NHS in London

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Wes Streeting

Thursday 24th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck, and a pleasure to follow so many contributions from hon. Members from across London. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) on securing the debate. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting us this opportunity to talk about the NHS across London.

The context is challenging across London, with a swiftly growing population, huge health pressures arising from demographic change and from London lifestyles, and a national health service that across the city is struggling to cope with those myriad pressures. We have seen that across the capital since the 2010 general election. A&E waiting times in hospitals throughout London, referral-to-treatment times and cancer waits have worsened throughout the period. As we have heard, Members from every corner of our capital city are reporting local pressures that reinforce that picture of national health service provision across London.

We feel that pressure acutely in Redbridge. Both the NHS trusts that cover our borough are in special measures: Barts Health NHS Trust, which covers the west of my constituency; and Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, which serves patients throughout my constituency. Primary care is an issue, with patients increasingly struggling to get a GP appointment and finding new barriers put in their way, such as telephone consultations before a GP practice will even grant an appointment. There are also service reconfigurations.

We have already heard about service closures across the rest of London, and in Redbridge we remember the Conservative party’s commitment before the 2010 general election that there would be no enforced closures of accident and emergency or maternity units. Well, we lost the maternity unit at King George hospital, and the decision to close the accident and emergency department was taken in 2011 by Andrew Lansley when he was Secretary of State for Health. That decision still stands, although it has not yet been implemented because the NHS is in such a state of crisis locally. Our local A&E waiting times for the last six months show that we have failed at any point to hit the target of 95% of patients being seen within four hours. The worst rate in the last six months was 76.8%, in December, and the best was 92.6%, in February. People living in my constituency will not find that satisfactory. In the last couple of weeks, the chief executive of the Barking, Havering and Redbridge trust has had to apologise to the 1,015 patients who have waited more than a year for routine treatment such as knee operations, which is simply unacceptable.

There are some positives. I have mentioned the chief executive of the Barking, Havering and Redbridge trust. I have confidence in the trust’s leadership. Since they came on board, they have approached the task energetically. They inherited an absolute mess that developed over a number of years, and there are some improvements, but as recent events have shown, there is still a long way to go.

I welcome the work that the clinical commissioning group and GPs are leading on primary care transformation to try to improve primary care services locally, but we are yet to see the fruits of their labour. I also welcome the extent to which the local authority, which is now Labour-led, has been leading the way on integration to help partners across the local health economy. I am pleased to see that my borough is taking part in piloting the accountable care organisation initiative, which I hope will bring real benefits to patients through greater integration between healthcare providers and our local authority. In that context, the cuts to local government spending and, in particular, to public health budgets are a real concern.

I should probably declare that I am still a serving councillor in the London Borough of Redbridge, albeit an unpaid one, so I am excellent value for money for my constituents.

[Andy Slaughter]

They should be the judge of that.

[Wes Streeting]

They may well be the judge, but I am standing down as a councillor in 2018. I was elected to Parliament while serving as a councillor, which is a good indication.

Seriously, the London Borough of Redbridge has the fourth lowest public health grant in London. Given the diversity of our population, and the pressures that that brings, it is a cause for concern. In that context, I was even more disappointed to find that the Government have cut our public health grant in-year. As a former cabinet member for health and wellbeing in Redbridge, and as the former chair of our health and wellbeing board, I know that we were already struggling to meet our statutory duties on public health, not least the new responsibilities we have been given, such as for health visiting, for which the allocation received from the Government was not sufficient. We managed to squeeze some extra funding out of the Government, but we are still struggling.

The reduction is disappointing, particularly in the context of London, where people’s healthcare needs and lifestyles are placing pressures on the NHS. Public health investment is an upfront investment in people’s lifestyles that will reduce NHS costs in the longer term, as well as improving people’s health and wellbeing. I cannot understand why, in that context, preventive budgets such as public health budgets are bearing the brunt of cuts. I hope Redbridge’s public health allocation in particular is something that the Department of Health will revisit.

I have talked about the financial challenge for local authorities, and I will now address the financial challenge facing the NHS and our local health economy. I was concerned, as everyone else was, to read David Laws’s revelation at the weekend that, far from the £8 billion that keeps being mentioned as the hole in the NHS budget, Simon Stevens actually identified a £30 billion hole, of which he said £15 billion could be found through efficiencies and improvements. My maths makes that a £15 billion hole in the NHS budget, and it is a source of concern that the £8 billion promised by the Conservatives at the last election is still not there. We have seen the Chancellor having to shuffle money around. Earlier, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), the shadow Secretary of State for Health, talked about the reallocation from capital to revenue in terms of the health budget.

A&E Services

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Wes Streeting

Wednesday 24th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I hope, Madam Deputy Speaker, that you and the House will indulge me if I spend my six minutes giving an update on the “Shaping a healthier future” programme, which afflicts west and north-west London. I have done so several times during the three years since—to the consternation and disbelief of 2 million people in those areas—the programme was announced, although there was something of a hiatus over the election period.

I do not want to be self-indulgent, but I think that the subject of “Shaping a healthier future” is one to which all Members will wish to pay attention, because it is the biggest closure programme in the history of the NHS. Four out of nine A&E departments and two major hospitals have been substantially downgraded. Many see the programme as a prototype for the Keogh review of urgent and emergency care. I wonder what has happened to the latest stage of that review; we heard nothing about it from the Under-Secretary of State. It was put on ice last year because a proposal for the downgrading of most of the type 1 A&E departments in the country was seen as political suicide, but it now seems to have disappeared completely. I hope that there are good clinical reasons for that.

Reference has already been made to the excellent briefing with which Members were provided yesterday by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. Here are three of the statistics that the college came up with. The increase in A&E attendances last year was equivalent to the workload of seven large A&E departments; only 2% of A&E attendances involve major trauma, stroke and heart attack patients; and a maximum of 15% of patients who attend A&E departments could be seen in a non-hospital setting. Even that must be subject to a caveat, because I suspect that a fair number of the people who go to A&E departments are not knowingly accelerating their symptoms or time-wasting, but have genuine concerns, perhaps for a child with a fever that might be a symptom of flu but, again, might be due to meningitis.

The solution proposed by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine is co-location. Its briefing states:

“Costly and time-consuming efforts to encourage patients to seek advice on urgent care by telephone or to attend elsewhere…have not reduced A&E attendances. Rather than blaming patients for attending A&E, when we know they have great difficulty accessing supposed alternatives, RCEM advocates a completely new approach. We believe that the issue should be dealt with by collocating”.

However, many hospitals in west London are already co-located, so that cannot be a solution for them.

There have been a number of developments in the past three or four months. Chelsea and Westminster hospital is about to take over West Middlesex University hospital. That new trust will believe that it can maintain two fully functioning type 1 A&E departments—unless another is to close in the area. Why, then, is Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust expected to manage with only one major A&E service in its three hospitals?

Ealing hospital’s maternity unit will close on 1 July. My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma), who could not stay for this part of the debate, asked me specifically to mention that, because it is a matter of great concern, not least because it will have an impact on other maternity services in the area.

We are still suffering the effects of the closure of the A&E departments at Hammersmith and Central Middlesex hospitals last September, including four-hour waiting times at other hospitals such as Charing Cross hospital in my constituency, which is persistently below target. At the same time, stroke services are being centralised at Charing Cross for at least the next five years, having been transferred from St Mary’s hospital, although the plan is to move them away in due course.

In the last two years, £33 million has been spent on consultants just for the purposes of the “Shaping a healthier future” programme, of which £12.5 million was spent on a single consultant, McKinsey. That is £27,000 a day, and it could pay for 300 new nurses. Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is spending one eighth of its staffing budget on bank and agency staff, and the most recent figures show that it had an £18.5 million deficit.

Against this crisis—and it is a crisis—in A&E, the proposal in relation to Charing Cross, a major emergency hospital in my constituency, is that all its buildings be demolished, that its beds be reduced from 360 to 24, and that it lose all consultant emergency services. The population of London, and of west London in particular, is going to go up massively over the next 10 years. That is unprecedented. This is a very poor scheme, not just clinically for the reasons that the Royal College of Emergency Medicine gives, but logistically, spatially and financially.

I am grateful to the Minister and the Secretary of State for the opportunity, at last, before the summer recess to meet and discuss these matters in depth. I will therefore say no more about them today. I look forward to that opportunity, and I know the Minister will attend in good faith and look at the concerns we all have about the “Shaping a healthier future” programme. These are not idle concerns. It is obviously in the Whips’ brief for Government Members to say, “Let’s not make the NHS a political football,” but I do not think any Opposition Member is doing so. We are not in an election period.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

It is a bit rich for Government Members to accuse us of using the NHS as a party political football, when prior to the 2014 local elections the Ilford North Conservative Association put out a leaflet claiming that King George hospital’s A&E would not close, when before the general election we were told its closure would be reprieved, and when the NHS trust chief executive has now told us that the closure plan will be published in the next six to nine months. That was playing party politics with the NHS, cynically.

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I make sure that every time I refer to what is happening in my local NHS now, I look into the voluminous papers on “Shaping a healthier future”, or what the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust actually says, so that I am clear that I am describing what is happening, not giving my opinion or saying something that has come from a party political standpoint. I simply wish that the Government would listen and respond in kind.