NHS: Long-term Strategy

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dr Luke Evans]

rose—

[Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

rose—

[Wes Streeting]

I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle), who has been waiting.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

On minimum service guarantees, does my hon. Friend think that the Conservative party has a brass neck to try to enforce minimum service guarantees, which are always made by agreement on any strike anyway, but says nothing at all about the catastrophic loss of service guarantees because of their mismanagement and underfunding on every other day?

[Wes Streeting]

My hon. Friend brings me neatly to the argument that I want to make about minimum service levels. Let me tell the Health Secretary who they are talking about when the Government attack ambulance crews. Donna Wilkins called an ambulance when she became concerned that her disabled son James may have been having a stroke, which is a listed side-effect of the medication that he takes. She and James waited in an ambulance for nine hours outside the Royal Bournemouth Hospital because there were no beds. Paramedics waited with them for the full nine hours. They chatted with James, loaded his favourite TV shows on their phone for him to watch and ran into the hospital to bring tea for Donna and soft food for James, who has problems with swallowing, which they spoon fed him. This is who NHS staff are. This is who ambulance crews are. These are the very staff the Government would have sacked with the legislation that they are bringing forward next week. As my hon. Friend said, what brass neck from this Government to talk about minimum standards on strike days when they cannot deliver basic minimum standards on any other day of the year.

The two-month target from GP referral to cancer treatment has not been met since 2015. Four in 10 people are waiting more than four hours in A&E. The four-hour target for A&E waits has not been met since 2015. The 18-week treatment target for elective care has not been met since 2016. One in seven people cannot get a GP appointment when they try. More than 1.3 million waited more than a month to get a GP appointment in November. How much more evidence do the Government want that they are incapable of delivering the minimum basic standards that patients deserve every single day of the year?

This has to be seen to be believed: the Government are planning an advertising campaign to urge patients to stay away from the NHS with the tagline “Help us help you.” Do they not see the risk in patients not coming forward for help when they need it? Can they not understand that people are fed up with being told that they have to protect the NHS, rather than the other way round? Instead of asking the public to help the NHS, the public want the Government to help the NHS to help them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Barclay]

The issue of bed capacity does indeed matter. I made the point a few moments ago that flow in hospitals is obviously constrained when bed numbers are high. That is exactly why, in the statement on Monday, I highlighted the importance of discharge, and of things like discharge lounges so that we can better facilitate those patients that are free to leave. But this is not simply about hospital bed capacity; it is about step-down intermediate care capacity and also, as we heard a moment ago, about the innovation that means we are better able to facilitate those patients who want to recover at home but want the safety net of some clinical support when they are doing so. It is about looking at the capacity in the whole of the system, not simply in the hospital; otherwise, the hospital itself becomes a magnet.

[Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

The crisis this winter was predictable and building long before we arrived here. Normally, the NHS and the Department plan for winter crises in the summer months, but this year something else was going on in the summer months, wasn’t it? The Tory leadership election. Does the Secretary of State regret what the distraction of the Tories’ internal faction fighting has led to, which is the inability of this Government to plan ahead and do the day job, and the fall below minimum standards of the Government service?

[Steve Barclay]

I do not think those are factors that affected what happened in Scotland, where the First Minister warned on Monday that the hospitals were almost completely full. Indeed, the Scottish Government are taking emergency measures, including cancelling some non-essential operations. I do not think that was a factor in France, where the French Health Ministry is saying that intensive care beds are at saturation point. I do not think that was a factor in Wales, where more than 54,000 patients are waiting more than two years for an operation. I am glad that the hon. Lady highlights the summer, because it was in the summer that we hit the first of our elective recovery targets in terms of the two-year wait, getting those below 2,000, in stark contrast to what we saw in Wales. The surge in flu has happened across the United Kingdom, not just in England, and it has also affected France, Germany and other countries in Europe.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Through neglect, ideological hostility and incompetence, the Tory Government are presiding over the worst crisis the NHS has ever seen. Some 7.3 million people are on the waiting list; there has been a virtual collapse of emergency response; and people cannot see a GP or get follow-up treatment without unacceptably long waits. Today, there have been reports of more than 1,000 excess deaths a week—the highest total, excluding the pandemic, since 1951. There have been many, many preventable deaths on the Government’s watch, and each and every one is a tragedy.

Our NHS is in crisis from top to bottom. There are patients in hospital beds who cannot be discharged because there is no domiciliary care and nowhere for them to safely go. Ambulances are queuing for hours, unable to admit critically ill patients. There are inhumane waits in A&E before anyone can be admitted to beds they desperately need. Staff, who are already burnt out from the stresses of the pandemic, are unable to care properly for patients and are barely able to get through a shift because of the emotional exhaustion of having to deal with those failures.

A nurse at Arrowe Park in the Wirral, which serves my constituency, wrote to me recently. After 21 years of service to our NHS, she says she has

“never worked in such an unsafe environment”.

She says:

“Staff are literally on their knees, leaving shifts late in tears, and leaving in their droves”.

My constituent went on to detail a case in another local hospital in which a patient had a cardiac arrest in a hospital corridor. Frankly, a hospital should be the best place to have a cardiac arrest if somebody is going to have one, but it is now not so in Tory Britain. The individual collapsed and died.

With 132,000 NHS vacancies in England—over 17,800 in the north-west alone—our NHS is dangerously understaffed, under-resourced and under-respected. That is why NHS staff at the end of their tether have taken the desperate decision to go on strike. That is why any Government worth their salt would have decided to negotiate properly with them, to listen to them and to try to deal with and recognise that, in the last 13 years, a real-terms cut of 20% in nurses’ remuneration is simply not acceptable, but what did they do? They chose to have a divide-and-rule strategy, and they chose to try to scapegoat and blame NHS staff for the terrible conditions I have been talking about.

Perhaps the Government should consider legislating for a minimum service outside of strike days, because we are going to be in the absurd position of having, by law, guarantees on strike days—they could be negotiated anyway and always have been—that do not apply on non-strike days. It is an insult when the Secretary of State meets the health unions and says they have to increase their productivity. They are working beyond any amount of time that any human being should be asked to work.

[Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

I confess to being a bit confused by the Labour party’s position on minimum service levels. We all want to ensure that our constituents are as safe as possible. The ambulance workers want to ensure that people are as safe as possible. The hon. Lady has said herself that these things would be negotiated anyway. But the challenge people face on the ground is not knowing who is going to come in, the fact that people do not have a say on whether they are going to come in and the fact that a negotiated settlement might be different in different areas of the country, which makes messaging and public health messaging very difficult and puts people at risk. So why is Labour so against minimum service guarantees?

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I think the hon. Lady, and I know that she is a doctor, needs to recognise that these agreements have always been made when there have been strike days in the NHS—always. I think she also needs to recognise that any Government who were being responsible would have negotiated to put an end to these strikes, recognised the fantastic service that nurses have given and dealt with the issue, instead of going for confrontation.

[Dr Johnson]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I am not giving way again.

I am going to leave the last parts of my speech to another constituent of mine, an 83-year-old who fell alone in his home and was left. The ambulance was called at 4.15 in the afternoon—it was thought he had a fractured hip—and he was warned of a potential 14-hour wait. My constituent said he

“naively thought this must be the worst case scenario and thought it was very unlikely to be that long”.

He could not move, he could not sleep and he could not go to the toilet. Eighteen hours later, the ambulance arrived—18 hours later—at 10.15 the following morning. At the hospital, things got no better. There were patients on trolleys lining the corridors. For nearly another 24 hours, this 83-year-old man immobilised with pain was to lie on a trolley in a hospital corridor after 18 hours of waiting for an ambulance.

This is in no way acceptable. This should not be accepted by any Government worth their salt. They should hang their head in shame at what they have done to our NHS. We need to have a Government finally, which we will after the next election, who will solve these problems, instead of seeking to blame everybody else—the weather, the pandemic, the staff and any number of other things. It is about time we had a Government who have the guts to take responsibility for the decisions they have made and put it right. We are going to have such a Government soon. Shamefully, we have not now.