Contaminated Blood

Debate between Andy Burnham and Jim Cunningham

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I fear that my hon. Friend is right once again. I am aware that individuals received Crown immunity to protect the Government from litigation at the time. That paints a strong picture, and that is why we need to see the papers and find out what happened. I do not want to stand here and accuse Ministers in that Government of anything—that is not my aim—but let us have a look at the papers, so that we can at least see whether any misleading statements were made.

The cases that I have brought before the House provide evidence of several things. First, people were used as guinea pigs. Secondly, people were given inappropriate treatment, as Stuart was. Thirdly, tests were done without people’s knowledge or consent. Fourthly, the results of tests, even when they were positive, were withheld for years—decades, in some cases—from individuals. It has even been suggested that those individuals, who were simply living their lives and did not know that they were HIV-positive or hepatitis C-positive, subsequently infected others who were close to them. Fifthly, as we saw in the case of Ken Bullock, medical records were falsified with slurs and smears to suggest that liver disease was self-inflicted. These are criminal acts.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the work that my right hon. Friend did when he was Secretary of State for Health. I was in the Department with him as a Parliamentary Private Secretary. Are we saying that the information is immune from the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act? Have they ever applied in this situation?

[Andy Burnham]

I think people have applied for documents, but many of those documents have been withheld. I will come on to that in a moment.

I was a Minister in the Department of Health just after the publication of the Archer report and the Government’s response to it. At the instigation of the late Paul Goggins, I sought to reopen the whole issue, and I encountered a lot of institutional resistance, if I may put it that way. I am myself standing here out of a sense of guilt—I wish that I had done more over the years—but having looked at it all and having pieced it all together, I think the documents that have been withheld would fill in some of the gaps I have described.

Agenda for Change: NHS Pay Restraint

Debate between Andy Burnham and Jim Cunningham

Monday 30th January 2017 Westminster Hall

[Andy Burnham]

I am glad to hear the intervention of the former Minister, whom I worked well with in the previous Parliament. I want to take this opportunity to say that he did listen on regional pay. We made an argument about that issue, backed up by the RCN and others, and, to be fair, it did not go any further than the experiment in the south-west. I give credit to him for that. I also give credit to him for consistently showing a real regard for the pressures faced on the frontline.

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point that the Minister would do well to reflect on. There is a huge false economy here. It makes sense to have fairness in terms of headline pay for staff, to maintain good will, but on top of that, it makes sense to provide them with incentives to give any additional shifts or time to the in-house bank, rather than private staffing agencies. The Government have lost sight of that in recent times.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

My right hon. Friend makes an interesting point. It can be a false economy to rely on agencies to staff hospitals, whether it be nurses or doctors. At the end of the day, training suffers. That makes it difficult for the NHS to recruit, so it is a false economy in a number of ways.

[Andy Burnham]

It is not only a false economy; it directly damages the quality of patient care. When people arrive on the ward who do not know the team or the environment and have to be told everything, it builds in confusion and delays because staff have to take them through things. It does not make sense to use private staffing agencies to the extent that they are being used in the NHS. The cost is exorbitant—that is No. 1—but it also damages morale, because it leads to staff in the permanent employ of the trust working on the ward alongside people who are being paid significantly more than them for the same shift, despite having just arrived on that ward. That does not build a sense of team on the ward; it builds a sense of resentment.

National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill

Debate between Andy Burnham and Jim Cunningham

Friday 21st November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I appreciate what the hon. Gentleman says—it would be churlish for me to say otherwise—and I am grateful for the way he said it. The things Opposition Members were saying back then have happened, and we can see the effects of the Government’s reorganisation in the NHS. With the new figures that came out this morning, we see that A and E has missed the Government’s target for 70 weeks in a row. The A and E figures are the barometer of the health and care system. They are the best place to look if we want to see whether there are problems in the health and care system. The fact that the target has been missed for 70 weeks in a row tells us that severe storms are building over the NHS.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

I am glad my right hon. Friend raised that. It takes us back to pre-1997, when people who could not get beds were lying on trolleys. I am sure he remembers that. I can remember a hospital in Coventry that was falling down. As a result of the Labour Government, we got a new hospital.

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend is right. The Labour Government inherited a situation where almost three quarters of the NHS estate was built before 1948. We transformed that, as well as bringing those waiting lists down. He is right to remind us.

I cannot believe that Government Members have not had the guts to be here today to argue for their own policy on the NHS. Or is it that under the shambolic regime of their new Chief Whip, who is now inflicting the same chaos on the parliamentary Conservative party as he did on England’s schools, the Government did not think they could win the vote today, so they did not dare to bring their troops here to hold it? I do not know what the reason is, but they clearly do not believe in their own legislation and the catastrophic reorganisation that followed. An unnamed senior Cabinet Minister has been quoted in The Times as admitting that it was their single biggest mistake.

Care Bill [Lords]

Debate between Andy Burnham and Jim Cunningham

Monday 16th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

One reason the Lewisham clause is so worrying is that simple collaboration between hospitals to solve financial problems is no longer an option to ease financial pressures. That is what it has got to do with the Care Bill. The Government are making a case for all hospitals standing or falling on their own, and in that context, the weakest can be picked off by the Secretary of State and closed without consultation. Given the financial pressures on many organisations, this special administration process is likely to be used on an increasing basis, putting more hospitals at risk. That should send a shiver though every community represented in the House today.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Government seem to have adopted a drip, drip, drip strategy to discredit the NHS? I can remember him proposing a national care service some months before we left office, but the Conservatives rejected it.

[Andy Burnham]

They did, and they put those posters up at the election to try to scare older people—I do not know how they thought that was appropriate, in the same way I do not know how their contributions today have been appropriate.

What my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) says is exactly what is happening. People are not daft. They can see what is going on. They saw a Government legislate to place the market at the heart of the NHS in a way that means we now have the Competition Commission making decisions and forcing services out to open tender. We also have a Secretary of State who does not waste a day running down the NHS—“uncaring nurses”, “lazy GPs”, “coasting hospitals”; everything undermined, everything wrong—rather than celebrating good care. That is the agenda. They are softening the NHS up for more privatisation.

That will be the big choice come the next election. The Secretary of State can spin whatever lines he wants from that Dispatch Box, but that is the choice: a public, proud NHS under Labour, or a fragmented market under the Conservative party. I know which side of the debate I am on, and that is the choice we will put to people.

Managing Risk in the NHS

Debate between Andy Burnham and Jim Cunningham

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

If the hon. Gentleman was listening, I said just a few seconds ago that the Secretary of State will not improve care for patients if he continually blames nurses and doctors. It is not one or the other, although Government Members seem to think they can attack the health unions for somehow being the enemy of patients. Ordinary people do not see it that way. They know that the staff are there for them day in, day out. We support the staff to help the patients. If staff are rewarded properly and have good working conditions, they will provide better care to patients. These are not opposites; the two go together, and the Conservative party would do well to remember that.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Some of us were here during the time of the previous Conservative Government, and I can remember that one of the hospitals in Coventry badly needed repair. After 1997, we got a new hospital. More importantly, one thing that Government Members always boast about is that they have increased the number of trainee doctors. It takes seven years to train a doctor. This Government are in their third year, so the credit goes to us.

[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.

Mental Health (Approval Functions) Bill

Debate between Andy Burnham and Jim Cunningham

Tuesday 30th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

That is a tremendously important point. Over the years, in terms of crucial public functions such as those we are discussing—and, indeed, in wider considerations such as assessments of new treatments with the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence—there has been a trend towards independent decision making, so that people can feel that there is no political, or departmental, interference, such as through changing local resource decisions.

The taking of these powers, and the rubber-stamping of approvals to section people, up to the national level will give rise to concerns about whether the process is sufficiently independent and people’s rights are being properly considered. I hope Ministers have listened to the important point my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East has just made.

I will end by addressing a point of wider principle about mental health policy and the place of mental health within our society. I believe it is possible that this whole unfortunate episode is symptomatic of a wider cultural problem: that mental health simply does not get sufficient focus and resources in the NHS at both the local PCT level and the regional SHA level—and, indeed, within the Department of Health. Beyond that, I do not believe that mental health gets the consideration it needs in Government or in this place. We do not give sufficient consideration to the hugely important issues relating to mental health.

When I was Health Secretary, hundreds of submissions would come across my desk in the course of an average week, and it was unusual if just one of them related to mental health. It is very much seen as a fringe consideration, pushed to the edges of the system—a peripheral concern in PCTs and SHAs, and all the way up to the Department of Health. That situation must not be allowed to continue.

The culture of separateness in the way we consider mental health, as opposed to other NHS issues, has deep roots in our society. Mental health services have often been provided in buildings that are out of sight, out of mind and on the fringes of the mainstream health care system.

That has to change. In the 21st century, we demand it. In our lives, we are all now dealing with much greater levels of stress, change and upheaval, and sometimes we are all left reeling by the sheer pace of modern life. We are discussing today between 4,000 and 5,000 very vulnerable people as though they are somehow apart from the rest of us. They are not. Any family can suffer the terrible consequences of serious mental health issues. In such circumstances, we would all want to be assured that those affected are not forgotten and pushed to the fringes where proper procedures are not carried out because there is a somewhat out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach. These issues are central concerns because they go to the heart of 21st century living.

Mental health must no longer be left at the edges of our national debate about health and care policy. It has to come to the very centre of our health care system. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 includes one good measure at least: to create parity of esteem between physical and mental health. I must say that it was a Labour amendment in another place that introduced that improvement into the Act, but, to be fair to the Government, I should add that I am pleased that they accepted it.

Will the Secretary of State explain what parity of esteem means in practice? What action has the Department thus far taken to put parity of esteem into effect in the national health service, and what plans does it have for the future? We have learnt in recent days that the budget for mental health has been cut in the last financial year, which suggests to me that the NHS is reverting to its default position in tough times.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that role models in society could do a lot more to help to improve cultural attitudes to mental health issues?

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point, and we have the seen the beginning of the kind of campaign he advocates with the work of the Time to Change group. There has also been incredible bravery from individuals such as the cricketer Marcus Trescothick, who spoke out very publicly about the difficulties he had faced, and just a few weeks ago in this House we witnessed some incredibly powerful contributions from Members on both sides of the Chamber: for the first time Members spoke personally and publicly about the difficulties they faced.

I think a change is under way, therefore. People who have been suffering alone will take great heart and encouragement from these developments. We are beginning to challenge the last taboo—the last form of acceptable discrimination in our society—but that does not come a moment too soon. My feeling is that Parliament is finally waking up to the full scale of the mental health challenge we face. A Bill before us at the moment will outlaw the discrimination that exists whereby somebody who has suffered a serious mental breakdown is unable to be a Member of Parliament, a company director, a juror or a school governor. It is so important to remove that discrimination from the statute book because it sends a message that recovery is not possible, and that if someone has a serious mental breakdown there is no possibility of their coming back and playing a full part in our society. The further problem with that legislation is that it prevents those people from being in leadership positions in those organisations—in schools, in Parliament and in companies—where they could develop a better understanding of mental health and what policies need to be put in place to support people who may experience those problems.

School Sports Funding

Debate between Andy Burnham and Jim Cunningham

Tuesday 30th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House congratulates the Youth Sport Trust on achieving major advances in youth sport over the past decade; believes that a good school sports policy must always be a combination of competition with coaching and opportunities for all to participate; notes that the number of young people doing two hours of sport a week has risen from 25 per cent. in 2002 to at least 90 per cent. last year, with over 1.6 million more young people involved in competitive sport between schools than in 2006; believes that removing funding for the Youth Sport Trust, cutting the specialist school status and dismantling School Sport Partnerships will undermine the Olympic legacy and the fight against obesity in young people; and therefore calls on the Government to reverse this decision, and to work with the Youth Sport Trust to find a solution that does not deprive children of the many health, wellbeing and educational advantages they gain from school sport.

We stand on the brink of arguably the biggest moment for sport in our country’s history. This is a one-off chance to lift the place of sport in our society and inspire a new generation. Today is a good moment to remind ourselves why we won the right to host London 2012. With cross-party support, my right hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Tessa Jowell) set challenging but achievable targets that included, by 2012, getting 2 million more people physically active, 1 million more playing sport regularly and 60% of young people doing at least five hours of sport a week. This is no time to lower those ambitions.

Huge progress has been made in the last decade and now we must build on it. I was struck by this quote from the Minister for Sport and the Olympics, made just one week after our success in Singapore. He said:

“I congratulate the Minister and his Department on the progress that has been made on school sport. Specialist sports colleges are proving to be a success—there is no doubt about that—and school sports partnerships likewise. The Youth Sport Trust, which I visited just before the election, is a fantastic organisation.”—[Official Report, 14 July 2005; Vol. 436, c. 335WH.]

He is right: it is a fantastic organisation. We championed it in government, just as John Major championed it before us. We also built on his plans for elite sport. There has been a developing consensus on sports policy since John Major signalled a change in the early 1990s.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Should we not remind the House that the Government’s proposals are nothing new for them? In the 1980s, they did the same thing—they massacred sport, had schools sell off their playing fields, and cut support for youth activities. The economic crisis is not the reason for their activities now: they are back to their old bad habits.

[Andy Burnham]

I had the great misfortune to be in a Merseyside comprehensive under Maggie, and I remember after-school competitive sport vanishing with the teachers’ dispute in the 1980s. Ever since, I have worked in politics to put school sport back on its feet. It is the right of every child to have good sport while at school, and it cannot be left to random chance and the occasional good will of teachers.