West Cumbria Health Services

Ben Gummer Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2016 Westminster Hall

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

It is very kind of you to oversee this debate, Mr Nuttall. I thank the hon. Member for Copeland (Mr Reed) for his kind words and I of course accept the fact that he speaks on behalf of all his constituents—he has a fine track record of doing so. It is good to see the hon. Member for Workington (Sue Hayman) by his side, and to see here present my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (John Stevenson), who has also taken a profound interest in this intractable and difficult matter. I do not have much time, so I will address the points that the hon. Member for Copeland raised in turn.

The hon. Gentleman said that the NHS is our national religion. One of his great forebears, the creator of the NHS, Nye Bevan, said that socialism is the religion of priorities. I know that the hon. Gentleman understands the nonconformist antecedents of the British Labour party, perhaps better than some of the party’s current leadership. He will also know that we need to get priorities right in Cumbria. That is something that neither we nor our predecessors in Government have achieved for many years.

I hope that the hon. Gentleman does not mind if I start by refuting his central contention that the success regime has been perverted in its course. That is absolutely not the case. The success regime has had no further instruction from its co-sponsors, NHS England and NHS Improvement, since its foundation. I have certainly made no intervention, other than to listen carefully to Sir Neil McKay when he came to see me a few weeks ago so that I could understand the challenges that he has in bringing the success regime to a conclusion.

I am as frustrated as the hon. Gentleman is about the time the success regime is taking to formulate a plan, and I expressed that frustration to Sir Neil. He is going through the proper consultation process, which in Cumbria above all places needs to be done properly, given the failure of previous consultations either to be done properly or to result in a conclusion. That is why I understand why he feels he needs to go through the process as rigorously as possible, but I do want to see a conclusion. We need to see a proper clinical resolution to the problems. It is not for me to say what that clinical resolution will be, so I cannot comment on the hon. Gentleman’s specific questions about service delivery at West Cumberland hospital and its relationship with Carlisle, or, for that matter—he did not mention this—with other partners in the north, be they the Northumbria NHS Foundation Trust or other possible partners for the trusts in Cumbria.

We will give Cumbria all the means to be able to achieve what it needs to achieve, whether they be financial or representative. I hope the hon. Gentleman will understand that the 3% funding increase for the clinical commissioning group in Cumbria this year alone shows our commitment to ensuring that Cumbria has the funds it requires to achieve the changes it needs to make. Nevertheless, those changes will not come just from more money; there will need to be reform, which is why I urge him to look at the success regime’s emerging thoughts on integrated care communities. Those thoughts have been brought together not by me, NHS England or NHS Improvement bureaucrats—I count myself as a bureaucrat in that sense—but by local clinicians who understand the problems on the ground.

I cannot comment on the devolution deal, which is a matter for the Treasury, but I can assure the hon. Gentleman that I will ensure that he has an answer from the correct person on the recent never events, of which I was informed. He should know that the Secretary of State keeps in his office a board of never events throughout the NHS. He takes a keen interest in them and in their reduction. I hope that I can ensure that the hon. Gentleman gets a proper answer to those questions.

I have previously endorsed the moves by the University of Central Lancashire that the hon. Gentleman mentioned, and I will of course ask Health Education England to engage with that process as fully as possible. I disagree with him about the impact of nurse bursaries. It is exactly by reforming health education funding that we can release 10,000 additional places in nurse training school. Those places will mean that we can staff areas of the country that have been difficult to staff in the past. We cannot provide such massive expansion by the traditional means, and nor could the Labour party have promised to do so, because the costs involved are so considerable. It is by that reform that we will achieve the ends he wants to see. I want to be outlining more items of medical education reform in the next few months, and I hope that they will be to the advantage of places such as the University of Central Lancashire. In the meantime, I shall ensure that Health Education England takes a keen interest in that work—I know that it already is.

On the second phase of funding for the West Cumberland hospital A&E department, it is incumbent on me to say that £90 million has already been spent. That shows our commitment to ensuring that services in West Cumberland are of a consistent and proper level. Nevertheless, I will find out what the blockage is. I know there is a problem with increased costs and the fact that, as anticipated, the budget has been broken. We cannot have a situation anywhere in the NHS where, just because a budget is broken, we pay for capital increases, but I shall ensure that that particular matter is addressed as quickly as possible and that that is not part of the success regime reasoning, as it is part of a phased deal for that hospital.

Finally, the hon. Gentleman raised the issue of GPs. I know that he will have noted NHS England’s announcement last week about the improved deal for GPs: there will be in excess of £2 billion over the Parliament to increase support for GPs. A lot of that will be going into under-doctor areas and those areas into which it is hard to recruit. Those are subtly different things, but both apply to Cumbria. I hope that, over the next few years, he will see the impact as the 5,000 additional GPs that the Government have committed to providing feed through to improved services on the ground.

West Cumbria and Cumbria as a whole are indeed a mark of whether we get the NHS to be a national service. Bevan coined the term “universalise the best”, but that also means universalising the best that we learn from elsewhere in the world. We must learn from elsewhere in the world about how to deal with scarcely populated areas and make sure that we have specific solutions for places such as Cumbria. We have not yet done that successfully, which is why I want the success regime to be concluded as quickly as possible, and with community buy-in, so that we can have the results that Members present want to see.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).