisis, too.