Health and Social Care

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I first declare my interest as a serving non-executive director on a local hospital board, which is in the register.

I thank the Minister for the Statement from Friday concerning the winter and the NHS. If the House will indulge me for a moment, I put on record what a pleasure and privilege it has been over these years to have had my honourable friend Jon Ashworth, former Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, as my boss. I welcome Wes Streeting MP to that position; his huge talent will challenge the health team in the Commons and keep them on their toes, I have no doubt, and I look forward to it.

Today, the Daily Telegraph carried a story saying that 10,000 hospital beds were taken up by patients waiting for home care. NHS Providers has done some research and warned that those beds are mostly currently occupied by elderly people who are medically fit to be discharged, but no care is available to look after them at home. The chief executive, Chris Hopson, said that hospitals are now having to deploy their own staff to take on care duties in the community in order to free up hospital beds.

The lack of social care surely lies at the heart of whether the NHS can cope with the winter pressures, deal with ambulances stacking up, tackle the backlog and deal with whatever Covid, and particularly the new variant, may throw at it. When Professor Stephen Powis, NHS National Medical Director, said:

“NHS staff have pulled out all the stops since the beginning of the pandemic, treating more than half a million Covid patients, while continuing to perform millions of checks, tests and treatments for non-Covid reasons”,


he could have added that they are exhausted and need our support and that of the Government to move forward.

We need to add in the fact that about one in 60 people in private households in England had Covid in the week to 27 November—up from one in 65 the previous week, according to the Office for National Statistics. One in 60 is the equivalent of almost 900,000 people. Although it is true that, thankfully, fewer people are hospitalised and even fewer are in ICU, that is still a significant number. But this rate of infection, with the new variant possibly being even more infectious, means that, apart from anything else, there will be a surge in people being off sick, including NHS and care staff.

It is too easy for the Government to say that the winter crisis and the huge waiting lists are simply the result of the challenges of Covid. The reality is that the entire health and social care system has been left dangerously exposed by this Government’s choices over the past 11 years. Before the pandemic, there were waiting lists of 4.5 million, staff shortages of 100,000 and social care vacancies of 112,000. This week, the National Audit Office starkly detailed that things are set to get even worse: waiting lists might double in the next three years.

Those NHS waiting lists stand at 6 million. Almost one in 10 people in England waits months, or even years, sometimes in serious pain and discomfort, because the Government have failed to get a grip on the crisis. Everyone understands that we are in the midst of a global pandemic that has placed the NHS under unprecedented pressure, but that does not excuse or explain why we went into the pandemic with NHS waiting lists already at record levels and with unprecedented staff shortages.

Of course, the investment described in the Statement is welcome, and the plan recognises the many challenges that the whole sector has faced over the past 18 months. Can the Minister say that the Statement is a credible plan to meet those enormous challenges? If it was a genuine plan to prepare for the winter, why did it arrive on 3 December? For example, I noticed that on one of the hottest days of the year, in August, people from GP practices, primary care networks and federations gathered to start to think creatively about managing their winter pressures in a session hosted by the NHS Confederation. When I served on a clinical commissioning group, we did our winter planning in June—it started in the early summer. The board on which I currently serve has been discussing winter pressures and our winter plans for months.

A serious plan to bring down waiting lists would have the workforce at its heart and would have clear targets and deadlines. A serious plan would recognise that, unless we focus on prevention, early intervention and fixing the social care crisis, there is no chance of bringing waiting lists down to the record low levels we saw under the previous Labour Government. A credible plan to tackle the NHS winter crisis—which was foreseeable and foreseen—would have been published long before 3 December. Without a serious strategy to build the health and social care workforce that we need, the plan is not a plan at all.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)]

I call the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, who is taking part remotely.