Accident and Emergency Departments

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Baroness Bray of Coln

Thursday 7th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

I sympathise with the problems described by the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh).

It seems a long time since NHS North West London presented its “Shaping a healthier future” proposals and Members from across west London first came together to debate them. On that occasion, I explained why I opposed the plans, and put on record my fear that they would have a serious and negative impact on my constituents. Downgrading the four nearest A and E departments—at Ealing, Central Middlesex, Charing Cross and Hammersmith hospitals—would be completely disproportionate, and would leave the people of Ealing and Acton slap bang in the middle of an emergency care black hole.

Since that debate, a cross-party coalition—including the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma), who opened the debate, and the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter), who is also present—embarked on fighting the plans. We have organised rallies, marches, petitions and leaflets, and pages and pages of coverage have appeared in the local as well as the national press. I am not a natural marcher, but I did attend the big rally on Ealing Common to oppose the plans, along with other local Conservatives.

We felt that the most constructive use of our time would be to encourage as many people as possible to fill in the consultation document provided by NHS North West London. We offered guidance on how best to navigate the bewildering and unnecessarily lengthy set of questions, and we helped about 600 people to register their views. That was a large contribution in a borough which returned the highest number of responses to the consultation, almost all of which opposed the plans, and it demonstrates the level of worry that exists in Ealing and Acton.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

Despite the biased nature of the questionnaire, efforts were made to fill it in, and a few thousand people did so. However, 80,000 people signed petitions which were then studiously ignored. Only the responses to the questionnaire were taken into consideration. Perhaps the hon. Lady would like to comment on that.

[Angie Bray]

I certainly think that a petition of that size cannot be easily ignored. However, as we pointed out when we encouraged people to take part in what was a massive and time-consuming process, I suspect that, technically and legally, the authority is obliged to register only the responses to the consultation.

Beyond what I have described, my role has been to make my objections, and those of my constituents, fully known to and understood by as wide an audience as possible in Government. After doing the rounds of meetings with the previous team at the Department of Health, I held meetings with the new ministerial team and the Health Secretary after last autumn’s reshuffle. I followed that up with a meeting with the Prime Minister, whom I left in no doubt that this issue was of the utmost importance to my constituents.

We all believe that the closure plan must be reviewed. None of us can believe that it is anything other than reckless. We wonder how the A and E departments that are left standing will be able to cope with all the extra pressure that will result from the closure programme. I explained to the Prime Minister in detail why the extra travel time to A and E departments further afield would be unacceptable. He listened carefully, asked a number of detailed questions, and told me that he would certainly discuss the issue this with Health Ministers.

Much of our campaigning has focused on the baffling way in which NHS North West London has chosen to present the proposals as a virtual fait accompli, without adequately explaining quite how they will work in practice. We are told that new “urgent care centres” will cater for everyone’s needs, but we have also learnt that there is a lengthy list of conditions, and that there are a number of possible problems with which they will not actually deal.

Hospital Services (West London)

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Baroness Bray of Coln

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Westminster Hall

[Angie Bray]

I agree. It is always important to bear in mind the impact on families who want to visit, because that is all part of the healing process. That is an important consideration.

The consultation is not made easy when the options to choose from are buried in such a heavy document. I have concerns about how that will affect the consultation process. The consultation document is itself a barrier to participation, as it is so huge and bulky as to be virtually impenetrable.

It would be helpful if NHS North West London were to encourage the GPs that it says support its proposals to actually speak out in support of them. The public are much more inclined to listen to their doctors than their politicians—we all know that, unfortunately—and I have urged those behind “Shaping a healthier future” on numerous occasions to do exactly that. So far, however, there has been a deafening silence. If the case for change is so strong, why are we not hearing more local GPs coming out publicly in support of the recommended options?

It is, of course, important to acknowledge that the NHS is set to undergo a series of improvements. The health reforms will fully kick in in April next year, crucially putting GPs in charge of decision making. It therefore seems extraordinary that, after the lengthy process of getting legislation through Parliament, we are now seeing a last-minute, top-down reorganisation of local health care pushed through by NHS North West London, instead of waiting for the GPs to take charge.

The “Shaping a healthier future” programme is a bureaucratically-led initiative by NHS North West London. As such, I urge my neighbouring MPs to accept that this is not about Government cuts. In fact, the Government are putting extra funding into the NHS in real terms year on year, and the Conservatives were the only party to pledge to do so in their 2010 election manifesto.

[Mr Slaughter]

I entirely respect the position that the hon. Lady is speaking from today, and I accept that the NHS locally is behaving very badly. However, does she not agree that the Government must take some responsibility and that, as local MPs, we all ought to be talking to the Government as well?

[Angie Bray]

I spend quite a lot of time talking to Ministers, who have been very generous with their time on this and other issues. Finance is at the root of the problem, but I suspect that the Government have decided to make the NHS a major spending priority; rather more so than some other Departments. We have to accept that there was a problem with funding relating to NHS London for a long time before the Government took power—a point that I was going to come on to in a moment.

As I said, we were the only party to make a pledge on extra funding in its 2010 election manifesto. Furthermore, any efficiency savings do not go back to the Treasury, but are instead ring-fenced for reinvestment in the health service. The latest figures from the Department of Health show that by 2014-15, there will have been funding growth of £12.5 billion across London. The problem is that NHS North West London has been struggling in the face of a huge £5 billion or £6 billion deficit in the past five years or so.

Clearly, we cannot stand against every proposal for change. All institutions occasionally need refreshing and reforming. The key to “Shaping a healthier future” is to work with local communities to establish clinical need that works for those who use the hospitals. This clunky consultation does not do the trick. Nevertheless, I urge people to persevere and wade through the massive document. My message to the Minister is that for my constituents to have all four of their nearest A and Es downgraded is absolutely disproportionate. I hope that, should the consultation go the way that I suspect is intended, the decision will be then called in and a fairer way forward will be found.

Social Housing in London

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Baroness Bray of Coln

Thursday 5th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Slaughter]

It seems okay to me.

Mr Johnson is in charge of some of the most controversial and largest developments not just in this country or in Europe but across the world—that is, the opportunity area schemes in Hammersmith and Fulham that will see the demolition of thousands of units of good quality social housing and their replacement with luxury high-rise housing, principally, as my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) said, for the benefit of people living abroad who wish to have a pied-à-terre somewhere near central London.

I have spent many days in the public inquiry dealing with this matter and I shall try not to bore Members with the subject for too long. The core strategy documents, which hon. Members will all have in their various boroughs, are interesting reading if one sits down with them. The housing policy in the Hammersmith and Fulham core strategy, which is the planning document that is supposed to last us for 20 years, states:

“The Council would prefer all additional affordable housing to be intermediate housing unless a small proportion of new social rented housing is necessary in order to enable proposals for the regeneration of council or housing association estates”.

That was amended during the public inquiry to add the words “and affordable rented housing”. That is a bit of a give-away that the Minister might want to blush about. In other words, all the time that the definition of affordable housing was social housing, the council wanted none of it, but as soon as it became 80% of market rent, it was happy to include it in its planning documents. That exposes what so-called affordable housing is about.

I am dealing with dozens of those schemes across the constituency, but let me mention just three of them. There are three opportunity areas in the borough. There are 30 of those large London plan schemes—roughly one per borough—but we have three of them in Hammersmith and Fulham, even though it is one of the smallest and most densely populated boroughs. One of them covers Earls Court and West Kensington, where the proposal, apart from knocking down the historic exhibition centres, is to demolish 750 newly modernised, good quality and popular council homes, half of which are terraced or semi-detached three or four-bedroom houses with garages and gardens, so that they can be replaced with 7,500 luxury flats in blocks up to 30 storeys high. That is described as four villages and a high street. I went to the architect’s premises to look at the plans. He had given nicknames to the high street and the other road that will be built—one was Sloane street and the other was South Molton street—and that is where the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates are at present.

Of those 7,500 homes, the only social rented homes will be for tenants who are displaced because their homes have been demolished who insist on having a new home in the area. I believe that about 250 such homes will be built, and they will be built conveniently just outside my constituency, so that those people will not be able to vote for me anymore.

The White City opportunity area is much larger. It is the area around the BBC site in which at least another 4,000 homes will be built—again, in blocks 20 to 30 storeys high. The planning document contains a little orange circle where it says, “This is where we are going to build just over 1,000 social rented homes.” That sounds like quite an attractive prospect, until one finds out that those homes will be built so that tenants can be moved from the 2,400 homes on the White City, Batman Close and Wood Lane estates in another part of Shepherd’s Bush. In other words, without saying anything about what will happen to the nearly 2,500 families who live on those estates—the document is silent on that—more than 1,000 homes will be built to rehouse them. Well, I might not be Inspector Clouseau, but I can work out that once those families are moved into those 1,000 homes, the leaseholders have been bought out and other people have been discouraged from living in the area, the bulldozers can then go into the White City estate, which is the largest estate in my constituency.

The most controversial site is Hammersmith town centre and riverside, which includes the listed town hall, cinema and flats owned by the Pocklington Trust, which is a trust for people with visual impairments. Again, the ambition is demolition and to build 320 luxury flats and a footbridge over the A4 that will take out a third of the riverside park, so that Malaysian investors can have somewhere with direct access to the riverside to put their money into and perhaps come to when they are in Hammersmith. How that is conceived as providing for all the needs—let alone the housing needs—of my constituents I do not know.

Council officers proudly told me that the Earls Court development is the largest one of its kind—I think that they mean by value—outside China. They are very proud of that. What those developments have in common is that they face the unanimous opposition or near-unanimous opposition of residents and that the council is co-developer. The planning authority is the developer in each case, and hon. Members can imagine how planning committees go in that context.

The key point for today’s debate is that there is no affordable housing—not one new unit of affordable housing, by which I mean social rented housing. As London citizens will say, the only type of housing in London boroughs such as mine that is affordable to people on the London living wage, which is now almost £8 an hour, is social rented housing. That is what there is a need for. Of course, we need other types of housing as well, but they are easier to provide. The function of government is to provide for unmet needs, but those unmet needs are not being provided for. On the contrary, the whole thrust of policy—not just in Hammersmith, although it is more obvious in Hammersmith—is to reduce the quantum of social rented housing, to stop the construction of new social rented housing and in that way to change the nature of housing tenure across inner London.

What is the motivation for that approach? If I am right about this, and I think I am because I have spent a lot of time looking at it, the first motivation of those politicians—principally Conservative, although we must now associate the Liberal Democrats with them—is economic. A phrase that I hear from Conservatives in my area is “sweat the asset”, and a memorable comment from the leader of the council is, “We want to attract people to the area who are very rich.” I think that such people see council houses with affordable rents, on what would otherwise be very expensive land, as an affront to them economically. They think, “This is not what should be done with this piece of land. What we should have here is a 30-storey, Singapore-style tower block or a conference centre or office block. What we should not have is low to medium-rise housing built in the same style as the rest of the district when it was created in the Victorian era.”

The second motivation is, I think, a social agenda. Estates are described in the most disparaging terms in official council documents—as “not decent”, or “inward-looking”. I know that Tory politicians are often not comfortable with council estates, but I do not know whether that is because they think the people who live on them vote Labour or because they do not like the collective ideals that built them. Perhaps they do not like the communities who live there, but they could at least leave them alone. Those communities are often the opposite of inward looking: they are some of the most diverse and cohesive in the country and now, partly because of housing policies, they are among the most stable in the country, but they are pilloried in that insulting language.

The third motivation is a personal objection to people who live on council estates. If hon. Members do not believe me they should go back and look at some of the election literature and what was said in Hammersmith and Fulham about dependency culture and how living in subsidised housing with security of tenure makes people flaccid and unambitious. Some politicians think that such people need a touch of iron and that we should go back to the more competitive and animalistic culture that the Conservatives would like us to have.

[Angie Bray]

indicated dissent.

[Mr Slaughter]

I hope that my constituency neighbour, who is not, from what I have heard of her comments, in that category, shakes her head because she does not want to be associated with such people.

I shall close on a point that I think is where this debate, in relation to Hammersmith, started. I shall read a couple of paragraphs from an article on ConservativeHome, of which I am a great reader. I enjoy it and find it amusing—sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. Hon. Members can make up their own minds about the article, which is about social housing and was written by the leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council in relation to a Commons debate such as this one almost exactly two years ago. It reads:

“On the day of the first Opposition social housing debate for three years, we ask here whether this is the time to reform social housing. It may not be an issue for the current intake of Conservative MPs at this time, but it will become an issue for many new MPs elected from target marginals which have far higher levels of social housing. Figures supplied to Greg Hands MP from the Commons Library show that shadow housing minister Grant Shapps’s seat (Welwyn Hatfield) has the highest percentage of social rented housing of any Conservative seat. Some key targets have huge percentages: Hammersmith at 36%, Westminster North at 30% and Birmingham Edgbaston and Battersea both at 29%.”

With the exception of Battersea, what do those other three seats have in common when one looks at the results of the last election?

The article continues:

“Whilst Conservatives are at a highpoint in local government, we still have a mountain to climb in our inner cities. We have no Conservative councillors in Liverpool, Sheffield or Newcastle and just one in Manchester. Many inner London boroughs remain either Labour or Liberal Democrat-run…Finally Boris Johnson’s stunning victory in our capital city was largely a suburban revolt. Why is this? The current state and levels of social housing in our inner cities may provide part of the answer. All our inner cities have relatively high levels of social housing compared to their suburbs. Today social housing has become welfare housing where both a dependency culture and a culture of entitlement dominate…Competition revolves around drawing welfare support and taking something out of the system. Conservative principles of freedom, self-reliance and personal responsibility run counter to this culture.”

That is not some lunatic adviser in the Conservative party; that was the head of the innovation unit for local government, who is running the Mayor’s campaign for re-election and is the leader of a London borough council.

I do not make the obvious point, which is that this is all about politics and gerrymandering. Of course it is about that, in a far more profound way than the things that Shirley Porter did. But the fact that we have people like that driving policy within the Conservative party creates a complete divide between the parties that has never existed before, such that it is now impossible for rational voices to be heard—even the voices of people in the Conservative or Liberal parties who know that they have a duty towards people in housing need and ought to be helping them, and that that should be separated from a political argument. This well has become so poisoned now that I believe that, unfortunately, it is Government policy—I have traced in this speech the link from that article through to the “Principles for Social Housing Reform”, through to Government policy in the Localism Bill and the demise of social housing—that is driving social housing policy in this country, particularly in London.

I do not expect to get a rational response from the Minister to this debate today—or probably ever—but I would like Government Members to think about the implications, not for us in our seats and our livelihoods going forward, but for the thousands of families who are the victims of the very crude political policy that is being pursued, in relation to housing uniquely. We can all have disagreements on other areas of policy, but they do not have such profound effects on people’s lives as this form of experimentation—demolishing people’s homes, making people move away from the communities that they have lived in for generations and separating families.

Those are the policies that are being directly pursued by the Conservative-Liberal coalition Government now. They are shameful policies. They should have received more attention from the media, and I wish that they did, but I think there is enough morality in the governing parties for them to go back and look at what they are doing in relation to housing policy and to think again. We are talking about future generations of people in this country who are growing up in conditions that are wholly uncivilised and wholly unworthy of the country.