The National Health Service

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Whitford]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that point. Of course, Governments can borrow at a much lower interest rate than any private business. Money is being sucked out of the NHS through the PFI across the UK, but there are also other ways in which money is being sucked out of the NHS, particularly NHS England—for example, through outsourcing under the Health and Social Care Act 2012. Private companies have to make a profit. Their chief executive is bound to make profit for the shareholders. They are not bound to deliver quality of care. We have seen clinical commissioning groups get trapped in this way. Six commissioning groups in Surrey tried to bring community care back into the NHS—they were not breaking a contract—but Virgin did what Virgin always does if it does not get a franchise renewed. It sued the CCGs. It is all hidden behind a commercial veil, but we know that at least one of those commissioning groups paid over £300,000 to settle out of court, and six groups together means that the figure was likely to be well over £2 million.

[Mr Sheerman]

I agree with almost everything the hon. Lady says about PFI contracts. We got a terrible PFI contract in Halifax and Calderdale. It is still a millstone around our necks. When I chaired the Education and Skills Committee, we looked at PFI contracts. The fact is that they are financial agreements, and some were better than others. But a lot of very clever City types came to places like Halifax and ran rings around the trust, so it got a bad deal. That is the truth of the matter.

[Dr Whitford]

That is true, and this obviously applies to the process of bidding and tendering for delivering services. An NHS orthopaedic department will not be able to compete with a major multinational with regards to its bid team, its tendering team and its ability to put in loss leaders. The problem is that all this money is being lost in a circular reorganisation that has been going on in NHS England literally for the last 25-plus years, with people being made redundant and given a big package, but then someone quite similar being re-employed or the same person being re-employed somewhere else with a different title—health authorities to primary care trusts to clinical commissioning groups. It is a huge waste of money, which is being sucked away from patient care, and that is where we want the money actually to go.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I shall rattle through my speech. I always like to speak in the Queen’s Speech debate. I thought I was going to be robbed this time, but here we are, back with the opportunity.

I am not an expert on health, but I do take a great interest in it, and I have a real interest in management, so I want to say something about the big issue in health. We have a brilliant national health service, and we will all, politically speaking, keep on fighting about it, but I agree with the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart): at some stage, we will need a royal commission, especially on social care, which will become very expensive as people live longer and as the challenge of providing decent care increases. Furthermore, everyone loves the NHS, but not many people want to pay much more in their taxation. We have to crack that and find a way to fund the NHS properly.

Not only that, but we are getting cleverer all the time. I had the pleasure of a breakfast meeting with Professor Topol, who wrote an innovative paper for the Government about new technology, science and our ability to identify cancers and diagnose earlier. It is all so exciting, and it is going to happen, but it will cost money.

Where our health service is severely deficient is in the quality of management. I spent some time in hospital a couple of years ago. It was not serious, but I had the chance to look at how a hospital was run, and the more I looked, the more I realised that people were not trained properly: doctors do not get trained as managers. We often promote highly skilled medical people to manage our health service, but there is no great institution educating the best administrators and managers in the health service. They have them in some parts of the United States and in other countries, such as France, but we do not have that very high-quality management, and we need to do something about it, because the future needs high-quality people.

May I strike a slightly discordant note at this point? What causes ill health is poverty. We all know about the relationship between the two. We know about it in my constituency, and we know about it everywhere. The fact is that poorer people get ill, and in the last few years austerity has made a lot of people ill. One of the indicators of poverty and ill health that I have noticed is dentistry: in this country, people have to be really, really poor to get any free dentistry. There are very few NHS dentists in my constituency, and we are beginning to see people with awful-looking teeth. You need wealth these days to afford good dentistry. It is a dreadful, dreadful thing that we have pushed dentistry out of the national health service. It is unacceptable to so many people.

On the other hand, I believe that there are very exciting signs. We now need a new model of hospital and a new model of GP surgery, and some of the very best that I have visited are top-class. I think we have learnt that big, big hospitals are no longer the most appropriate for most communities. I am delighted that, after a massive campaign in Huddersfield, we have money for a new A&E service in our old hospital that Harold Wilson opened, but that hospital is out of date. We need a new build, and I can tell the Secretary of State and his ministerial team that we would build a modern, techie, innovative, wonderful hospital on that Harold Wilson site. We already have some money for the A&E, but we could go further and build a wonderful, futurist hospital.

I have done a lot in public health. I organised the seat-belt legislation that banned people from allowing children to be unrestrained in cars. That is one of the things that I have done with the World Health Organisation on an international basis. Every year, 1,780 people are killed on the roads and 10 times that number are seriously injured, and the impact on our hospitals is massive.

We need much better public health education. Where has it gone? People talk about it, but then they turn it off. Local authorities do not have the money to deliver it, and to deal with the problems of obesity, drug addiction—which was mentioned earlier by the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston)—alcohol addiction and smoking. We could make such changes if there were more relevant public education on those matters, and on matters such as atrial fibrillation: half the people in this country do not know that they have an irregular pulse and are likely to have a stroke.

There are all sorts of things that we can do in our wonderful health service. We just need the time and the resources.