Healthier Together Programme (Greater Manchester)

Debate between Jonathan Reynolds and Graham Stringer

Tuesday 22nd July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) for securing the debate. It is particularly useful that we can express our views before the summer recess. I do not want to speak for too long. I will echo my colleagues’ sentiments about the quality of the consultation process, but I want to give a view from the eastern part of the conurbation, Tameside, and make a couple of additional observations.

A lot is going on with the NHS and health care in Greater Manchester at the moment, so the timing is not very conducive to running such a consultation. The changes to Trafford A and E have already been mentioned. Passenger transport has been privatised from the NHS ambulance service to Arriva. Most of the walk-in centres that I am aware of have gone. I do not know about the situation in other constituencies, but in mine GP access is a huge issue—people regularly wait a fortnight for access to a GP in Stalybridge. Of course, in Tameside there are particular challenges because of the Keogh review in Tameside hospital. All the Tameside MPs warmly welcome that. It has been a positive process enabling a light to be shone on many of the things that we have been discussing for several years. However, when all the factors I have mentioned are added together, it is a difficult time to carry out a consultation on any part of the NHS and particularly on hospitals, because the public are most sensitive about them in many ways.

I understand the need for specialisation. I echo the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green). Even if we had substantially greater resources, it would be difficult to recruit the people we would need to meet the standards now required for hospitals in the conurbation. With the financial modelling that has been done in Tameside, we are perhaps a little more advanced in our forward projection work than some other boroughs, and I think that we are in a perfect storm. We have had to spend a lot of money at the hospital to try to meet the higher standards that people should expect by correcting some of the processes that the Keogh review highlighted as wrong. On top of that, the council was always one of the leanest in the country, let alone in Greater Manchester, so it suffered the worst from the severe reductions made by the coalition in northern local authorities. Our clinical commissioning group is in a relatively good position, but clearly it is not to anyone’s benefit simply to use that financial picture to prop up other parts of the system that are not working so well.

History will be hard on the coalition for prioritising such a big ideological reorganisation at a time when the figures show that the situation I have described is the challenge that incoming Health Ministers should have concentrated on. The promise that no A and E departments in our hospitals will close is welcome news, but I wonder whether the scale of the rhetoric around Healthier Together justifies or validates that promise. Either we shall not produce the results that have been promised, or that promise on the long-term future of hospitals and A and Es may not be honoured in the way we expect.

[Graham Stringer]

My hon. Friend is right to say that that commitment was given when we met the Healthier Together people and in some background documents. Does he agree that it is worrying that it is not in the consultation document, whatever credibility we give to the commitment itself?

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I do agree. That is a matter of extreme concern to me. My understanding is that we have been given a cast-iron pledge that there will be no hospital or A and E closures as part of Healthier Together. The problem with all hospital reconfigurations anywhere—it happened with the maternity services consultation—is that they always appear to people to be about cuts. It is hard to get across the argument that they are about improving services. There is some mixed messaging about the primary outcome of such a process.

My principal problem with specialisation is the one that arises with specialisation in any field. Greater Manchester’s geography makes it hard to get from one borough to another. Public transport and the railway system are not configured to operate in that way. I should love the opposite to be true—if we had the resources and local autonomy to make public transport work differently. That will come one day, I think, but it is not true at the minute. I did not by any measure expect to become an MP in the 2010 general election, and my daughter was booked in to be born at St. Mary’s, because I worked in the centre of the city and it was easier to have appointments there than to get back to Tameside for them. Frankly, we were concerned about the possibility of labour starting in Tameside at the wrong time, because of the journey to get to St Mary’s and what that might mean. I think that that would be the same for many people, whatever the health issue: the journey is not easy in a car, but by public transport it is almost untenable. That would be people’s primary concern when they thought about the outcome of such a consultation