Income Tax (Charge)
Amanda Martin Excerpts(1 week, 5 days ago)
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Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
I wonder whether the Chief Secretary to the Treasury agrees that those on the depleted Government Benches continue to paint a picture showing that the last 14 years of Tory neglect were not a choice. That is made even more delulu by attacks on the changes that this Government have made to fix the foundations and improve the lives of people in constituencies up and down the country. This shameful attempt to rewrite history would be laughable if it were not so tragic for the people who live in my city.
The Budget is the first step in a different and positive direction. I am proud to say that the Government have seized the opportunity to create real change for my constituents. There are 9,600 minimum wage workers in my constituency, a number proportionally higher than the national average, and many work in our public sector. Increasing the national living wage to £12.21 per hour is a huge win for those low-paid workers, and the increase to £10 for those aged between 18 and 20 gives young people a decent chance to start their independent lives.
More than 12,300 unpaid carers are fighting to provide vital care in my city. Unpaid carers deserve our unwavering support, and I am proud that we are raising the threshold for carer’s allowance, which will provide a vital boost for many families. The review of the carer’s allowance overpayment scandal that we saw under the last Conservative Government is very much overdue, and I am pleased that we are launching it.
Some 63,000 people are waiting to start treatment at Portsmouth’s NHS trust, with almost half waiting more than 18 weeks. The injection of spending into the NHS represents a real-terms growth rate of 4%. The additional funding will support the delivery of extra appointments, reduce waiting times and deliver an 18-week target, which is vital for my constituents. I am looking forward to hosting the first joint NHS public consultation in December with my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), and to feeding our city’s views into the 10-year plan for the NHS. In Portsmouth North, 6,730 people are on universal credit. Our reforms to universal credit will mean the introduction of a fairer debt repayment rate. We are bringing the rate down from 25% to 15%, which will help so many people.
As a teacher, it would be remiss of me not to mention the 43,000 children in my city who are in education. We are bringing in breakfast clubs to ensure that children are set up every day, and removing the VAT exemption and business rates relief for private schools, so that 94% of the kids in our country get money into their schools. We are recruiting teachers and, crucially, supporting 14,000 children with SEND in my city.
Access to Primary Healthcare
Amanda Martin Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Stephen Kinnock
As the Darzi review shows, one of the most egregious examples of the neglect and incompetence of the past 14 years is the underspend on capital. We are clear that a number of premises across the country can be repurposed, and that the bureaucracy needs to be cleared out of its way. As the Prime Minister said earlier this week, we will have a mission about smart regulation and clearing the bureaucratic barriers to change.
We are also cutting red tape so that GPs spend less time pushing paper and more time face-to-face with the patients they serve. We are working to bring back the family doctors and to end the 8 am scramble. We have done more for primary care in the last 14 weeks than that lot did in the last 14 years.
On dentistry, we will introduce supervised tooth brushing for three to five-year-olds in deprived areas, ending the national scandal of tooth decay. And we are rebuilding the bridges that the Conservatives burned with the British Dental Association. I have already met the BDA, and we will deliver a rescue plan that gets NHS dentistry back on its feet, with 700,000 additional urgent appointments, starting as soon as possible, in those parts of our country that need them most.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
Given the shocking state the last Government left us in, is it not good that the grown-ups are now in the building and that we have seen the urgency needed in the NHS, commissioning the Darzi report and investing £82 million, alongside making our commitment to tackle dentistry, use pharmacies and reduce the unnecessary burden?
Stephen Kinnock
I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for getting the strikes sorted within a week of us taking power—what a change that has made. We will reform the dentistry contract to make NHS work more attractive, boost retention and deliver a shift to prevention.
On pharmacies, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) made clear, we will shift the focus of our NHS out of hospital and into the community, empowering more pharmacists to prescribe independently, and freeing up GP appointments for those who need them most. That shift from hospital to community is vital for demand management in the primary and acute sectors.
On the whole, this has been an excellent debate, but I find it absolutely extraordinary that not a single word of humility or contrition was uttered by the official Opposition. Where was the apology for the fact that they spent 14 years bringing our NHS to its knees? Where was the mea culpa for the way in which they spent 14 years scapegoating the workforce, dodging the tough questions and passing the buck? Where was the acknowledgment of the fact that they called the election and ran away from their £22 billion black hole and from the multiple crises in our public services?
While the Conservative party continues to live in a parallel universe, we on the Government Benches are living in the real world. We are honest about the scale of the challenge, and we are up for the fight. While the mountain before us is daunting, we are not daunted. Instead, we are focused on the future, reform and rebuilding, and on shifting from hospital to community, from sickness to prevention, and from analogue to digital. Let us roll up our sleeves and get to work.
Question put (Standing Order No. 31(2)), That the original words stand part of the Question.
NHS Performance: Darzi Investigation
Amanda Martin Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Wes Streeting
Honestly, Madam Deputy Speaker, “brass neck” springs to mind. Once again, the hon. Member gets to her feet and fails to say the word “sorry”. If she wants to correct the record, how about she stands up and corrects the abysmal record that she and her predecessors lumbered this country with? They took the NHS from being the very best—that is how it was left in 2010—to being the very worst; that is how she inherited it. If she wants to talk about humility, she might like to start demonstrating some before her time in Parliament comes to an end.
If the hon. Member wants to distance herself from her former dentistry Minister, let us turn to the candidate seeking to lead her party who is head and shoulders above the rest with its membership, the right hon. Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch). She wants to go even further. On whether the NHS should be free at the point of use, she told The Times last month:
“I think we need to have a serious cross-party, national conversation.”
That is what she said about whether the NHS should be free at the point of use. I suspect that she has blamed the journalist for her own words since, but just so that Government Members are clear, that will happen over my dead body. This Labour Government will always defend our NHS as a public service that is free at the point of use, so that whenever someone falls ill, they never have to worry about the bill.
The problem is not, and has never been, the fair, equitable model of funding. It is the same model that we had in 2010, when the last Labour Government delivered the shortest waiting times and highest patient satisfaction in history. A universal, single-payer health service is the fairest, most equitable way to provide healthcare. More than that, in a way that could never have been predicted in 1948 by Attlee and Bevan, it makes the NHS the best placed healthcare system in the world for the revolution taking place in genomics, technology and life sciences. The NHS has the right funding model, but it is not taking advantage of the opportunities in front of it. That is what we need to change.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
Under the previous Government, poor investment and a lack of respect for NHS workers, particularly in primary care, resulted in Portsmouth North having over 3,000 patients per GP. That has resulted in over 1,800 people waiting more than a month to see a GP. Despite that, Lord Darzi notes that many of the solutions can be found in parts of the NHS in our constituencies. Will the Secretary of State acknowledge the fantastic initiative and hard work of GPs in Portsmouth North, as they work alongside trainee GPs from King’s College London, and look to push that across the country?
Wes Streeting
My hon. Friend is right. In Portsmouth and right across the country, there are people who, against the backdrop of the previous Government, have none the less tried to innovate, do things differently and improve services for patients. Especially given that they sent her to represent them here in Parliament, I am sure they are relieved that they now have a Labour Government on their side.