Healthcare Provision: East of England

Blake Stephenson Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Westminster Hall

[Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) for securing this debate. We seem to be on a journey from east to west; we have covered Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, and now we are in Bedfordshire, one of the smallest counties in England—and I am pleased to be joined today by my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin). We are a small county, and my very rural constituency is squeezed between Bedford and Luton. I would like to dwell on three points: housing growth and primary care, hospital modernisations, and rural communities and health equality.

Our communities in Mid Bedfordshire have done more than their fair bit and taken more than their fair share of housing growth. We have seen population growth far outstrip the delivery of new infrastructure. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a planned new town called Wixams in my constituency. Residents had reasonably expected that the infrastructure they needed would be staged throughout the development so that they would have the healthcare that they need as that community grows, but that has not happened.

Seventeen years after shovels went in the ground, around 5,000 people now call Wixams home. That number could be as high as 20,000 when the development is finished, but they still do not have a GP surgery. The community has been fighting for years to have a GP surgery, and their demands have been falling on deaf ears, between the local authorities—Bedford and Central Bedfordshire—and the ICB. The ICB is not accountable to our local populations, and that demand for a GP surgery is falling on deaf ears. I ask the Minister, if I may, to respond to that and to join and help me to unblock the issues that we are facing with local, unaccountable integrated care boards, to deliver the healthcare in Wixams.

I know that that case in Wixams is not an isolated one. Across Mid Bedfordshire, I hear time and again of cases where GP surgery capacity has failed to grow and meet population growth. We have heard statistics from colleagues in this room; in our ICB area, the average number of patients per GP is now 2,955, up 651 since December 2016; in the same period, GP numbers have reduced by 44. That just is not good enough—we need better healthcare for our constituents. I am sure that that picture is painted in constituencies right across the east of England.

If the Government are serious about plans to deliver 300,000 new houses per year, they also need to be serious about their plans to deliver the infrastructure that our communities need, starting with a clear plan for a capital investment programme that will give local communities up front the funding they need to deliver GP surgeries rather than having to wait for developer contributions after the houses are built. I will be interested to hear what the Minister says about infrastructure alongside housing development.

My second point is on hospital modernisation. Communities across the east of England deserve access to modern and advanced hospitals. I welcomed the fact that the previous Government had committed to the inclusion of the Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital and the Milton Keynes Women’s and Children’s Hospital in the new hospitals programme, and I urge the current Government to confirm that they will proceed with that investment. However, we cannot stop there.

Right across the east of England, we see hospitals failing to deliver the high-quality services that our constituents need. That is not the fault of the hard-working doctors and nurses who work in the hospitals; it is because of crumbling buildings and poor technology. In Bedfordshire, we are behind on NHS digitisation, and significant investment is needed in the fabric of our local hospitals—particularly in Bedford, where I understand there is a significant and serious maintenance backlog.

In the coming months, I look forward to engaging further with the Minister about the Government’s plans to drive forward NHS digitisation in Bedfordshire, and to discussing how we can ensure that people using Bedford Hospital—mostly people from the north of my constituency—have access to the state-of-the-art facilities.

My third point is on rural communities and health inequality. Across the east of England, many of us represent highly rural constituencies. I do not think that I will “out-rural” colleagues from Norfolk, but Mid Bedfordshire is among the most rural; as a result, some of our residents face significant health inequalities. Those include difficulties for remote and isolated hamlets, which have poor access to poor health services, in accessing treatment; insufficient public transport; narrow roads; bad broadband; longer travel times to access the local GP and dentist—if there is a dentist; and all the challenges that many of our more rural healthcare settings face in recruiting staff.

During this Parliament, I would like to see the Government commit to delivering for rural areas, with focused efforts to deliver staff and services that reach out into the most isolated communities, to ensure that everyone can access the healthcare they need within a short journey from their front door. I hope that colleagues across the east of England share that ambition.