Oral Answers to Questions

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, of course, I would be delighted to meet my hon. Friend and his constituent. He is right that the fall in deaths from breast cancer is huge progress that we have made as a country. I pay tribute to the work of the NHS on that but, of course, every such death is a tragedy and we need to do yet more.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

“Shaping a healthier future” was the biggest hospital closure programme in the history of the NHS, with the loss of two major hospitals, including Charing Cross in my constituency. It was fully supported by the Conservative party not only nationally, but locally, as the right hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands) well knows. After seven years, millions of pounds wasted in consultants, staff leaving through insecurity and 2 million people across west London threatened with the loss of essential and world-class hospitals, is that it today? Abandoning “Shaping a healthier future” is a victory for the people of Hammersmith, for the Save our Hospitals campaigners and for our Labour council, but there has been appalling judgment by a succession of Governments and Secretaries of State. Will this Secretary of State now apologise to my constituents?

[Matt Hancock]

It is astonishing, is it not? My right hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands) has made this case with objective clarity and reasonableness, is supporting his constituents and led to a very positive outcome, keeping the A&Es open but still doing the positive work in the community, and all we continue to get is information that I regard as erroneous from the hon. Gentleman, who has campaigned in the most terrible way on this over many years.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 19th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

There is a variability in availability. Of course the current model of delivery is a trial—we have doubled the size of that trial but it is still a trial that runs until 2021. I am very happy to work with my hon. Friend as well as with the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) to try to make sure that it is as available as possible.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

Hammersmith is one of the sites that is now closed. When will PrEP be made freely available? Here we have a drug that has almost 100% effectiveness and that will save money for the NHS through HIV protection. When will we see it available to anyone who needs it?

[Matt Hancock]

As I have said, last month we doubled the availability of PrEP, which is an important step in the right direction.

NHS Long-term Plan

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Monday 7th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, my hon. Friend is absolutely right about this. I pay tribute to the work that he did as a Minister in this area. We have put forward £30 million to support mental health services for rough sleepers. It is about so much more than just the money, though—it is about co-ordinating care and co-ordinating different agencies. There is a lot of work going on on this inside Government that he was very much involved with.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

My clinical commissioning group has to make more than £40 million of cuts in the next 15 months and is proposing to cut GP and urgent care centre opening hours. It also has an £11 million risk thanks to the predatory private “GP at hand” scheme, of which the Secretary of State is a member. We have had GP practices suspended, palliative care beds closed, and our major hospital under threat of demolition for seven years. Will he accept that the self-regarding statement he has just made will be unrecognisable to people who work in and use the NHS, which is reeling from the crisis that his Government have caused?

[Matt Hancock]

I will take advice and consideration from many people, but not from the hon. Gentleman, who for seven years has run a frankly outrageous campaign based on scare stories about hospital closures that are totally unreasonable, unrealistic and wrong. He will never be somebody I listen to, because I care about improving the future, not political point-scoring.

Health and Social Care Committee

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Dr Wollaston]

I absolutely agree with what my hon. Friend has said and I welcome the ongoing interest that the Justice Committee is taking in this issue. He will know that one very depressing aspect of this situation is that report after report is published highlighting the issue, but we are just not seeing the progress needed. There needs to be real accountability and consequences for progress not being made on all these issues.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

We all know that the suicide rate in prisons has increased markedly, but also, because of ageing prisoners and addiction problems, more people are dying. Was the Health and Social Care Committee able to assess whether the standards of healthcare mean that people go into prison and simply do not come out?

[Dr Wollaston]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. The point is that if someone goes into prison with a serious underlying medical problem, it is simply unacceptable that they cannot access the healthcare that they should be receiving. That is what we heard time and again: people’s appointments are cancelled, issues are not addressed and thing are not followed up. Sometimes an outside appointment with a specialist, for very serious conditions at times, will simply be cancelled, and then there is no continuity and follow-up, so the person simply falls out of the system. Undoubtedly, therefore, people’s health is suffering and, as I said at the beginning, no one is sentenced to worse healthcare when they are sentenced to deprivation of their liberty. The situation is unacceptable.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee makes a really important point. There is no greater enthusiast for technology than me—as you well know, Mr Speaker—but the thing about new technology is that the rules sometimes need to be updated to take changes in technology into account. The response when there are challenges such as the one my hon. Friend raises is not to reject the technology, but the opposite: to keep improving the technology so that it gets better and better, and to make sure that the rules keep up to pace. I spoke to Simon Stevens at NHS England about this only this morning—we have had a series of conversations in the past couple of weeks since I have been in post—and he is reviewing this exact question. I am absolutely sure that we will get to the right answer.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

Is the Secretary of State familiar with the “GP at hand” online service? It is a partnership between a private company and a Fulham GP surgery, and it has poached thousands of profitable patients from GPs all over London, to the alarm of the British Medical Association and of GPs generally. My clinical commissioning group is investigating it, and in the meantime CCGs have blocked Babylon’s expansion to Birmingham on safety grounds. This is creating a two-tier system for GPs, so will the Secretary of State investigate it?

[Matt Hancock]

I am acutely aware of the question that the hon. Gentleman raises, not least because I am a user of the Babylon service myself—it is my GP. The important thing is to ensure that the rules are kept up to date so that we can get the benefits of the new technology, but make sure that it works in a way that ensures everybody gets high-quality primary care.

Autism

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Thursday 29th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Sheerman]

Absolutely. All my experience suggests that most work now needs to be put into early family support, in every way. People feel so isolated and bereft of support, and bereft of knowledge. Thanks to the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham and others, there is a lot of information out there, but how do people get it when they have never even really understood what autism means?

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I increasingly get families with autistic children in my surgeries complaining about bad housing conditions in the private rented sector, with overcrowding, really appalling conditions, infestations, noise and so on, but there is also a problem with temporary accommodation and families being moved on. This creates particular stress for autistic children. Does my hon. Friend agree that those making housing assessments should take more account of autism?

[Mr Sheerman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Interestingly, as has been said, this goes right across the whole spectrum. Of course, having access to healthcare is important. Access to education is important, especially when there is a very supportive environment for a child on the autism spectrum at primary school and then going to “big school” is a very big challenge for them. We need to get this right, and support families to support the child at that time.

Recently, many Members were part of the campaign for Lauri Love, a severely autistic, wonderful young man who was in danger of being extradited to the United States. Anyone who met Lauri Love and understood his condition was sympathetic. At the moment, it looks as though we have been successful in supporting Lauri, so that is a great victory.

Leaving the EU: NHS

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

Thank you for calling me relatively early in the debate, Mr Stringer. I apologise to hon. Members, particularly those on the Front Bench, because I will not be here for the closing speeches, but I will of course read them assiduously. I and some other MPs have a meeting with Imperial Healthcare Trust that has taken a long time to arrange. Given the pressures and crisis of funding in many parts of the NHS, I think I need to be there. It is not entirely irrelevant to the subject of the debate. I will, for the reasons I have given, try to be brief and confine my comments to the issues that affect my constituents.

I am extraordinarily privileged to have some of the finest healthcare and medical research facilities not only in this country, but across Europe and the world, in Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush. I have three of the five hospitals in Imperial Healthcare Trust: Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea, Hammersmith, and Charing Cross. I also have, being built as we speak on a 23-acre site in White City, the major new campus for Imperial College. They are amazing institutions that this country is proud to have, and they are truly international in the staff who work there, their research and co-operation, and the funding that they receive. We cannot avoid the fact that they are grievously affected by the consequences of Brexit. They are resilient organisations and they will do what they can to mitigate the effects.

Just a few weeks ago, Imperial College announced a joint venture with the National Centre for Scientific Research, one of the major French scientific research institutions. There is already a lot of international co-operation, but one of the main purposes of the joint venture is to allow continued access to vital European funding. We welcome attempts to mitigate the effects of Brexit, but when we talk about Brexit it always seems to be about how we can achieve a second-best position. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), who eloquently expressed the variety of damage that Brexit will do to the healthcare sector, I find it difficult to see any positives. Yes, it is possible to see mitigation, but very difficult to see how we are going to be any better off in any capacity as a result of Brexit.

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, given the research facilities he has described in the hospitals in his constituency, we are talking about not only the effect on the institutions, but the ability of the entire health sector to produce the best outcomes for patients in this country, because they get new treatments faster because of the co-operative work being done internationally?

[Andy Slaughter]

Yes, the system is fully integrated across EU countries, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Last November, the president of Imperial College, Alice Gast, revealed that some of the 2,000 staff at Imperial College who are EU nationals have already left. I will come on to why that should be the case, given what the Government have said on EU nationals. Half of them—1,000 people—have taken legal advice on their positions post Brexit. A quarter of the staff and a fifth of the students at Imperial are from the EU. In the healthcare sector across London there are 20,000 staff from the EU, which is about 15%.

A good example is another of my local hospitals, the Royal Brompton, where 30% of the clinical staff are EU nationals. I have visited the Royal Brompton, and it has the most extraordinary paediatric cardiac surgery unit doing the most advanced and delicate operations on newly born babies. When I visited, all the surgeons who were operating were EU nationals, I think from five different countries. The Government may say, “Well, so what?”, but I do not imagine that they maintain, as has been said previously, that we can give a sudden opportunity to replace many doctors and nurses with home-grown doctors and nurses. That is not going to happen overnight. We know that the demand is such that we will continue to rely on clinicians from abroad for the indefinite future.

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an incredibly valid point about staffing in our hospitals. My local hospital, St George’s, has already experienced a loss of staff because people from the EU are leaving. Our patients have to wait longer to be seen. For example, one lady who had to see a radiographer was seen within a day, but now she has to wait up to six weeks to be seen. Does he agree that what the Government say does not ring true in reality?

[Andy Slaughter]

I agree with my hon. Friend. If Members are honest, that is the experience that many of us will have had. There are many questions about the health service, as I have indicated, and the situation is simply being exacerbated by removing one of the most compatible, professional and necessary parts of the health service: its staff from the EU27 countries.

Why are we losing those staff? We hear protestations from the Government that those who are here now and until 29 March next year are welcome to stay, but that is not correct. First, there is uncertainty, because nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Secondly, the rights of EU staff will not be the same as they are now, as my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) indicated in her intervention. There is no continuity of rights; settled status has to be applied for, there has to be a register and there might be identity cards. As often happens, certainly with people in medical research grades, they might leave the country for five years but want to come back, yet they would then no longer have settled status. The position in the transitional phase, we understand, will be different again.

Even if some legal certainty is eventually given, there is still the climate or mood among EU citizens. I can speak confidently about this, because more than 20% of my residents in Hammersmith are EU citizens—it is one of the top three boroughs in the country for the percentage of EU residents—so I talk to them every week. I have now talked to and corresponded with not hundreds but thousands of them over the past two years, and they are extremely concerned. Let us be honest: they have transferrable skills and they can go to work in countries where they feel more welcome and valued than they do here.

The Government have not done enough—indeed, the Government cannot do enough—to reassure those EU citizens. The message that Brexit sends is that they are at least not as welcome as they once were. I will end on this, which I came across when preparing for the debate. It is something that Imperial College Healthcare Trust put out shortly after the referendum, when it introduced #LoveOurEUStaff. The management wrote to the staff:

“Our country is currently in a place of uncertainty. There has been no clear message from the Government about what the future holds for EU citizens living in the UK… I’ve heard that many EU and other overseas citizens are feeling concerned about their futures in the UK. I’ve also seen the media reports of an increase in racist incidents following the referendum vote.”

Eighteen months on, I wish I could say that those comments no longer applied. Sadly, they do. The fact that we are barely nearer certainty in the matter means that every day individuals are voting with their feet, feeling that they will be more welcome and their skills more valued in other countries. Frankly, the Government are not doing very much to address that point. I, too, read the debate and hear what the Minister says about that. I wonder what the Government can do, given the hole that they have dug themselves into.

NHS Winter Crisis

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Monday 5th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Barclay]

We continually hear this myth about privatisation. The reality is that this Government appointed to run NHS England, first, Sir David Nicholson, who had previously been appointed by the Labour party, and then Sir Simon Stevens, who has worked for both sides of the House. Numbers show that the level of private healthcare provision has not changed this year compared with last year. I understand that the Health Committee is due to look into ACOs and integration within a matter of weeks as part of its deliberations, and I very much look forward to reading the conclusions in that Committee’s report.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

The programme to reduce acute hospital services and close blue-light A&Es, like that at Charing Cross Hospital, is about to undergo its fourth change of name in five years—“Shaping a healthier future,” “sustainability and transformation,” “accountable care,” and “integrated care”. Would it not be better to reconsider that policy, which is being driven not by local clinicians, but by his Department?

[Stephen Barclay]

The impression given by the hon. Gentleman is that he always seems to oppose reconfiguration of any sort. The reality is that most clinicians will say, “We do need to reconfigure. We do need to look at how services are operated.” The evidence of that can be seen within London in terms of the reconfiguration of stroke, which from memory, he opposed—

[Andy Slaughter]

indicated dissent.

[Stephen Barclay]

If the hon. Gentleman did not oppose it, I will happily correct that, but he will recognise that the reconfiguration of stroke in London to fewer sites significantly improved outcomes for patients. There is always a discussion to be had about how reconfiguration operates, but clinicians and the royal colleges recognise that the benefits of reconfiguration are better outcomes for patients as well as better outcomes for the NHS.

NHS Winter Crisis

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Wednesday 10th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

We have heard some excellent contributions today. The depth of the crisis is reflected by the fact that no fewer than 38 Members put in to speak, and although we only managed to hear from just over 20 Back-Bench Members, they were from all four corners of England. Owing to the time constraints, I cannot refer to them all, so I will just pick out a few, particularly from those still working in the NHS, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (Dr Williams), who said it felt like we were going back to the 1990s and that it did not have to be like that—this decline is not inevitable. I totally agree with him on that.

We also heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Eleanor Smith), who brought her 40 years of service in the NHS to the fore and made the valid point that cancelling operations now creates a backlog, which will cause problems later on. We know that many trusts are already failing to meet their 18-week target.

Perhaps the most compelling contribution was from my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan), who worked in A&E over Christmas. She was absolutely right to say that many people attend A&E because they are not getting the treatment that they need from elsewhere in the system, due to a squeeze on funding. She also made the valid point that many people are not being discharged as quickly as we would like because of massive cuts to social care over the years. Her contribution was excellent, and she made the point that these conditions have arisen not by accident, but because a political choice has been made.

After two years in which the A&E target has been missed altogether, we now know that waiting times shot up in recent weeks. Some hospitals cannot see even half their patients within four hours at A&E. The Secretary of State knows a little about waiting: there was a gap of an hour and 42 minutes between his entering No. 10 on Monday and confirmation that he was continuing in his job. Perhaps he was left waiting in a corridor. I hope that he was at least offered a chair. He would have to double that time, and double it again, to begin to appreciate how long some patients are having to wait, often in great discomfort and pain.

Following the reshuffle on Monday, the Health and Social Care Secretary has had a rebrand, but if it took him over five years to work out that his actions might have some bearing on social care, how much longer will it be before he learns that the message that he hears about underfunding in the NHS is so consistent because it is true? How long before he realises that, on his watch, standards have deteriorated by almost every measure? How long before he realises that the decisions that his Government have taken have led to the litany of woe that we have heard today?

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I do not know whether my hon. Friend has seen that an emergency consultant at Charing Cross Hospital has said that staff were practicing “battlefield medicine” there. By that, he meant that when a blue-light ambulance arrived, staff had to decide whether to take someone out of the resuscitation room to put the arrival in, or to leave the arrival in the corridor until a bed space was free. That same hospital faces losing all its emergency beds and its blue-light A&E. Does he agree that we have to rethink further reductions in beds and A&E capacity, given the crisis that we are in?

[Justin Madders]

I thank my hon. Friend for his contribution. He is absolutely right. Those working on the frontline have made many statements about just how acute the problem is. Bed numbers have dropped rapidly in recent years. The worry is that under STPs, even more beds may be lost.

The Health Secretary today denied there is a crisis, but he admitted it on Twitter, where he asked of Tony Blair,

“does he not remember his own regular NHS winter crises?”

If the House wants to make a comparison with Tony Blair, I will help it: in the last winter under Tony Blair, between October and December 2006, one in 50 patients spent longer than four hours in A&E. In November, under this Health Secretary, one in 10 did.

Of course, behind every single figure is a vulnerable patient who is being let down—a patient like 87-year-old Esme Thomas, who, according to the BBC, waited 22 hours to be admitted to a ward at Weston General Hospital, or the patients at Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield, who, as we have heard, were photographed lying on the floor, some still attached to drips. If the best that we—one of the wealthiest nations in the world—can offer people who are ill is an uncomfortable metal chair, something has gone badly wrong. What do the Government say to the nurse who told “ITV News” that there had been times when she had spent whole days treating patients in the hospital car park? Those stories should shame the Government into action.

Of course, it is not just those attending hospital who are suffering; so are those who are not able to go to hospital at all: 55,000 operations have been cancelled this month. When asked about this, the Prime Minister said that it was all “part of the plan.” If it was all part of the plan, why were the operations arranged in the first place? This is not a plan; it is a shambles.

The human cost of this crisis is devastating. Even before the worst of the winter had reached us, a one-year-old baby with a hole in her heart had her life-saving operation cancelled five times. Her parents were told that their daughter could go into cardiac arrest during the operation, so I cannot begin to imagine the anguish that they must have gone through in preparing themselves for the operation five times. Or what about the 12-year-old autistic girl from my constituency whose operation to remove her tonsils has been postponed? She has had at least eight bouts of infection in the past year, and because of her autism, the delay to her operation has caused her anxiety. It was a huge deal to build her up for the operation after her pre-operative assessment, particularly given the prospect of spending a night in hospital, but after the cancellation, she is anxious that when she gets her new operation date, that will be cancelled as well. If leaving these children anxious and in pain was part of the plan, it is a plan this Government should be ashamed of.

Across a whole range of indicators the NHS has experienced its worst performance since records began, and that was before we headed into this winter. Let us be clear: I do not for a second hold the people who work on the frontline responsible for this. Indeed, it is only through their dedication that the health service keeps going, despite the best efforts of this Government to destroy staff morale—whether an entire generation of junior doctors alienated, the next generation of nurses deterred from entering the profession by tuition fees, or the thousands of staff up and down the country who are frankly fed up of rota gaps, pay restraints and meaningless platitudes from this Government.

Only this afternoon we hear that the Care Quality Commission is postponing routine inspections, presumably because it knows a winter crisis is on. This is an unprecedented step that sends a huge signal to the Government that this is not just normal winter pressures.

Let us hear from some of those staff working on the frontline. A&E doctor Adrian Harrop said the claims that the NHS had never been better prepared were “misleading, disingenuous nonsense”. He also said:

“The system I’ve been working in in recent days and weeks seems under-resourced, underfunded and understaffed.”

Tracy Bullock, chief executive of Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said:

“I’m 34 years in and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

These are honest, hard-working professionals—the lifeblood of the NHS—and Conservative Members know full well we could have repeated dozens of similar comments from NHS staff, because at the bottom of all this is the unescapable, indisputable fact that under this Government the NHS is in the middle of the longest and deepest financial squeeze in its entire history, and it is a squeeze that, as we have heard today, is having devastating consequences.

We warned time and again that, unless early and substantial action was taken, we faced another severe winter crisis, and that is exactly where we are today. We have had an apology but no action from the Government. Patients deserve to know when this crisis will be solved and when their cancelled operations are going to take place, and this country deserves a Government fit to run the NHS. I commend this motion to the House.

King’s College Hospital Foundation Trust

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dunne]

All those who assist the NHS in a non-executive capacity do so with the best motivations. I would not question Lord Kerslake’s motivation for wanting to undertake this role. As to the suitability of all the individuals appointed to these positions, that will be variable because there are so many organisations across the NHS. I would not like to make any comment about political motivation in relation to this departure.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is also running a large deficit—it is not just King’s. The Government’s solution is to demolish Charing Cross hospital, when admissions have gone up 11% in the past two years. We are on our fourth chief executive in five years. The last one left to run NHS Improvement before he could even meet local MPs. When are the Government going to get a grip and fund the NHS properly, rather than blame everybody else for the problem?

[Mr Dunne]

I share the hon. Gentleman’s concern about trusts that have a revolving door of senior leadership. One thing we are looking to do is to encourage a larger cadre of leadership people in the NHS and more clinicians to become leaders, so we have more consistency of skills and better trained leaders across the NHS. I do not think the departure of Ian Dalton from Imperial has anything to do with the subject of King’s College, or indeed with the funding of the NHS.