Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Selous and Andrew Murrison(8 months ago)
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Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
The Minister for Defence People and Families (Dr Andrew Murrison)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend and, as ever, pay tribute to him for the work he has done in this area. It is the case that when people move around the country, they are disadvantaged. We recognise that, which is why integrated care boards are now running a pilot scheme on how we can get around people losing their places on waiting lists when they travel around the country. Obviously, the issue involves other Government Departments too. Nevertheless, we have a responsibility, which we discharge in a number of ways. For example, HeadFIT is being adapted and adopted at the moment to ensure that our veterans and service families are able to access much of its content.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Selous and Andrew Murrison(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
Dr Murrison
My hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not know off the top of my head what those recommendations relate to. I can say to him that Defence is very fortunate in having him and his colleagues as co-authors of the report on the armed forces family strategy steering group, acting as critical friends and holding Defence to account against the strategy action plan. I would be more than happy to meet him to go through those recommendations one by one.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Selous and Andrew Murrison(2 years ago)
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Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Dr Andrew Murrison)
May I first pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his excellent, comprehensive report? Families are an integral part of the armed forces community, and our evolving assistance to them includes funding wraparound childcare, supporting children’s education and the employment of partners as societal expectations evolve and change. The armed forces families strategy, published in January, sets out the Government’s response to “Living in our Shoes” and sets the framework for the delivery of more sympathetic policies in relation to armed forces families that are fit for the future.
Andrew Selous
Will the Government make public each of the six monthly service family steering group meetings and the progress that has been made on each of the 106 accepted recommendations, and ensure that we have parity of esteem in the way that we look after both veterans and service families—a wonderful group of people on whom the defence of the nation depends?
Dr Murrison
I am very sympathetic to my hon. Friend. We owe so much to our families and he highlights that very well in his report. Of course we meet service families all the time and I am more than happy to meet him at any time to update him on what we intend to do as a result of his report and indeed the veterans strategy, published earlier this year, which covered many service families and members of the service community.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Selous and Andrew Murrison(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Dr Murrison
I thank the hon. Gentleman for the question, but I am certainly not going to speculate on the matter he raises. Apropos the Foreign Secretary’s remarks a few moments ago, we are America’s closest friend and ally, but that does not prevent us from criticising it from time to time; that is what being friends is all about. [Interruption.] The shadow Foreign Secretary is chuntering from a sedentary position, but I gently point out that on 26 March officials in our embassy in Washington raised concerns directly with US counterparts regarding the United States’s decision to recognise the Golan Heights as part of the state of Israel, which is unacceptable.
Andrew Selous
A perception that the west applies the rule of law partially undermines our ability to broker peace, so what steps are the Government taking to ensure that the international rule of law is applied equally to the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements and to terrorist elements within Palestine?
Dr Murrison
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. He is right that we need to be fair and equitable, and nowhere more so than in the middle east. I point to the postponed demolition of Khan al-Ahmar in area C of the west bank as an example of a positive intervention. We urge Israel to convert that postponement into something permanent. Although we are clearly friends with Israel, and indeed equally, I hope, with the Palestinians, that enables us from time to time to give a word to the wise, and that is what we will continue to do on both sides.
Health and Social Care
Debate between Andrew Selous and Andrew Murrison(7 years, 8 months ago)
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Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee, the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts).
Notwithstanding the issues that have already been brought to the House’s attention, it is worth putting on the record the increase in the money—the extra £10 billion by 2020—that the Government are committing, with the 11,400 more doctors and 11,200 more nurses in the system, as well as the near eradication of mixed-sex wards and the huge reduction in hospital infections. I also note that health spending in England is nearly 1% higher than the OECD average.
Dr Murrison
I am sorry to intervene on my hon. Friend so early in his speech. Does he agree with me that the OECD average is probably a specious comparator? It covers countries—such as Mexico and Turkey, and former eastern bloc countries—whose health economies, laudable though they may be, are not ones with which most people in this country would wish ours to be compared.
Andrew Selous
My hon. Friend makes a fair point. I will outline some areas in which I think more spending is necessary.
I want to start by focusing on an individual case—it is not from my constituency—which highlights many of the issues that have been raised so far. It concerns a 98-year-old lady who was admitted to a hospital in one of our major cities on 22 January. Unfortunately, she died in that hospital on 31 January. It was made clear to the hospital on 25 January that the nursing home she had come from—she had been in its residential part—had nursing facilities, and it would have been able to take her back and deal with the deterioration in her health. Despite that, no action was taken to remove her back to the nursing home, which resulted in an extra six days’ stay in hospital.
The relatives who drew this true case to my attention asked me to raise two points. First, they thought it was not really good enough that the hospital concerned did not have a good knowledge of the fact that in addition to the residential facilities, the nursing home had facilities that would have been able to care for the elderly lady and thus free up a hospital bed. Secondly, they were disappointed that because her period in hospital spanned a weekend, they were told by several of the nursing staff that no doctor was available to make a decision about moving her back to the nursing floor of the home she had come from and where she had always wanted to end her days. That story illustrates some of the issues—I know Health Ministers are aware of them—of making sure that there is knowledge of what residential and nursing facilities are available in the community for elderly or frail people who go into hospital, and of making sure that there is weekend cover so that appropriate decisions can be taken and beds are not unnecessarily taken up in hospitals.
A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with a number of social care providers covering both residential and domiciliary care in Bedfordshire, and I asked them what they thought they needed to attract enough people into care provision. As the Chair of the Select Committee has just told us, there is a 27% turnover rate, and I learned that the providers cannot always attract people of the calibre they would like. For domiciliary care, I was told very clearly that the ability to offer a salary—perhaps of £16,000 to £18,000 a year—rather than paying people on an hourly basis when they provide care, would go a very long way to attracting the right sort of people into this profession.
That domiciliary care provider, which is one of the better ones in my area, pays 30p a mile for travel costs. All of us, as Members of Parliament, get paid 45p a mile when we travel in our constituencies. Frankly, I find it an affront that there is a division between rates for travel within the public sector. Social care staff do an incredibly important job and, frankly, it is not right that they are lucky to be offered 30p a mile, when Members of Parliament get 45p a mile. I am not just asking local authorities to put up what they pay to such a level straightaway. We must be realistic, and I fully recognise that that would come with a price tag that would have to be provided through taxation. However, having a salary of £16,000 to £18,000 a year, rather than hourly rates of pay that do not include travel time, and having travel properly paid for—it is currently paid for at a very miserly rate compared with what other people in the public sector get—would go a long way.
One of the issues that has not been highlighted so far in the estimates is the revaluation of the NHS litigation costs. There has been an increase of some £8 billion, which is a fairly large figure. It is worth focusing on that because litigation costs mean a couple of things. First, they mean that patients have not got the right quality of care first time around, and secondly, they mean that money is going out the door of the NHS, often to lawyers, that could be better used doing the job correctly the first time.
In that regard, I make no apologies for again drawing the House’s attention to the Getting it Right First Time initiative, which seeks to embed quality in clinical care across the NHS. I often find that we do not focus sufficiently on that in this House. Variability in the rates of infection and of the revision surgery that is required are significant across the NHS. If we could raise the quality of clinical care to the level of the best across the NHS, we could get the amount for litigation down substantially.
I was pleased to join a meeting that the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), held a couple of weeks ago on the “Manifesto for a healthy and health-creating society”. It was led by Lord Crisp, the former permanent secretary of the Department of Health, with colleagues in the House of Lords and others. Although that may seem a long-term approach to the acute problems we face today—the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee is right to say that we need action now to get the preventive issues right, because not everyone will be around in the longer term—it is incredibly important, none the less, that we take a lot of the ideas in the report seriously to try to reduce the strains on the NHS and to create a healthier population in the years to come.
There are already some very good examples of such ideas. The St Paul’s Way transformation project in Poplar in the east end is doing sterling work. The Well North initiative, which is supported by Public Health England, is focusing on 10 cities in the north of England that have poor health outcomes and bad levels of health inequality. It is all about creating what it calls vibrant and well-connected communities to deal with issues such as debt, jobs, training, missed educational opportunities, poor housing and loneliness. Our late lamented colleague Jo Cox focused on the issue of loneliness, and many of us in the House are determined to carry on her work in that important area. Such long-term preventive work to increase the resilience and health of society is absolutely fundamental to all the issues we are talking about tonight.
On the sustainability and transformation plans, I have spent time with both GPs and hospital staff during the past couple of weeks, and I observed that clinicians in hospitals often point to the work that they thought should have been done but had not been done by GPs, while GPs pointed out that they do quite a lot of work that in the past they would have expected hospitals to undertake. As we move forward with the sustainability and transformation plans, there would be some merit in making sure that those in time turn into accountable care organisations, so that we get a proper join-up between the different parts of the system and such finger pointing between different parts of the health system becomes a thing of the past.
Finally and briefly on the issue of beds, I totally understand the Government’s correct focus on shifting more care to the community, but we have 8,000 fewer beds than we had five years ago, while the occupancy rate has increased from 84% to 87%. At times, operating theatres stand idle because of delayed discharges for care. I should like Ministers to reflect on that.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Andrew Selous and Andrew Murrison(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Dr Murrison
The hon. Lady is absolutely right that a long-term peaceful settlement relies entirely on co-operation between the parties. The Northern Ireland Office has done, and will continue to do, everything in its power to bring the parties together so that we can ensure a peaceful and prosperous future for the people of Northern Ireland.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
2. What recent assessment she has made of the outlook for the Northern Ireland economy.