Delivery of Public Services
Debate between Anna Firth and Paul Bristow(1 year, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Anna Firth
The national health service was funded and run by those on the Government side of the House. Perhaps the hon. Lady has not noticed that. If the Opposition had been in charge, she would of course be saying that it was they who had rolled out the vaccine.
Paul Bristow
In fact, it is a little bit worse than that. If Opposition Members had been in charge of the vaccination process, we would not have jabbed nearly as many people, because they would have supported the EU scheme rather than ours.
Anna Firth
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Nor would we have come out of lockdown at the earliest possible moment, which has preserved the economy and jobs. The main point, however, is that we have heard no solutions from the Opposition.
The motion mentions GP and hospital appointments, and that is what I want to talk about today. In the health system, the Government are looking for new, innovative solutions to solve the problems that we are experiencing. Of course there are problems: we have just been through a global pandemic which saw the whole country in lockdown and our hospitals and GPs focused on treating millions of covid patients and on the vaccination programme that I have just been talking about, so inevitably there have been delays to regular and routine appointments.