Health and Care Services

Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Phillip Lee

Wednesday 3rd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lee]

My hon. Friend is right: in a rural location the distances become further. I do not know the particular situation in his region, but I would suggest that there are probably location issues with regard to existing hospitals.

Moving neatly on, that is why—yes, you heard it here first: a Conservative calling for a Soviet-style central plan—I have called for a national plan for acute and emergency care. By definition, we cannot have a market interfering in that; we need to look at it in the round and say, “Where would we put these hospitals? Where are the motorways? What is the population density? Where is the rural location? Where is the urban location?” The problem is that if we reconfigure in isolation—I have seen this locally—it has a knock-on effect on other hospital services which then say, “Where are we getting our patients from?”

We should have a national plan that everyone from both parties has bought into. We should have—dare I say it?—a cross-party party committee looking into this. We should take it out of the political exchanges that we all engage in. We know what is going to happen in certain quarters in 2015—it will become a political football. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister is very aware of this. That is dreadful when we are talking about saving lives. Let us try to take this out of party politics. We can have robust exchanges, on principle, about payment, about how services are commissioned or not commissioned, and about whether there should be top-down reorganisation, but the fundamental question of where hospitals—acute and community hospitals—are located should be decided nationally; otherwise we could have perverse decisions whereby some services wither on the vine and we end up with gaps in emergency and acute care across the country. I make a plea for some cross-party activity on this.

Let us put the national health service’s budget into context. This country has debts and liabilities in excess of five times the size of our economy, and the situation is getting worse. Almost 40% of spending is on health and welfare, and it is growing. We know that that will happen; we have heard it this afternoon. Let us be realistic: there is only so much we can afford. I genuinely want a service that is based on clinical need. I genuinely want somebody to arrive at the appropriate location and get the very best care available. I fear that if we continue along this path of denial as regards how the service is paid for and, more important, structured, we will end up with more and more scandals. There are more in the pipeline. The chief executive of Tameside hospital has just resigned.

The public out there want more from us. They want us to make some difficult decisions, for sure, but using evidence, not party politics. I make that plea to everybody. If we can do that, we can structure a service that becomes the envy of the world; it is not that at the moment. However long I end up staying in this House, if that is achieved in the time I have been here, I will retire a happy man.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Before I call the Front Benchers, may I remind Members that if they are going to bring mobile phones into the Chamber they must be on silent and that they should not wait for them to ring? This is not the first time I have said that, but I certainly want it to be the last. Has the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) taken that on board? Excellent.