Health Bill

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Commons Chamber

[James Murray]

I am going to make some progress.

Following Dr Dash’s recommendations, the Bill will embed the mission and functions of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body into the Care Quality Commission to establish a clearer link between investigating safety concerns and increasing the quality of care. We will ensure that we protect the principle of a safe space for people to share their concerns. To ensure that patients are heard at every stage, from commissioning to delivery, we will make sure that patient feedback is embedded alongside decision makers at every level.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I am most grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way, and I congratulate him on his appointment. He has inherited this policy—it is not his own. I assure him that the abolition of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body is a dreadful mistake, because which other investigative function in the healthcare system is completely unconflicted in what it does? By abolishing HSSIB he is taking its functions into the CQC, which is a regulator and compliance enforcer, not an investigator, so that there is no longer any independent, unconflicted body conducting healthcare investigations. Has he consulted the royal colleges about this? I have not spoken to a single royal college that is in favour of the abolition of HSSIB.

[James Murray]

As I made clear, we will protect the principle of a safe space for people to share their concerns. The investigatory function will remain protected within the CQC. The benefit of embedding the HSSIB in the CQC will be to establish that clearer link between investigating safety concerns and increasing the quality of care. That is something on which we can all agree.

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[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I very much welcome the idealistic vision that the hon. Member for Dudley (Sonia Kumar) sets out for us, but I am afraid that it is far from what is in this Bill. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer), I shed no tears for the demise of NHS England; it was never an organisation independent of politics, but always looked upwards at the political leadership and did what Ministers wanted. It was created as an unnecessarily complex organisation. However, I ask myself whether reasserting the principle—unspoken in this debate—that somehow the man in Whitehall knows best is not reverting to the previous failures of the system, when we need to be looking for a much more organic and local system.

I speak in this debate to lament the demise of HSSIB, as proposed in this Bill. It is a profound mistake. It represents a downgrading of safety as a priority in this Government’s health policy, because HSSIB is the only organisation that can independently investigate safety incidents in the NHS and is not conflicted by any other function or role. It does not compromise any other functional role in the NHS, yet the Government have decided to get rid of it. It will not save any bureaucracy. This tiny organisation costs a few million pounds, yet it is pioneering a new system of safety management in the NHS that the NHS culturally barely understands.

We forget that NHS reform is really about people and leadership, not management structures and organisational structures. HSSIB was one of the catalysts that was beginning to transform attitudes towards safety. It was a safety valve for clinicians and patients and their families. It was the one place they could go to tell their story, without fear nor favour, in a safe space, and it was instructive.

[Saqib Bhatti]

My hon. Friend is delivering a passionate speech. Is he reassured in any way by the changes the Secretary of State alluded to that will help strengthen the patient voice?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

Well, no, and the abolition of HSSIB is an example of that. It was the one organisation that could independently hold any part of the system to account. If its functions are transferred to the CQC, those functions will be compromised in their independence —and they are explicitly intended to be compromised. The Government set great store by the Dash review, but it is a flawed and dishonest document that misleads the public by what it says. The Dash review is not about patient safety. It puts far more emphasis on quality. It elides quality and safety, which are not the same thing, even if many people believe them to be so.

That concern is reflected by the fact that there are too many recommendations flying around and too many resources being diverted to recommendations that the NHS does not want to implement. All those recommendations are coming from this plethora of public inquiries that Secretaries of State keep setting up. Surely we want to replace the public inquiry system with something much more effective, as we did for rail accidents. After the Ladbroke Grove rail crash, we replaced public inquiries with the rail accident investigation branch in the Department for Transport.

There has not been a public inquiry into a rail accident since the Ladbroke Grove inquiry, because we have the rail accident investigation branch. There has not been a public inquiry into an aviation accident since 1972, because we have the air accidents investigation branch. Why can we not have the same principle for safety in healthcare, instead of this ridiculous Dash review, which is full of falsehoods and misleading statements? I will give the House just one example of that. The review says:

“HSSIB was not able to retain the maternity programme because the Health and Care Act 2022 does not make provision for maternity investigations under HSSIB.”

That is wrong. It had to give them up, because it did not have the capacity to do them.

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[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

It is an enormous pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Alex McIntyre)—I call him my hon. Friend as he is a fellow member of the Health Committee.

The 2012 Act was mentioned earlier, and I am one of the few Members who was in this House when it was passed. I was sitting on the coalition Benches at the time, but I eventually voted against the Second Reading and the Third Reading of the Bill because it broke the coalition agreement. We had agreed that there would be no top-down reorganisation, but it was the biggest reorganisation that the NHS had ever seen. Although the Liberal Democrats made the Bill significantly less bad—and I congratulate all those involved in that—there was still far too much that damaged the NHS. I welcome this Bill as it addresses some of those deficiencies.

On the points made by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin), I strongly agree about the abolition or the merging of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body into the CQC.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

Clause 59 states:

“The Health Services Safety Investigations Body is abolished.”

It is going to be abolished.

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[Ian Sollom (St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire) (LD)]

Reducing duplication, streamlining priorities, and getting resources close to frontline care—these are reasonable aims. My concern is that in pursuing simplification the Bill makes a series of choices on patient safety that it is not clear have been fully thought through and that risk repeating mistakes that this country has paid a very high price to learn from.

Through successive inquiries, including Mid Staffordshire, Morecambe Bay, Shrewsbury, Ian Paterson—I could name more—Parliament has repeatedly recognised that the NHS cannot be relied on to scrutinise itself. Each found the same pattern: concerns present within the system but not acted on, problems developing in isolated services, and a culture in which those who raised concerns were treated as the difficulty rather than as sources of vital information.

Yet the Bill’s general approach is to remove independent scrutiny rather than improve it. I am not arguing that all the bodies that have been created—Healthwatch, the National Guardian’s Office, which has been absorbed into NHS England, which will now be abolished, and HSSIB—have worked exactly as intended. In fact, I have been working with families and others affected by failings at Cambridge University Hospitals trust. It has been suggested that the trust has not published independent information, commissioned by the trust, that found 32 missed opportunities to identify and address concerns about a paediatric orthopaedic surgeon between 2012 and 2024, and children were harmed as a result.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising the HSSIB question. The Dash review accused HSSIB of exceeding its remit. That is completely wrong in law, and it was always intended to look at systemic problems across the system. The new investigation function in the CQC will not be able to do that, because it will not be independent.

[Ian Sollom]

The CQC and HSSIB themselves have expressed concerns about how those two organisations might be brought together. The AAIB is separate from the Civil Aviation Authority, and that model was created for a good reason. The hon. Member made good points about the statistics on that earlier.

Returning to the case I was talking about, a clinician at the trust who did raise concerns formally in 2015 was simultaneously subjected to disciplinary proceedings and told by the trust that they did not want to hear any more complaints. I wish I could say that I had not heard similar stories from NHS staff several times in a little under two years as an MP.

Just because there are some flaws in those independent systems for the NHS, it is not a reason to remove the independence. That would represent a return to conditions that so many of the inquiries warned us about, and I think that patients would rightly question whether lessons have really been learned.

As the Bill proceeds to Committee stage, I urge the Government to ask a simple question about each body that it proposes to absorb or scrap: not just whether the function will still be performed somewhere but whether it will be performed with genuine independence from the organisations that it scrutinises. That independence has been hard-won, and I hope that Ministers will reflect on that carefully before legislating to remove it.

Puberty Suppressants Trial

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Wednesday 17th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question. I recognise that the decision I took, within days of coming into this office, was received by trans people in particular, and the wider LGBT+ community, as a negative decision that detrimentally impacted their rights and identity. That is why it was an uncomfortable decision for me to take; I knew how it would be received and had to balance up the risk. I believed—and still believe, by the way—that it was the right thing to do, for the right reasons: a clinically led decision.

When it comes to the care and health of children and young people in particular, I make no apology for exercising extreme caution. I do want trans people in our country to know that this Government respect them and their identity, and want them to live with dignity, safety and inclusion. That is the approach that the Government are taking. I realise that decisions that I have personally taken have not been received in that way. That has not been comfortable for me, but I do believe it has been the right thing to do.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

If we were resting this judgment on purely clinical evidence, we would tell every child that whatever sex they were was immutable and could not be changed, and that if they took these puberty blockers they might well find that they had irreversibly changed the course of their lives. How is a child of 10 or 11 going to be capable of making that judgment?

Whatever the Cass review says, in the end this is the Secretary of State’s judgment. I remember the covid inquiry repeatedly saying that it was wrong for Ministers to hide behind “the science”. Equally, there is no single clinical advice on this question: clinicians are as divided as the rest of society. We rely on the Secretary of State’s judgment. I am afraid that I think he has got it wrong.

[Wes Streeting]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his question and for how he puts his criticism, too. As I said earlier, and for the avoidance of doubt, I know what my responsibilities are. I understand the decisions that I take in this office and that I am accountable for those decisions. I do not resile from that. I am following clinical advice; I think that is the right thing to do in this area.

On the question of sex, the right hon. Gentleman is right: sex is immutable. Even if there has been treatment with hormones or surgery, underlying biology none the less means that trans women, for example, would still need to be screened and treated bearing in mind their biological sex, and the opposite is true for trans men. We have to draw that distinction between biological sex and gender identity.

Whatever my discomfort and personal views about this particular trial or about the notion of young people using puberty blockers in this way, I cannot ignore, and should convey faithfully to the House, conversations that I have had with trans young people and adults. They have described in powerful and unforgettable terms not just the life changing, but the life enhancing experience that they have had. I am thinking particularly of the university student I met; if she walked into this Chamber now, we would assume that she was born female. She is living her best life and described in very powerful and unforgettable terms the impact that treatment has had for her and her quality of life. At the same time, I think of high-profile cases such as Keira Bell’s. That is why we have to tread extremely carefully in this area, to follow evidence and to build an evidence base. It is also why these are such finely balanced judgements and why I can be simultaneously uncomfortable with the permanent ban that I put in place and uncomfortable with the clinical trial. I hope that I have reassured people that I think very deeply about these issues before taking decisions.

NHS 10-Year Plan

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I am so grateful to my hon. Friend for her question. I pay tribute to Professor Ian Abbs. He is an outstanding NHS leader, and we have loved working with him. As with many people of his calibre moving on from their positions of leadership in the NHS, it is a bit like the Hotel California—you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. We will not let him drift off into a quiet retirement; we are determined to make use of his expertise.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise the importance of nursing. Nurses and midwives will play an increasingly important role in neighbourhood health. They are central to our shift to a modern, digital NHS. They are clinical leaders in their own right. Following the 10-year health plan, the chief nursing officer for England will work with the professions to develop a strategy that will make nursing and midwifery modern careers of choice, to address the decline in applications. As I have set out this week, we are looking forward to working closely with the Royal College of Nursing and Unison—of which, I should say, I am a member—to make sure that the status, the conditions and the impact of nursing on our NHS go from strength to strength, because nurses are the backbone of the NHS. We would not have a national health service without them.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I join others in welcoming much of the Secretary of State’s plan, but I want to return to the question of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Melton and Syston (Edward Argar) referred. I welcome the tone of the Secretary of State’s response to that part of my right hon. Friend’s questions, but will he agree to meet those of us from the Select Committee—a cross-party group of people—who campaigned over many years to bring this body, which is still in its infancy, into existence before making any further decisions on it?

As my right hon. Friend says, HSSIB is not a regulator, and to put it in with a regulator will create confusion about what it is. If he were Secretary of State for Transport, he would never dream of putting the air accidents investigation branch into the Civil Aviation Authority, because they have completely different and separate functions. That needs to be understood across the health service, and it is obviously not well understood at the moment.

[Wes Streeting]

I welcome the hon. Member’s constructive approach. Of course, we are happy to receive representations on HSSIB. I would just like to outline the problem we are trying to solve, which is that the patient safety landscape is increasingly cluttered. We have far too many bodies trying to do the same thing, cutting across each other, and for frontline staff and leaders on the receiving end of those many and often competing instructions, it can actually make things less safe rather than more safe. I really value the expertise in the Health Services Safety Investigations Body. We do not want to see that expertise lost, nor do we want to move it into the CQC prematurely, before the CQC is ready to receive it. I hope that that reassures him, but we are happy to have that conversation.

Hospice Funding

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Tuesday 8th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Joy Morrissey]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point about the pressure that hospices take off the NHS. The wonderful work of the hospice the hon. Gentleman mentions is the reason the NHS can function in the way it does. The cost savings on palliative care—both in hospital and out-of-hospital care settings—are invaluable. The hospices in our constituencies are a model that already works, and they are trusted by the community. I think we should be funding that model, instead of allowing hospices to die on the vine because of a lack of funding and changes to the funding model. I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. We should not just complain about this terrible new tax that is being applied to hospices, but point out to the Minister that the return on taxpayers’ investment in what hospices spend on the dying is very great indeed. If a little bit of the big increase in funding that the NHS received was transferred to hospices, it would pay great dividends; it would save the need for much more costly care in the hospitals. The return is 300%, according to St Helena hospice, just outside my constituency, on whose behalf I am speaking this evening. I hope the Minister will address that point when he winds up.

[Joy Morrissey]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. That 300% cost benefit would be replicated across the country, in every hospice setting. A small amount of money given to hospices through the NHS funding model would be invaluable. We talk about palliative care and assisted dying, but why are we not having a debate about increasing hospice funding, and making that service part of the NHS? If hospice settings were part of the NHS, they would be exempt from the rise in national insurance contributions. That increase is devastating hospices right now. Many rely on volunteers or low-paid workers in charity shops. The money raised helps pay for the running of hospices. Although that is a wonderful model, hospices are not exempt from the NICs increase, as other NHS bodies are. Even changing the status of hospices to make them part of the NHS would go a very long way to making their financial model viable.

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[Stephen Kinnock]

The decisions on ENICs and where they are being levied have been made. I think it was made very clear that the line was drawn where it was drawn. Any attempt to try to reverse engineer where that line should be drawn would not really be aligned with the policy decisions that were made at the Budget.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

Was it the Government’s intention to put an additional tax on hospices? Is that exactly what the Government intended to do, or is that an unforeseen consequence?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I would not dare to speak from this Dispatch Box on behalf of the Chancellor, but I am absolutely clear that when she did the autumn Budget, she knew that she had to dig us out of a very deep hole indeed, and that required levying taxes that she had to levy. The line had to be drawn somewhere and that is where the line was drawn.

On the other questions asked by the hon. Member for Beaconsfield, the funding has gone through Hospice UK, so it is not direct funding in that sense. Hospice UK has kindly co-ordinated the process because it is extremely well informed about which hospices across the country have opportunities to upgrade their infrastructure, whether that be IT infrastructure, refurbishment or whatever it might be. It has reviewed those proposals, worked at tremendous pace and, as a result, we have managed to deliver the entire £25 million of the first tranche. We are now working closely with Hospice UK on the £75 million and I am confident that that money will be out of the door and into hospices in very quick time this year, based on the outstanding performance on the first £25 million tranche. I therefore hope the hon. Lady will be reassured on that point.

In closing, I hope that we at least have a consensus on the vital importance of hospices. The Government are committed to working at pace to ensure that we secure a sustainability and solidity for the sector going forward. I thank the hon. Member for Beaconsfield once again for securing this important debate. I also thank and wish everybody in this Chamber all the very best for the recess, and I look forward to seeing them all on the other side.

Question put and agreed to.

Hospice Funding

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Karin Smyth]

That is possibly one of the cheekiest questions I have ever heard asked here, and I am obviously going to have to say yes. Frankly, rather him than me, but good luck to my hon. Friend on doing that. I know that many hon. Members raise money for their local constituencies and that the marathon is an important part of that.

We understand how different hospices are funded differently throughout the country. We want to make sure that end of life care, with all the different options that people have in their local systems, is well supported. It is really important for people to have some of that security, and I know that this announcement will be welcomed by my hon. Friend’s local hospice, as it is by the sector today.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Merry Christmas, Mr Speaker.

The St Helena Hospice in Colchester, which serves my constituency and that of the Labour hon. Member for Colchester (Pam Cox), estimates that the national insurance increase will cost it £300,000 in a full year. Can the Minister now give a guarantee that the hospice will be compensated by the Government in full?

[Karin Smyth]

It is good to hear the hon. Gentleman supporting his local hospice with his neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Pam Cox). We will announce allocations for the whole sector and the NHS in the usual way in the new year.

NHS: Independent Investigation

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

My hon. Friend, who I am delighted to see representing Bassetlaw, is already showing herself to be an outstanding champion for her community. She raises a really good challenge that we all face as constituency MPs: the public recognise that change takes time and that we cannot fix more than a decade of problems in the immediate future, but they want to know that at least we are hitting the ground running and getting the job done.

I can reassure my hon. Friend’s constituents in Bassetlaw that within our first couple of months, this Government employed 1,000 more GPs on the frontline who had been left unemployed by the previous Conservative Government. We did that pretty much immediately. We have settled—I hope; we await the outcome of the ballot—the junior doctors’ dispute, so we can remove the cost of disruption and industrial action and start work on getting the waiting lists down. We will be working at pace to deliver 40,000 more appointments every week so that we can cut waiting lists, and 700,000 urgent emergency dentistry appointments so that we can ensure that people get the care they need. Every single promise in our manifesto, notwithstanding the challenges in the public finances, was a fully costed, fully funded promise that we will keep and that the country can afford.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

May I urge the Secretary of State to learn from what is working well in the NHS, as well as from what has gone wrong? In reference to the Health and Care Act 2022, paragraph 14 on page 121 of the report states:

“The result is that the basic structure of a headquarters, regions, and integrated care boards (ICBs) is fit for purpose.”

I draw the Secretary of State’s attention to the Suffolk and North East Essex ICB, which is one of the most successful in the country. Can we learn from that success, and build it into other areas?

[Wes Streeting]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his constructive approach. The tragedy of the Health and Care Act 2022 was that a large part of its focus was on trying to correct the enormous damage done by Lord Lansley through a top-down reorganisation that nobody wanted and that the country could not afford. That is why I have said very clearly that we will not repeat the mistakes of top-down reorganisation. With the architecture of the system, we will take an approach of evolution rather than counter-revolution.

On the hon. Gentleman’s point about learning from what is working well in the NHS, what gives me great hope for the future of our national health service is that every day there are amazing people providing great-quality care, reforming, innovating and showing us what the future looks like. It is the responsibility of this Government to take the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS. That is exactly what we will do.

Government Policy on Health

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. Let the record reflect that, when he was raising the crisis that is leaving people in Hartlepool without access to NHS dentistry, Conservative Members were shouting, “What about Alan Milburn?” That says everything about their priorities, everything about their lack of remorse and contrition, and everything about why they should stay in opposition for a very long time while we sort out the state of NHS dentistry in Hartlepool and across the country.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

How legitimate is it for the House of Commons to ask about external people coming into Departments and potential conflicts of interest? In cases like Alan Milburn’s, or that of a former Conservative Secretary of State, how does the Department identify and manage conflicts of interest?

[Wes Streeting]

It is entirely legitimate to ask questions, and it is also entirely legitimate for Government Departments to invite people with a wide range of experience and insight to advise on policy debates and discussions. That happens all the time. Where do we draw the line? Do we have to send compliance forms to Cancer Research UK before it comes in to talk about how we tackle cancer? Do we have to send declaration of interest forms to patients who want to discuss awful cases they have experienced?

Frankly, I find this pantomime astonishing. I am surprised that the shadow Secretary of State thinks this is such a priority that she should raise it on the Floor of the House rather than NHS waiting lists, ambulance response times, GP access or the state of social care. It is clear that the Conservatives have not learned why they are in opposition.

Pharmacy First

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

I am always happy to speak to colleagues on both sides of the House about their ideas for new dental and pharmacy schools. It is an ongoing interest.

England is, in fact, blessed with huge numbers of community pharmacies—well over 10,000—and four in five of us are able to walk to a community pharmacy within 20 minutes. The number of pharmacies in more deprived areas is double the number in more well-off areas. We are very well served by our brilliant pharmacies, and I hope the Pharmacy First programme will improve their footfall and their value in each of our communities.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I very much welcome this initiative to encourage our pharmacies to provide more frontline healthcare. People need to know about this, because they often do not think of going to the pharmacy. What work are the Government doing in larger population centres such as Harwich and Dovercourt, which has over 20,000 people but no out-of-hours pharmacy cover? People have to make a round trip of more than 40 miles to collect a prescription on a Sunday, for example. Are the Government doing any work on 24/7 pharmacy coverage for larger population areas?

[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. Pharmacists will keep their community pharmacy open for up to 72 hours a week in most cases, and up to 100 hours in some cases, which means there is weekend accessibility. We keep this under review, but the availability is very good.

Recovering Access to Primary Care

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Tuesday 9th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

I agree and thank the hon. Member, who is absolutely right to recognise the huge amount of work done by GPs and their staff, including receptionists. That is why the recovery plan is very much targeted at recognising the workload. I flagged in my statement the additional volume of patients that a typical GP surgery is seeing and that reflects the huge amount of work that is done. I think pensions were a factor, certainly in the feedback from the profession. The issue was raised. The changes the Chancellor announced take 9,000 GPs out of the tax changes, but the hon. Gentleman is right—that was not the only factor; the workload was another. The recovery plan looks to cut bureaucracy and, as I say, reduces the targets to five. It also looks at areas where there are appointments that we do not feel are necessary—so it looks at how secondary care can do fit notes, for example, rather than someone needing to go to the GP to get one. There are areas where we can streamline GPs’ workload and that is what the recovery plan does. On the workforce plan, we have said on a number of occasions that, post purdah, we would set that out very shortly. We will have more to say on that in due course.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I join the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) in inviting the Secretary of State to thank all our GPs for their incredible work. I very much welcome his statement. Will the Pharmacy First plan enable places such as Harwich and Dovercourt in my constituency to increase the out-of-hours cover that pharmacies provide? Otherwise people will have to travel miles just to get a prescription. Also, where are all these new GP staff going to be put? Most GPs have very cramped premises. West Mersea surgery in my constituency has been trying to develop new premises for a long time, unsuccessfully because the GPs’ partners will not take the risk. At the Mayflower surgery in Harwich, there is empty space in the building rented by the NHS from a failed Labour private finance initiative project, but the GPs cannot afford to pay the rent, so the space sits empty, although it is still paid for by the taxpayer. What are we going to do about that?

[Steve Barclay]

First, I join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to the work that GPs do in his constituency, as they do elsewhere. On pharmacies, part of the reason for the investment is to support pharmacy, including in rural settings. The more funding going in, the more they can prescribe. The more things they are able to do, the better the business model. There are more pharmacists and more pharmacy shops than there were in 2010, but it is important we make the business model more viable and that is what the announcement does. On estates planning, that is an issue for each integrated care board to consider. He mentions a specific issue locally with a former PFI and how it is being used. That is not a new issue. I sat on the Public Accounts Committee when it was chaired by the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) and I remember looking at many a Labour PFI. The regional fire control centres were a case in point; the estate could no longer be afforded and the space was empty. If there is an issue like that, I will be happy to look at it in due course.

Covid-19 Update

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

We work very closely across the UK, and the positive output from that work has been evident throughout the pandemic, especially on vaccinations and antivirals. We will continue to work together and provide whatever support is needed.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend obviously understands that these measures will try the patience of the British people. Will he look at the other measures that can suppress the virus, particularly the booster rate? Does he agree that the rate of booster vaccinations is constrained not by supply or demand, but by the capacity of the health service to deliver the vaccines? Will he also, therefore, support integrated care systems that call on military assistance or local authority assistance and want to reopen the mass vaccine sites to accelerate the vaccine programme?