NHS Workforce Expansion

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Aaron Bell

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to catch your eye a little earlier than I did yesterday evening.

I welcome the speech from the SNP Front Bench. It is good to see Scotland is having its say in this debate. I disagree with a lot of what the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) said, but it is good to see that she is standing up for her Government. At the start of this debate, there were no Welsh Labour MPs in here at all. I see that a couple have popped in now. It is interesting, given what Labour claims it is going to do for the NHS in England, that no Welsh Labour MPs have put in to speak in this debate to defend their record in Wales.

I also note that the hon. Lady, in praising how things work in Scotland, did not refer to the recent report by Audit Scotland that said that the plans to hire GPs in Scotland were not on track, the target for more mental health staff was at risk and the number of operations was still 25% below pre-pandemic levels. It was described as an ever-increasing crisis in the Scottish NHS, with the double whammy of nursing vacancies going up at the same time as staff are leaving, yet the man responsible for the NHS in Scotland, Humza Yousaf, is standing to be the next leader of the SNP. Wikipedia does not inform me as to the hon. Lady’s preference in that election—perhaps she has not endorsed anybody yet—but I find it extraordinary that the man responsible for presiding over the state of the NHS in Scotland is putting himself forward to be the next leader of the SNP. It is an astonishing succession failure from Nicola Sturgeon to have such a weak field vying to be First Minister of Scotland, which is a very important job. But as I say, I respect the fact that the hon. Lady is here standing up for what she believes in and standing up for her Government in Holyrood.

Turning to the motion, as I said in my intervention on the Minister—I congratulate her on her speech—I reject some of the premises of the motion and some of the statistics involved. It is pretty rich to be lectured by the Opposition, given the backlogs they left in 2010 when they had no covid to contend with. There is no mention of covid in the motion. They left a 20,000 backlog in elective surgery that successive Governments got down to 1,000—a 95% fall—before the pandemic. [Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) does not think the pandemic is relevant in the context of backlogs, I don’t know what to tell him. Under the Labour Government there was also a lack of productivity growth in the NHS—it was at less than 1% a year—which we have got back up to 1.7% since 2010. The hon. Gentleman spoke about IT, and I agree with him on that—I used to work in IT—but the Labour Government wasted £12.8 billion on IT for the NHS, which was a complete disaster and exposed as such by the Audit Commission.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

I do not quite understand this backlog the hon. Gentleman is talking about. I remember when it took three years for somebody to get a knee replacement or a hip replacement. Under the Labour Government it took six to eight weeks. Not 68 weeks; six to eight weeks. Across all elective surgery, we put those lists well and truly through the floor. Surely he can acknowledge that.

[Aaron Bell]

When Labour left office, more than 20,000 people were waiting over a year for elective treatment. Before the pandemic—this was not acknowledged properly—the number of people waiting more than 52 weeks for elective treatment had fallen by 95% in England, to just over 1,000. Those are the statistics. The hon. Gentleman can argue with them if he likes, but they are there in black and white.

As I said, it is interesting to see the lack of contrition about the state of the NHS in Wales, which is a complete mess. I will refer to that in detail later, but only yesterday the NHS Board in North Wales was put into special measures for a second time. I accept that there are challenges everywhere—in Scotland, Wales and England. Indeed, if we look at the comparisons across the continent, we can see that these challenges are international in nature, because everybody is recovering from covid, but I believe that this Government are tackling the challenges, and the workforce challenges, head on.