Oral Answers to Questions

Ben Gummer Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Ben Gummer)]

I am pleased to refer my hon. Friend to the recent appointments of Ruth Carnall to the role of programme chair and Judith Dean to the role of programme director for the success regime in Northern, Eastern and Western Devon. Together, they will lead an intensive diagnostic exercise within the local health economy, which will develop options for change to be implemented in the new year.

[Johnny Mercer]

Given the news last week that the Northern, Eastern and Western Devon clinical commissioning group that covers my constituency has appointed a special team to ensure the projected £430 million funding shortfall does not become a reality, what can my hon. Friend do to assure my constituents that an already challenged constituency can retain confidence in its health care provision?

[Ben Gummer]

My hon. Friend rightly points out that there are specific challenges in Northern, Eastern and Western Devon and that is precisely why NHS England has instituted the success regime and why it has moved quickly to appoint a programme director and team. I hope that with the engagement that I know he will lead with his colleagues they will come to a resolution that will ensure that the challenges cease.

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

9. What additional financial support he is making available to the NHS to help it deal with winter pressures.

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[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

12. What steps his Department is taking to manage and meet demand for A&E services in Worcester.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Ben Gummer)]

Last month, the Department approved a £4 million capital improvement loan for the expansion of the A&E department at Worcestershire Royal hospital and the development of a dedicated discharge lounge. Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust and the local health system will also receive practical support via the emergency care improvement programme to help the trust to address the challenges it has faced in meeting the four-hour A&E waiting time standard.

[Mr Walker]

I thank the Minister for his reply. I warmly welcome his recent decision to approve the £4 million interim investment in A&E capacity and a new discharge suite at the Worcestershire Royal. As he knows, demand remains very high, and the number of patients being admitted to hospital is close to record levels. May I urge him and his colleagues to look very carefully and urgently at plans for further upgrades, which could deliver much-needed capacity over the coming years?

[Ben Gummer]

I assure my hon. Friend that we will do so, but he will be conscious that capital plans are the responsibility of individual trusts. I urge his trust to take part fully in the Worcestershire acute review and in other reviews of the west midlands health service. There are challenges, and we will fix the problems only if there are locally sourced solutions, which we will then seek to support.

[Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)]

13. What estimate his Department has made of the change in the number of nurse training places since 2010.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Ben Gummer)]

The number of available nurse training places in England in 2015-16 is consistent with those filled in 2010-11. There are 20,033 nurse training places available in England in 2015-16, compared with 20,092 in 2010-11.

[Drew Hendry]

Simon Stevens, the head of the NHS in England, has already highlighted the devastating impact that new immigration earnings thresholds will have on nursing numbers—it is estimated that up to 29,755 nurses will be affected, and that the recruitment cost will be more than £178.5 million by 2020. What representations will the Minister be making to the Home Secretary to put a stop to this irresponsible and illogical change in policy that defines ballet dancers but not nurses as a shortage occupation?

[Ben Gummer]

The hon. Gentleman will be reassured to know that there are continuing and cordial relations between the Department of Health and the Home Office. Trusts have had three years to prepare for this moment. There is a bigger issue at play here, which is that there are five applicants for every nursing place in the United Kingdom; that is the position for people wishing to train as a nurse. Our first responsibility is to ensure that we are getting as many people who want to be nurses in this country into a nurse training place.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, which covers the Wakefield constituency, has been forced to recruit nurses from both Spain and India. Following on from the previous question, what representations has the Minister made to the Home Office, because these changes could affect nurses who have come to Britain, bought mortgages here and plan to make their lives here? Will they be affected?

[Ben Gummer]

The hon. Lady knows that the Immigration Advisory Committee is independent and it makes its recommendations on that basis. There are trusts—I have visited some myself—that had previously relied on agency and migrant labour that have now managed to change the way they are hiring staff so that they can better source sustainable staffing from the domestic staffing pool.

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

In December 2009, Lord Lansley, as the then shadow Health Secretary, described the amount spent by the NHS on agency staff as “unforgiveable”. Since he made that statement, agency spending has spiralled out of control, rising by 83% in the past three years. Ministers are in denial about the root causes of that increase. The cuts to nursing training places have created a shortage of nurses and forced hospitals to spend vast amounts on expensive agency staff. Will the Minister now come clean and admit that it was the Government’s mismanagement that caused this financial crisis?

[Ben Gummer]

The hon. Gentleman should know that the unforgiveable thing was the dereliction of care by a Department of Health under a previous regime. It contributed to short staffing—a significant part of the scandal at Mid Staffs—that we needed to put right in short order. That required an emergency response and agency labour to be employed. We are now putting staffing on a sustainable basis; we were left with short staffing in 2010.

[Tom Pursglove (Corby) (Con)]

14. What steps he is taking to ensure consistency in services and treatment throughout the NHS.

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[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

T9. Patients in England wait 18 weeks for an operation, but in Wales, where Labour has run the NHS for the past 16 years, they wait 26 weeks. Does that not prove that only the Conservative party can be trusted to run the national health service?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Ben Gummer)]

My hon. Friend is right. A further cause of distress for the people of Wales is the fact they do not have the funding that the NHS requires in their country, just as England would not had a Labour Government been elected in 2015, because we would not have the funding that this Conservative Government have promised to ensure top care for patients.

[Ian C. Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)]

T5. The all- party spinal cord injury group, which I chair, recently reported that very vulnerable patients are being prejudiced by delayed discharges, taking up lots of public money in hospital expenses that should be used to treat more patients. Will the Secretary of State carry out an urgent service review to address this real problem in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?

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[Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)]

T8. The Royal College of Nursing reports that it is becoming clear that for the first time since the early 2000s there is a critical shortage of registered nurses in the UK. Both the UK and global nursing labour markets are changing, and our increasing reliance on alternative sources is not sustainable. In 2014, 37,645 students across the UK were turned away from nursing courses. Is it not time the Minister admitted that the situation is not good enough and that the Government need drastically to scale up those places to reduce dependency on overseas nursing staff?

[Ben Gummer]

The thrust of the right hon. Lady’s question is correct. That is why we have near-record numbers of nurses in training and a record number of nurses in practice, and we will continue to see growth over the next five years.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

Last year the NHS paid £300 million to claimants’ lawyers. Indeed, for small and medium claims, the lawyers made two to three times as much as the claimants themselves. Is there more we can do to stop this abusive behaviour?

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[Mims Davies (Eastleigh) (Con)]

Given this Government’s continued excellent commitment to investing in our NHS and reducing preventable mortality, does the Minister agree that keeping healthcare provision as local as possible is very important for Moorgreen hospital in my constituency?

[Ben Gummer]

The core purpose of the Vanguard programme is to ensure that we get local solutions to local healthcare problems. Only by making sure that we release the potential of local healthcare staff and providers, doctors and nurses, do we get the solutions we require rather than things being determined from Whitehall, as was the wont of previous Administrations that we will not follow.

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

I can think of few things more frightening than being in labour and being turned away from a maternity unit that someone has visited, become familiar with, and got to know the staff. Over a third of units closed their doors to women in labour last year. What is the Minister going to do about this, and why does he think it has been happening?