Francis Report

Debate between Andy Burnham and Mark Harper

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

That is what I am saying: A and E is the barometer of the whole system. If there is pressure anywhere, in the end it shows up in A and E. Hospitals become jammed: they cannot admit people from A and E to the ward because people in the ward cannot be discharged home. This is what we are seeing. The Secretary of State is in denial, basically. He is shaking his head and saying that this is nothing to do with the issues raised by the Francis report. I am afraid that this is the real experience of people—staff and patients—up and down the country, and the sooner he wakes up to it the better for us all. If he thinks the situation with regard to getting a GP appointment is acceptable at the moment that is up to him, but those of us on the Opposition Benches find it completely unacceptable. It is simply not good enough and the sooner he pulls his finger out and does something about it the better.

The Secretary of State’s failure even to acknowledge these issues today is a matter of some amazement, given that he could find time to talk on an area that is not his responsibility—the NHS in Wales. There are, of course, important issues that the Welsh Assembly needs to address, but voters in England might appreciate it if he spent a bit more time sorting out problems here rather than pointing the finger over there.

[Mr Harper]

The NHS in Wales is relevant. Thousands of constituents in England have to use the NHS in Wales—the point I made to the Secretary of State—because of the Labour party’s ill-thought-out devolution settlement. Thousands of patients in Wales cross the border to use the NHS in England, too. What lessons should this House draw from the Labour party’s performance in running the NHS in Wales, if the shadow Secretary of State is ever back in my right hon. Friend’s chair at the Department of Health?

[Andy Burnham]

I, as part of the previous Government, left the lowest waiting times in the history of the NHS, and A and E was performing much better at the end of the previous Government than it is now. Hospital A and Es have dropped right down, so we do not need to take lessons from the hon. Gentleman.

Let us return to the issue of England and Wales. The mantra or script of Government Members is almost to deny that there are problems in England. Last week, 16 major A and Es in England were below the Welsh average on waits in A and E. Some trusts are seriously struggling, such as in Leicester, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), and Great Western Hospitals NHS Trust and North West London Hospitals NHS Trust, where one in four patients were waiting more than four hours.

Another trust below the Welsh average was Barking, Havering and Redbridge, which includes Queen’s hospital, Romford. May I recommend to the Secretary of State that instead of sitting there mumbling away, he read an article on The Guardian website today by Saleyha Ahsan, an A and E consultant who has worked at Queen’s hospital, Romford? She writes:

“Being a doctor in accident and emergency has at times resembled being a medic in a war zone.”

May I remind him that this is the English NHS she is talking about—the one he is supposed to be responsible for? She goes on to say that the severe shortage of A and E doctors is a result of his predecessor’s failure to listen to the warnings from the College of Emergency Medicine about the looming recruitment crisis, because it was obsessed by its reorganisation. Dr Clifford Mann said he felt like

“John the Baptist crying in the wilderness”

because the Government’s reorganisation brought “decision-making paralysis” to the NHS. What does Dr Mann say now? He says that even after the reorganisation these issues cannot be dealt with, because

“there are now a lot of semi-detached organisations to deal with”.

Government Members do not like hearing it, but the fact is that the reorganisation by the right hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr Lansley) damaged front-line care in the NHS. May I remind the Secretary of State that just 12% of people think standards in the NHS have got better under the coalition, while 47% think they have got worse? Rather than pointing the finger at Wales, the Government need to spend a bit more time sorting out the problems they have created in England.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) says, an urgent area that needs to be addressed is mental health. Some 1,700 mental health care beds have been cut over the past two years because these Ministers have allowed the first real-terms cut in mental health spending for a decade. As a result, alarming stories are emerging of very vulnerable children and adults being held in inappropriate accommodation, such as police cells. According to Mind, many trusts are reporting more than 100% bed occupancy. One trust in London has had to turn office space into temporary wards with camp beds.

We are also hearing of children being sent hundreds of miles to find an available bed. In a constituency case, my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West found that there was simply no bed available in the public or private sector anywhere in England on a day when a very vulnerable child needed support. A recent freedom of information request by Community Care found that in 2013-14 10 trusts sent children to young people’s units more than 150 miles away. The furthest distance was 275 miles, from Sussex to Bury. A 12-year-old girl from Hull was sent 130 miles away to a unit in Stafford. Her child and adolescent mental health services team were searching for a bed for two days, and were told that the Stafford bed was the only one available in the country.