National Health Service

Baroness Donaghy Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Turnberg for initiating this debate and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, on her wonderful maiden speech.

It is quite a while since I have spoken on health or social care matters, but I am fearful for the future. The ingredients of broken promises on social care funding, inadequate funding of the National Health Service, increasing demand and creeping privatisation mean that the pressure cooker may one day explode. The Government seek to avoid blame by making doctors and nurses subsidise our health provision, and finding a scapegoat in local government for the failures of social care. Student nurses are paying for their own training and working for nothing in the NHS for half their time; their pay has been capped and they are paying for their lodgings; safe staffing ratios have been scrapped; and nurses are doing even more outside work for the privilege of working up to 70 hours a week. That does not create a positive climate for the future.

The Government need to take a step back on the junior doctors dispute, which has been badly handled. The overwhelming vote of 98% on a 76% turnout is not just a problem for the Government; it places an enormous responsibility on the doctors’ leaders, because any settlement is going to look like a comparatively poor deal. It is important to allow ACAS to get on with its job. I read a very moving letter in the paper from the father of a junior doctor, who said of his son:

“He regularly works weekends and nights, and spends much of his ‘free’ time adjusting his sleep patterns. He almost always works between one and three hours extra daily because of understaffing … His social life is almost nonexistent due to exhaustion and antisocial hours”.

All that is on a basic pay of £28,000 a year, and he is paying for his own insurance fees as well as very expensive examinations.

Finally, the recent hasty announcement to devolve health budgets to five London boroughs is not genuine devolution. It is more like being persuaded into a life raft only to find the substantial figure of Boris Johnson jumping in at the last minute. Apparently, he is going to oversee the process—clearly, part of the “Keep Boris Busy” campaign. The massive funding gap for social care will be slightly narrowed at the expense of healthcare, and the London boroughs will take the flak. These piecemeal experiments will lead to more complex structures, more contracting out and huge dividends for management consultants, who will hope to increase their £600 million a year income. The losers will be patients and the elderly. I really am fearful for the future of the NHS.