NHS Long-term Plan
Meg Hillier Excerpts(5 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Speaker
A very large number of right hon. and hon. Members are seeking to catch my eye. The Secretary of State is attending to the questions put to him in his usual courteous fashion, and I think that is respected. However, I gently point out to the House that this is the first of three ministerial statements today and that there is then further substantive business with which we want to make progress, so I gently encourage colleagues to be economical.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
I am heartened that Baroness Harding is looking at the staffing side of things, but she does have a mountain to climb. Let me remind the Secretary of State that the last time the NHS went out to recruit GPs, it ended up with fewer GPs at the end of the year than it had had before. That is not to mention the pension cap put in place by his former mentor—or maybe his current mentor—the former Chancellor, which now means that there is a problem with the retention of senior clinical staff. We can add to that list the immigration rules and pay ceiling. Is the Secretary of State lobbying the Home Office and the Treasury, particularly to deal with the £30,000 cap and the pension cap?
Matt Hancock
I welcome much of the tone of the hon. Lady’s remarks. The truth is that it is critical to ensure that we have the workforce and the people to deliver the plan. There is a whole section of this plan, as well as ongoing work, to deliver that. I want to clear up this point: in the immigration White Paper published by the Home Secretary before Christmas, as now, there is no cap on recruitment numbers for nurses and doctors. The proposal is that the cap will not necessarily apply within a shortage occupation. We will be recruiting people from around the world to work in our NHS.
NHS Shared Business Services
Meg Hillier Excerpts(6 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
I am pleased that the Secretary of State at least acknowledges that this was incompetent but, crucially, does this not run deeper? Problems were first raised in January 2014, and then again internally by an administrator in June 2015. He found out, as Secretary of State for Health, only in March last year, and the Public Accounts Committee found out and was able to look at this only in September, because information was released on the final day that Parliament sat last summer. He talks about transparency, but does he not think there are deeper lessons to be learned here not only about transparency but about how the NHS supports whistleblowers?
Mr Hunt
There are two big lessons that we need to learn. First, why did the company have no internal systems in place to deal with the fact that from 2011 the mail was building up into a backlog? According to the NAO report, the situation was not escalated to the chief executive’s level until the end of 2015. That is wholly unacceptable. Secondly, it is also unacceptable that we did not have the assurance systems in place that would have allowed us to know that a backlog was building up. That is why it is so important that lessons are learned.