Contaminated Blood

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

That was the direct content of the Stanford letter. There was a worry that the NHS was using such products in a completely different context, not understanding the difference between the two systems. That was the Stanford letter.

I am not standing here claiming to be an expert on all the papers, because I am not; I am saying what I know, from the people I have spoken to, to be wrong, and linking that to the documents in order to say what I believe to be the case. I may not be right, but we need to find out whether I am right, and that is the point that I will be putting to the Government.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

I was not going to intervene, but the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) made the point that generous treatment is needed. The victims of this NHS scandal are not receiving generous treatment. I have a constituent who was infected during the scandal as a child at the Royal Manchester children’s hospital. When he discovered that his cirrhosis, if it remained untreated, meant that he ran a 25% chance of developing liver cancer, he was told that he would be denied treatment by the NHS. The treatment he needed to clear the virus load from his system cost £100,000, and at that point he decided to use the ex gratia payment that he had been given—such a payment is supposed to be some compensation, although it is not enough—to try to do so. That is the situation that victims such as my constituent are in at the moment, and it is a disgrace: they should not be fighting this and having to use their own money for their own treatment.

[Andy Burnham]

It is a total disgrace. Absolutely there must be full, fair compensation now. I say to the Government, do not delay; do what Ireland and other countries have done. They should do that now. They raised expectations and they should do it. We would all support it.

Mrs Bullock, whom I mentioned, is reduced to sending begging letters. She has had to sell the family home and move away from everything. She is sending begging letters to the Skipton Fund for a stair-lift. She is not well herself now. How can that be right? We are making a woman who has lost everything send begging letters for a stair-lift, as she tries to cope on her own because her husband is no longer there. On the point about medical treatment, I understand that Mr Bullock may have been refused a liver transplant because his notes said that he was an alcoholic. There is injustice upon injustice here. It is absolutely scandalous. I hope the House now understands why, as I said at the beginning, I could not live with myself if I left this place without telling it directly what I know to be true.

[Andy Burnham]

Absolutely; I could not agree more. It is downright immoral to make these people carry on begging in the way they have been forced to do. The Government raised their hopes; they should deliver on the former Prime Minister’s promise and do what my right hon. Friend has just described.

The story is becoming clear, is it not? Warnings from the United States were ignored. There was a wish to drive on with these new products from the Oxford haemophilia centre: “We’ll just push them out there to find out the results before we really know whether there is infectivity.” Problems started to happen and perhaps there was the idea, “Oh no, the Government might be exposed to litigation. Let’s not have it in people’s notes so that a story does not build about how there has been negligence and people might have a compensation claim.” That is the story I have got; I do not know what anybody else thinks. Worse, for some people, they said, “Don’t just destroy their notes; falsify their notes.” That is the story. We need to find out whether it is true or not. In my view, these are criminal acts. They did not just happen by chance. A major injustice has happened here.

In making this speech tonight, I think of our late, great friend Paul Goggins, who I miss every single day. He did so much to advance the cause of justice for those who suffered. I also think of his constituents, Fred and Eleanor Bates, and of the promises I made to act for them in Paul’s name. In a 2013 debate like this one just before he died, Paul made an impassioned call for:

“A serious Government-backed inquiry…with access to all the remaining records and the power finally to get to the truth of what happened and why.”—[Official Report, 29 October 2013; Vol. 569, c. 201WH.]

His demand was as undeniable then as it is now, yet it pains me that, in the four years since then, this House has not moved it forward at all. If that continues to be the case after what I have said tonight, I am afraid that this Parliament will be complicit in the cover-up.

In reply to the demand of my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North for an inquiry in a letter she wrote in October 2016, the Prime Minister said:

“the relevant documents have been published on the Department of Health and the National Archives websites and it is unlikely that a public inquiry would provide further information.”

In my view, that is a highly debatable statement. I do not think that a Prime Minister who has a good track record in helping to secure justice for those to whom it has been denied should have put her name to such a letter, which was probably drafted by the Department of Health. I remember exactly the same thing being said to me by those who opposed the setting up of the Hillsborough independent panel. “Everything is out there, it’s already known,” is what they always say. If the Prime Minister is confident in her assertion—I say this to the Minister—then rather than just publishing the documents the Government have selected as relevant, why not publish all the Government-held documents so that we can all decide whether her claim is true? On the basis of the evidence I have presented tonight, I believe it would be quite wrong for this House to resist that call.

To be clear, I am not calling for a lengthy public inquiry; I am calling for a Hillsborough-style disclosure process, overseen by an independent panel, which can review all documents held by government, NHS and private bodies. Just as with Hillsborough, the panel process should be able to view documents withheld under secrecy protections and make the necessary connections between documents held locally and nationally. It should then produce a report on the extent to which the disclosure of those documents tells a new story about what has happened.

So tonight I issue a direct challenge not just to the Government but to all parties in this House, including to my own Labour Front Bench and the Scottish National party: do the right thing and put a commitment in your election manifestos to set up this Hillsborough-style inquiry into contaminated blood. That, in my view, would be the most effective way to get as quickly as possible to the full truth and the whole story, as it was, effectively and efficiently, with Hillsborough.

I want to be very clear tonight with the Minister and with the House. If the newly elected Government after the general election fail to set up the process I describe, I will refer my dossier of cases to the police and I will request a criminal investigation into these shameful acts of cover-up against innocent people. I say to the Minister that the choice is hers. People are asking me why I do not just go straight to the police with the evidence I have, and I owe them an explanation. It is my view that the individual crimes I have outlined tonight are part of a more systematic cover-up and can only be understood as a part of that. If we refer them piecemeal to the police, they may struggle to put together the bigger picture of what lies behind the falsified medical records. That, in turn, may delay truth and justice. If the Government will not act, however, I believe a police investigation is the correct next step and that is what I will request. I cannot keep this information in my possession and not do something with it.

As we know, time is not on the victims’ side, so I will set a deadline. If the Government do not set up a Hillsborough-style inquiry by the time the House rises for the summer recess, I will refer my evidence to the police and request that investigation.

[Barbara Keeley]

My right hon. Friend is making an incredibly powerful case in his final speech in this place. The shadow Health team discussed this matter earlier and entirely support his call.

[Andy Burnham]

I am very pleased to hear that. I hope that means a commitment in the election manifesto of the kind I have just called for.

Policing

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend puts it very well. Let us look at what Merseyside has said about what the proposed cuts would do. It has said that they would mean scaling down teams dealing with sexual assault and hate crime. Those are very serious implications. Where is the evidence to justify cutting the police on that scale? I have not seen it. I hope we hear it today, because this House cannot give permission to the Government to proceed with these cuts until they have made the case for what they are trying to do.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

Is my right hon. Friend as surprised as me to hear that there are Members who do not understand that, in certain parts of the country, crime is rising, not falling. Crime in Greater Manchester rose by 14% in the 12 months up to June 2015 compared with the previous 12 months. Recorded violent crime rose by 39% over the same period. Members must take account of the fact that some parts of the country are different. We have guns and gang violence in Salford, and it is a very serious issue.

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend puts her case very well. Crime may indeed be changing, and moving away from volume crime, such as car crime and burglary, but that is not to say that crime is falling. As I have said before, online crime is not adequately reflected in the crime figures. She rightly says that there are worrying increases in the most serious crimes in a number of areas, including in our part of the world, in Greater Manchester.

Health and Social Care

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Tuesday 2nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend anticipates me, because this is precisely the issue I am coming on to. Under the Lansley reorganisation, workforce planning went out of the window, and that led to today’s huge workforce crisis and hospitals being in the grip of private staffing agencies. That is the single biggest driver of the NHS deficit that I mentioned a moment ago, and I will talk about that shortly.

The Secretary of State gave us a pious warning about temperate language, yet this is the Secretary of State who today on the front page of The Daily Telegraph is saying that the NHS has enough cash and now must deliver:

“the time for debating whether or not”

it has enough money is over, it

“now needs to deliver its side of the bargain”.

Not for the first time, that is a statement by the Secretary of State that will have caused jaws to drop across the NHS. People will not forget the time he accused hospitals of coasting when they were in the middle of an A&E crisis, but even by his standards this was a staggering piece of spin.

The simple fact is that the NHS does not have enough money. In fact it is seriously short of money. It is facing a £1 billion deficit this year, with two thirds of hospitals in the red, which marks a major deterioration from what the Conservatives inherited in 2010, when there was a surplus of over £500 million.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

Are not some rather stupid decisions about to be made? Wythenshawe hospital has a £3 million deficit and is talking about cutting 28 district nursing posts. The Secretary of State said earlier that community resources are important. Of course they are, but if we are going to cut district nurses every time there is a trust deficit like the one at Wythenshawe, we are not going to get through another winter without a much more serious A&E crisis.

[Andy Burnham]

That is exactly the point. When we are in a crisis like this, short-term, knee-jerk cuts are made, which make the situation wrong in the long term.

When I raised these deficits in the election campaign, the Secretary of State said I was scaremongering, but just two weeks after the election the truth emerged. [Interruption.] He says I was, but we now know the truth. There was an £822 million deficit in the NHS last year, a sevenfold increase on the previous year. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State says he is dealing with it. That is not good enough. That is appalling mismanagement of the NHS. Financial grip in the NHS has been surrendered on this Secretary of State’s watch, and things are looking even worse this year. Far from scaremongering, these issues are real and should have been debated at the last election. The NHS is now facing a £2 billion deficit this year. As my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) said earlier, that will mean cuts to beds, to staff and to services.

National Health Service

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend describes the problems well. I know the hospital because I have been there with him. He is right that older people are becoming trapped in hospital. The support is not there for them in their own homes, and nursing home places are not available. I will come back to that theme in a moment.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

On exactly that point, the Health Committee looked at the A and E crisis last week and was told by the president of the College of Emergency Medicine that delayed discharges were due to underinvestment in the community, by which he meant social care, GPs and district nurses. Indeed, one third of delayed discharges were down to social care. One third of frail elderly people, or vulnerable people, cannot go home because of the issues with social care, which has been cut by £3.53 billion under this Government.

[Andy Burnham]

We have record numbers of delayed discharges in the NHS right now. The number may even go past the 1 million mark—I am talking about days lost in the past year. That reorganisation that I mentioned a moment ago cost at least £3 billion, probably more. The budget was flat so where did that money come from? As my hon. Friend rightly says, it came from cuts to the general practice budget, cuts to the community services budget, cuts to the mental health budget and cuts to the social care budget. That is why the community has been stripped bare and people are trapped in hospital. This is a mess of the Government’s making.

NHS Services (Access)

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Wednesday 15th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I am interested to see this new friendship that my hon. Friend has struck up with the hon. Member for Clacton (Douglas Carswell) on the Front Bench. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The promise was that there would be no top-down reorganisation. We told the Government that it would be a major mistake to break that promise. They broke that promise and now they are admitting it in private to newspapers. I will come to that point a bit later.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

It is worth saying to my right hon. Friend and to the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) that all of us on the Health Committee were very concerned yesterday when we spoke to people in Staffordshire and Stoke, because they were talking about what seemed to be the privatisation of cancer and end-of-life care services. That seems to be going on much to the consternation of clinicians and radiologists who were not consulted; much to the consternation of NHS staff and of an awful lot of patients and people who live in that area. It is very concerning indeed that we find ourselves in that situation. That could be one of the biggest mistakes that is made in the NHS.

[Andy Burnham]

I am glad that my hon. Friend raised that point, as again it highlights the major difference between us and the Government. They were saying that we brought in private providers. Yes, that is true, but that was to bring down waiting lists for planned operations, such as hip and knee operations. As she has just rightly said, the Government are putting out to tender cancer services. That is a very different thing. The Government are presiding over a major increase in private ambulances providing blue light 999 services. That is a massively different policy from the one they inherited, which is why the points they have made simply do not hold water.

Health

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Monday 9th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I just gave way to somebody from Wales. What is the hon. Gentleman on about?

That is not all. As I said before, the NHS is now missing its standard to ensure that cancer patients start their treatment within 62 days. That will cause huge distress to thousands of families up and down this country.

Another way in which the NHS has got worse, and every patient knows this to be true, is that it is becoming harder and harder to get a GP appointment. It is a common experience for people to ring their surgery early in the morning only to be told that there is nothing available for days. A survey has found that almost half of GPs predict that the average waiting time will exceed two weeks by next year.

The clearest measure of growing problems in the NHS is what has been happening in A and E, which is the barometer of the whole health and care system. Problems or blockages anywhere in the health and care system will manifest, in the end, as pressure in A and E. If A and E is the barometer, what is it telling us? It is warning of severe storms ahead. Hospital A and E units have now missed the Government’s target for 46 weeks running. For the last four weeks, the NHS overall has missed the Government’s target, suggesting that the winter crisis has now been followed by a summer crisis.

Why is that happening? The fact is that cuts have been made to general practice, social care and mental health, which are pushing more and more people towards the acute hospital and placing it under intolerable pressure. Today, many hospitals are operating way beyond safe bed occupancy levels, and not surprisingly this is taking a toll on A and E staff. Today, we reveal that three times as many A and E consultants left the NHS in 2013, raising the worrying prospect of A and E now being trapped in a downward spiral.

[Barbara Keeley]

I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way. May I just take him back to the point about GP access, because that is the start of the patient’s journey? In our survey in Salford, we did not find the situation that we had under the Labour Government, where 80% of patients could get an appointment within 48 hours. Now only half our patients can get an appointment within 48 hours, with one in seven having to wait more than a week, which is concerning, and one in five unable even to get through to speak to someone in their GP surgery. This is concerning us in Salford because these are people who may have worries—they may even have cancer and need tests—and they cannot get through to their GP.

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right—the deterioration in general practice has been marked during the past few years. There have been changes that have disadvantaged patients. Within weeks of taking office, the Government removed the guarantee that patients could have an appointment within 48 hours. That explains the situation that my hon. Friend describes, alongside cuts to funding of general practice to the point that some practices now say they are on the brink of deciding whether or not they can remain open. The Government have responsibility for that situation, but there is not a word from the Secretary of State about it and there is not an acknowledgement that people have severe problems in accessing their GP.

Care Bill [Lords]

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Tuesday 11th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

If the Minister gave councils budgets that enabled them to be more generous, they might have a chance, but drastic cuts mean that they cannot provide care that is worthy of the name. He will know of the fears of organisations that represent disabled adults of working age. The Royal National Institute of Blind People, for instance, fears that the move to retrench eligibility criteria to cover only substantial and critical needs will remove care from people with moderate needs whose support currently enables them to continue to work.

[Barbara Keeley]

I understand that the Minister is to visit Salford tomorrow. Perhaps he would like to talk to Salford city council, whose budget has been cut by £100 million over the last three years, about how it might be more generous. I am glad that my right hon. Friend has mentioned carers and their new rights, but how hollow do those new rights seem to carers in Salford, given that 1,000 people will lose their care packages this year and 400 will not qualify for them? That is a direct result of what the Government have done.

Francis Report

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

Pressure on hospitals, and how we relieve it so that they can care for people properly, is the core of this debate. What we have seen under this Government is an ever-increasing number of frail, elderly people coming into hospital via A and E. The Secretary of State shakes his head, but Francis made specific recommendations on the care of older people in hospital. The point I am making is that under him the number of older people admitted to hospitals as emergency admissions has gone up significantly, and that goes to the heart of the issues raised by the Francis report.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

We have an excellent hospital in Salford—it is one of the best in the country—but we also have 1,000 people who are losing their care packages this year. We have pressure on Salford because Trafford has been downgraded and lost its A and E, and we are short of two A and E consultants—even Salford has a problem recruiting A and E consultants. Those are real concerns for people in Salford despite having one of the best hospitals in the country.

[Andy Burnham]

I hope that the Secretary of State was listening to my hon. Friend. The point I was making—he did not like it—was that there is plentiful evidence that the NHS has gone downhill in the 12 months since the publication of the Francis report. The chaos in A and E has increased, and pressure on mental health services has reached almost intolerable levels.

Trusts face great difficulties in recruiting sufficient A and E doctors—a central issue in the Francis report, as it addresses safe staffing numbers.

Care Bill [Lords]

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Monday 16th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I was about to explain that those charges are increasing quite quickly, but first I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), who has done so much to raise these issues.

[Barbara Keeley]

I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way and I am surprised and disappointed that the Secretary of State would not give way.

My local council, Salford local authority, is one of the many that are reluctantly having to cut their eligibility criteria this year. Salford tried to stick with the moderate level and this is the third year of cuts. The council has lost £100 million over the past three years and it will lose another £75 million before the Bill’s reforms are implemented. That is a 20% cut in adult social care. How can any of the Health Ministers, whose southern local authorities are not affected in the same way, think that our northern councils can afford this?

[Andy Burnham]

Those are the facts. The councils that are still trying to provide support to people with moderate needs are not all, but by and large, Labour councils. They are still trying to do that, but they have lost significantly more per head under this Government than councils elsewhere. The situation is about to get a lot worse, because NHS England will meet tomorrow to consider a major change to the NHS resource allocation formula, which will reduce the weighting given to health inequality and increase the weighting given to age. That will have the effect of taking more money out of Salford and Wigan and giving more money to areas where healthy life expectancy is already the longest. The Government are making it impossible for people who want to do the right thing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Burnham]

I say again, with all respect to the Chair of the Health Committee, that I was proposing a fundamentally different scheme to that in the Bill. I was proposing a universal all-in scheme, and several steps were put forward to get us to that. The right hon. Gentleman knows that because the Conservative party and those on the Government Front Bench put posters up about that scheme before the last election. Does he remember that? [Interruption.] He nods, right—that was my proposal, but it is not the Government’s proposal, which is different. I proposed various steps to get to my scheme. Is it about time the Government started answering for their proposal, rather than for mine?

[Barbara Keeley]

My right hon. Friend is being generous in giving way, and I guess we ought to move on shortly. There is all this harking back to our policies, but I understand—I was here—that steps were taken towards Labour’s national care service, including the Personal Care at Home Act 2010 that would have helped 400,000 people, not the 100,000 who will be helped by this Bill—if, indeed, it ends up being 100,000. Is my right hon. Friend, like everybody else, totally disappointed with the Government’s lack of ambition to help people?

[Andy Burnham]

I completely agree, and it is unfair that older people have not been given a full picture. People need proper information to plan for the future, and they have not been getting that today. People need the facts. Spin is of absolutely no use to them whatsoever, but that is all that is on offer from this Secretary of State. The truth is that in the end, the Bill will not stop catastrophic care costs that run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, or stop people losing their homes. It will not improve services now as it promises only a vague review of the practice of 15-minute visits, and strips the Care Quality Commission of its responsibility to inspect local authority commissioning, which is often responsible for such things.

Managing Risk in the NHS

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

As so often with the spin that we hear from Government Members, it is our achievements they are trying to claim credit for. I left behind the plans for the training of those doctors, but we do not hear much credit coming in this direction, do we? Government Members are happy to take the credit and then they try to cast off all the blame for everything else. My point is that criticism must be fair and made with care. We all have a duty to point out the failings of the NHS, in our own constituencies and nationally, and that is what I did when I did the Secretary of State’s job. However, we have to do that responsibly and fairly, especially for hospitals and those who manage them.

Hospitals are not the architects of all the problems we read about. For example, they are all struggling with the fallout of severe cuts to social care budgets, the appalling cost of which I recently revealed: a 66% increase over two years in the number of over-90s coming into A and E via blue-light ambulances. In human terms, more than 100,000 very frail and frightened people have been speeding through the streets of our communities in the back of ambulances. Hospitals have to absorb that extra pressure and also struggle with longer delays in getting people back home. We are in real danger of asking too much of our hospitals by allowing them to be the last resort for people who would be better supported elsewhere. Without a greater understanding of that situation in the current debate, and if the trend towards the vilification of NHS managers continues, who will take on the job of running our acute trusts? Good people will walk away and no one will want to do the job. Again, the NHS simply cannot afford that.

This crude blame game is an election strategy with two components: run down the NHS; and pin all the failings on the previous Government. The NHS cannot take 20 months of that until May 2015. It has been destabilised and demoralised already; if the Government are not careful, they will push it over the edge.

The Secretary of State needs to change course and find a way of bringing people back together, so the purpose of the debate is to put forward two constructive proposals to manage risk in the NHS—one for now, the other for the long term. First, I turn to the immediate proposal. It is clear that the best way to draw a line under recent events and unify people would be for the House to embrace today the analysis and main recommendations of the Francis report. The motion highlights the three most significant recommendations: benchmarks on safe staffing; a duty of candour on individual NHS staff; and the regulation of health care assistants. If all parties endorsed those proposals, it would send staff a message of support and recognition of the pressure that they are under, while the patients who have suffered poor care would receive the positive message that the parties are working together to prevent that from happening to others.

Given the tragic events that lie behind them, public inquiries should, when possible, produce consensus. It is extraordinary that, having commissioned a three-year public inquiry, the Government have slowly been distancing themselves from the Francis report’s analysis and conclusions ever since its publication. It is hard not to conclude that the report did not deliver what the Government wanted and that they have spent the past five months rewriting it. They have come up with their own recommendations on chief inspectors for hospitals, general practice and social care, yet dragged their feet on the actual recommendations. They have substituted the verdict of Francis on Ministers in the previous Government with that of the kangaroo court of Lynton Crosby. We do not oppose chief inspectors, but if the Government believe that ever-tougher central regulation will bring about the culture change locally that everyone agrees is necessary, they are mistaken. We need change that will have an immediate effect on the ground, and that will support staff and improve care for patients.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend has probably been in the Chamber on most of the occasions when I have raised the question of safe staffing with the Secretary of State. It was cited in the Francis and Keogh reviews, and the Care Quality Commission tells us that one in 10 hospitals has unsafe staffing levels. The Secretary of State dances around the issue again and again, but he will not take action. Yesterday, I asked him to introduce transparency to the process so that hospitals do not have wards with ratios of two staff to 29 patients, but he refused to answer my question. Does my right hon. Friend agree that if hospitals were transparent about their ratios, that would be the way forward, because we would know where we were?

[Andy Burnham]

The Keogh report exposes alarming ratios at my hon. Friend’s hospital and others. We have been warning the Government for months—years, in fact—about cuts to nursing numbers. It is neither right nor fair to criticise nurses for being uncaring when too many of them are unsupported and are working in conditions in which they have to make compromises that they would rather avoid.

Staffing emerged as the main concern arising from the Keogh report, but the problems go way beyond 14 trusts. The CQC says that one in 10 trusts in England does not have adequate staffing levels. Can we agree today that the staffing in all hospitals must urgently be brought back up to adequate levels, as defined by the commission, with clear benchmarks set for the future? [Interruption.] I am pleased if the Secretary of State is agreeing, because that represents progress, so I look forward to finding out how his plan will be delivered.

Accident and Emergency Waiting Times

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

It is important for me to answer the Chairman of the Health Committee. Those of us who are in the club of former Secretaries of State understand that the health and social care systems are interconnected and must be seen as one system, because the failure of social care lands on the doorstep of the NHS.

To answer the right hon. Gentleman’s point directly, the money that I was talking about would come from the underspend. It is part of the allocated budget that his Government gave to the Department of Health for 2012-13. The Department did not spend the whole budget so there was a £2.2 billion underspend. As he knows, the practice has been that Departments can take forward that resource to meet new pressures in later years. I am asking the Secretary of State please to ask for access to that money to relieve the pressure on social care. Simply handing it back to the Treasury when there is an A and E crisis and social care is collapsing is not good enough.

The third point I want to address is out-of-hours advice and the introduction of the 111 service. Last week’s summit heard worrying evidence that the problems of 111 are not just teething problems, as the Secretary of State has claimed. We were told that the problems were more structural and were a result of how 111 has been set up—a feature of the cost-driven contracts that have replaced the successful and trusted NHS Direct. Contracts have gone to the lowest bidder, and they are saving money by having inexperienced call handlers working to a computer algorithm that too often results in the advice “Go to A and E”. There has also been a huge reduction in nurse-led call back, which was the norm with NHS Direct.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend know that we had a useful debate on this subject in Westminster Hall this morning, when I made the point that the dropping back from clinician-led triage has caused a problem that the chief executive of my local hospital told me about—that falling back on computer and non-clinician advice has led to patients being brought into the emergency departments when they were actually on end-of-life pathways and should have community input?

[Andy Burnham]

That shows the human cost of the failure that we have seen in recent weeks; my hon. Friend has identified yet another aspect of it.

There has been a huge reduction in nurse-led call back, so inexpert advice is being to people who should probably have other options put to them. An internal graph produced by NHS Direct shows that under the old 0845 NHS Direct service, about 60% of calls received a nurse call back; under 111, that has now dropped to between 17% and 19%. What is happening to these people? They are getting poor advice, so they are frightened and are going to A and E. What is this Secretary of State doing about it? Absolutely nothing.

Health and Social Care

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Monday 13th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will come on to that, but I have a job to do in holding this shambles to account and that is exactly what I am doing.

Under this Government, people are paying more out of mum or dad’s bank account for care, which often does not come up to the standards that they want, because their council has been cut to the bone. What are they meant to make of a promised, far-off cap of £72,000, or £144,000 for a couple? The Government are giving a little with one hand, while with the other they are grabbing a fortune from people’s bank accounts.

[Barbara Keeley]

Does my right hon. Friend acknowledge that this is not even a question of £72,000 or £144,000, because those caps will be metered at the level that the council would pay, and will take no account of top-ups or accommodation costs? I have seen examples that show that people might have to pay £250,000 before they get anywhere near the cap and any help from the state.

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The cap is a mirage, and this will not feel like progress to people who are paying care charges. Indeed, it is a cruel con trick. The Government are loading extra charges on people while telling them that they might benefit from a cap in a number of years. This simply means that more people will be paying right up to the level of that £72,000 cap.

How can it be fair to pay for the cap by raiding council support? That does not make sense. Those of us who were involved in the cross-party talks—the failed cross-party talks, I might add—will remember that a question was put directly to Andrew Dilnot. He was asked whether, if there was not enough money around, it would be better to pay for a cap or to pay to support councils to ensure that the baseline was not cut further. His clear answer was that we had to do both. He said that it would not make sense to do one without the other, yet that is what this Government are doing—

NHS Funding

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

They are certainly sheepish today; they need to get back to their offices pretty sharpish to amend their websites in light of the letter from the chair of the UK Statistics Authority.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

The website of the Conservatives in Salford says, on the budget that was going to increase,

“we would see more investment in our local NHS”

under a Conservative Government, but in Salford Royal hospital, 750 jobs have been cut. Between them, all our local hospitals have had 3,100 jobs cut in the past couple of years, and two walk-in centres have closed. If the budget is the same, why all these cuts?

[Andy Burnham]

This is the reality on the ground, as my hon. Friend says. There is also the mental health budget cut. There has been a mismatch; people see all those things, yet they hear the statements from the Government, and it does not make any sense, but now the truth and the facts about our NHS are being told, and things will begin to make sense to people.

What I find most troubling about all this, and most revealing about the Government’s style and the way that they work, is that even when they are warned by an official watchdog, they just carry on—as they are doing today—as if nothing had happened. When they admitted cutting the NHS in 2011-12 by amending their website, what was the excuse that they offered to Sir Andrew? Labour left plans for a cut; that is what the Prime Minister said at the Dispatch Box last week. It is what the Secretary of State said in a letter replying to Mr Dilnot. Again, that is simply untrue.

According to Treasury statistics, Labour left plans for a 0.7% real-terms increase in the NHS in 2011-12. From then on, we had a spending settlement giving real-terms protection to the NHS budget. It was this Government who slowed spending in 2010-11, who allowed the resulting £1.9 billion underspend to be swiped back by the Treasury, contrary to the Secretary of State’s promise that all savings would be reinvested, and who still have published plans, issued by Her Majesty’s Treasury, for a further 0.3% cut to the NHS in 2013-14 and 2014-15, contrary to the new statement that the Conservatives have just put on their website. The Secretary of State has a lot of explaining to do.

National Health Service

Debate between Andy Burnham and Baroness Keeley

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

The hon. Gentleman was not listening. The social care transfer comes in for the years 2011-12 to 2014-15, but I was talking about the year 2010-11 and, in the year ended, there was a real-terms cut to the NHS, as confirmed by Treasury figures. This debate is about that fact. He and his hon. Friends stood at the election, with those airbrushed posters all around them, promising that they would not cut the NHS, but in their first year in office, they delivered a real-terms cut to the NHS.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

Is it not the case that, whatever Government Members say, 82% of councils offer social care only in critical and substantial cases, that thousands of people up and down the country are suffering the loss of their services, and that that will have a real hit on the NHS in years to come?

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. That was precisely why I said it was irresponsible for the Conservatives to promise increases to the NHS in the way that they did, on a much-reduced public spending envelope. That has led to precisely the consequences that she describes. Indeed, that hidden cut to adult social care has been quantified at £2 billion.

I remember well Conservative party claims before the election about death taxes, but what about the dementia taxes that the Conservatives have loaded on to vulnerable older people up and down this country, who are now paying more out of their own pockets to pay for the care that they desperately need? That is the effect of cutting adult social care and cutting council budgets in that way.

We today the nail the position once and for all. The real position is worse than the one I described because of spiralling inflation, which in effect means even deeper real-terms cuts for the NHS this year and in all the years that follow.