Healthcare in Rural Areas
Blake Stephenson Excerpts(1 week, 4 days ago)
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Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered healthcare in rural areas.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I hope that this debate can be a constructive discussion of the particular challenges that rural communities face in accessing healthcare. In that spirit, I will open the debate by saying some things that I hope no one will find controversial.
Rural communities are bigger and further apart than urban ones and have fewer people in a wider area, which makes the delivery of basic services much harder than in major conurbations. The time and money lost to travel is higher because the distance between places is larger, and it is more challenging to recruit and retain staff in public services such as healthcare. Accessing online support—often seen as a silver bullet for the future of healthcare—can be challenging in rural areas where high-quality broadband and mobile signal have not yet arrived. All that means that securing equal access to healthcare in rural areas as in urban areas is more challenging and expensive, which has practical implications. In the Health Secretary’s constituency of Ilford North, there are 20 main GP surgeries. In my constituency of Mid Bedfordshire, there are just nine. The age of the village doctor is gone.
When my constituents heard of the plans for a neighbourhood health service, with a neighbourhood health centre, within the Government’s 10-year health plan, there was some optimism that that age might return, even if not necessarily in the same way as before. In principle, neighbourhood health centres are absolutely the right step. They are a way to empower people to get the healthcare that they need on their doorstep and to keep them out hospitals, which could then focus on those who need the most specialised care.
Sarah Gibson (Chippenham) (LD)
Does the hon. Member agree that rural communities, such as mine and his, and villages such as Lyneham, which is famous for its serious airbase and is full of veterans, now find themselves with poor GP surgeries and no future for that? People in those villages are waiting longer and longer to get that care and feel completely left behind, as they have no access to any form of health service.
Blake Stephenson
I know Lyneham quite well; it is a beautiful part of the world—although of course, Mid Bedfordshire is far more beautiful. I have to agree with the hon. Lady. The situation is deeply concerning for those in rural communities who are struggling to access GPs, and, given the growth and development in our communities, access is becoming much more difficult as the years roll on.
Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)
The hon. Gentleman is making a valid point about development. In the rural village of Bosham in my constituency, a resident was recently told that they would have to wait four months for a GP appointment. Meanwhile, they have seen plans come online for the development of 300 homes behind the GP surgery, and the surgery is now expecting 600 new patients. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need to have an infrastructure-first principle, because the reason that residents get so frustrated with development is that they cannot see those extra GP appointments coming online once those homes have been built?
Blake Stephenson
The hon. Lady front-runs entirely a point I will make later, and I thank her for doing so.
Unfortunately, that early optimism about neighbourhood healthcare was somewhat tempered by a response I received to a written question, indicating that the Government expect neighbourhoods to have a geography of around 50,000 people. I am afraid that that will do nothing for people in Mid Bedfordshire. It will mean either that rural communities on the edge of urban catchments will be split up and served by “neighbourhood” health hubs in nearby major settlements, which will likely be Hitchin, Bedford, Luton or Milton Keynes, or that one rural “neighbourhood” will cover the vast majority of rural communities, meaning that constituents will have to travel to a central location to access the services that they need. In either case, that is what already happens now.
People in rural communities can only get to healthcare services in big towns that are often a distance away. They deserve better than to be viewed as the hinterland of larger urban areas. They deserve a neighbourhood health service designed not as a one-size-fits-all solution, but as genuinely local to their needs. I appreciate that funding is not unlimited and that tough choices need to be made, but those tough choices always seem to result in rural communities losing out when it comes to access to healthcare.
Aphra Brandreth (Chester South and Eddisbury) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that allocating NHS resources on a strictly per head basis disadvantages rural communities, particularly when nearly a quarter of rural residents are over the age of 65 and the rural population is ageing faster than in urban areas? Will he join me in encouraging the Minister to commit to reviewing the funding formula to reflect age profile, travel times and sparsity?
Blake Stephenson
Absolutely. I do join my hon Friend in asking the Minister to respond to that specific point in summing up. I know many MPs who represent rural communities have concerns about the fairer funding formula. In fact, it is not fair, particularly for rural communities. It would be helpful if the Minister were to reflect on that in his speech.
I would like the Minister to give serious consideration to amending the Government’s plans on neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods in urban communities can likely afford to be larger. The relative impact of that in many urban communities will be minimal. However, in rural areas, we need neighbourhoods in the region of 10,000 not 50,000, so that people living in small rural towns such as Flitwick and Ampthill in my constituency do not have to leave their towns to access “neighbourhood health services” and so that people living in villages large and small only have to travel to the next village over and not to a big town many miles away.
My concern over the Government’s plans for healthcare in rural areas does not end there. In Bedfordshire, we have recently seen our integrated care board—initially serving Milton Keynes, Luton, Bedford and central Bedfordshire—absorbed into a huge conglomerate ICB covering Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Peterborough and Milton Keynes. That is an area of around 3.5 million people. It is hard to see that the new ICB will be able to give the level of attention to people in our rural communities that they need and deserve.
In Wixams, a new town being built in my constituency, a GP surgery has long been promised. It was promised when shovels first went into the ground in 2007, and it has been promised ever since, but the empty field remains, waiting for a building and some doctors. Wixams now has roughly 5,000 residents, and it made up about 0.4% of the population of the previous ICB area. It needs its promised GP surgery, but residents have found it incredibly difficult to get action from the ICB. Under the Government’s new ICB arrangements, Wixams’ residents represent just 0.1% of the ICB’s population. It seems obvious to me that an already small but growing community that needs healthcare services will find that this centralisation of leadership structures will make it even harder for them to get the healthcare they need.
To give credit where credit is due, the new ICB leadership have been very responsive to my representations on Wixams. After nearly two decades of delay, it feels like we are finally making some progress, together with the Mayor of Bedford and the hard work and commitment of local councillors Graeme Coombes, Marc Frost and Andrea Spice—all of whom I thank for their hard work. However, the point remains the same: when the area covered by ICBs is made bigger, the influence of our smaller rural communities and their healthcare needs becomes smaller.
What the Government are doing in Bedfordshire is in no way an isolated incident. I understand that the 42 ICBs that existed before will be reduced to just 26 super-ICBs once the Government’s process finishes. That means thousands of rural communities across England will have less control over their local healthcare overnight, and it was confirmed almost in the same breath as the Government’s plans to bring healthcare closer to communities. That is particularly short-sighted when put against the Government’s plans for mayors. The Government have previously spoken of their desire to line up the boundaries of mayoral areas and integrated boards. Even as part of the 10-year health plan, they stated that their aim is that:
“integrated care boards should be coterminous with strategic authorities wherever feasibly possible.”
What a fantastic idea. Doing so would give proper political accountability to integrated care boards. It would mean that the rural village has a proper elected voice at the table when decisions about the future of healthcare are being made, and a representative that they could hold accountable at the ballot box if their local healthcare needs were left wanting. That is exactly what rural communities need to ensure they get the healthcare they deserve.
The proposals, like so many others, seem to have been put back on the shelf and watered down. Now ICBs will be coterminous with lots of strategic authorities. In Bedfordshire, we are to be forced to have a mayor covering Bedford, Luton, Milton Keynes and central Bedfordshire. Our new ICB would therefore be covered by three mayors, including a mayor for Hertfordshire and a mayor for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. That dilutes the political pressure our mayor can bring and the impact that rural Bedfordshire communities covered by that mayor can reasonably have.
If the Government change course back to the sensible idea of having an ICB and a strategic authority be coterminous, that will have been a whole lot of money wasted in two needless restructurings that could have gone into more doctors and nurses. It makes absolutely no sense—we need more doctors and nurses. In Bedfordshire, in the decade since 2016, we now have 18% more patients per fully qualified GP. That reflects the reality that in that same decade, our rural communities have been targeted for more and more development—a point made by the hon. Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller).
In central Bedfordshire alone, more than 20,000 houses have been built in that period, with many more in Luton, Milton Keynes and Bedford, including significant build-out in Wixams, as I mentioned earlier. There is barely a village in Mid Bedfordshire that has not been expanded significantly over the past decade. We expect to see many thousands more built in the coming years, including potential new towns at Tempsford and expansions east of Milton Keynes.
The old argument for healthcare with development no longer works. The argument would go, “Build a large development or new settlement. Give up a bit of what makes your rural community special, and in return you’ll get the new GP surgery or healthcare hub. You’ll get the infrastructure your community needs”. That just does not happen anymore. Now we get the houses, but the field where the GP surgery was promised remains empty, just as it has for two decades in Wixams.
The same argument has been made for the Government’s flagship new towns: build a big new town from scratch and it will come with the right infrastructure. However, the Department of Health and Social Care has not been able to confirm to me that additional funding will be provided for GP surgeries, and there does not appear to be future funding provided from the Treasury. That leaves open the prospect that GP surgeries in new towns will be funded at the expense of new GP surgeries in areas such as Wixams and other rural communities across the country, which have been waiting far too long. I would be grateful if the Minister could assure me on that point specifically.
The overall point is clear: where rural communities see development, they need infrastructure to cope with it. That is common sense; it is simple, and it is what our constituents want to see. They need to see that infrastructure arrive before the houses are occupied, and not for the burden on overstretched existing infrastructure to be relieved at some indeterminate point in the future.
It has been proposed a few times in this Session, but I fundamentally believe something must be done to allow councils and ICBs to benefit from developer contributions from the day that planning permission is granted, not as development is happening. That could be achieved by something as simple as the Government providing funding up front and reclaiming it from the developer via section 106.
This is one of the biggest issues facing my residents. When the wait to see a GP soars because of a new housing estate next door, nobody wins. I know this is not confined solely to rural areas, but it is in rural areas where existing infrastructure is strained to capacity, and where a good proportion of the Government’s 1.5 million homes are expected to be built.
I will bring my remarks to a close, and I look forward to hearing the views of others in this debate. There are particular challenges for rural communities in accessing healthcare. For too long the approach has been to centralise care in larger and larger towns, and in doing so take it away from villages and small towns. The Government’s move to centralise local healthcare decision making over much bigger areas risks leaving rural residents further behind.
The planned shift to a neighbourhood health service is welcome, but it must be a truly neighbourhood-based service. While a neighbourhood of 50,000 people might make sense in our big towns and cities, it risks leaving our rural small towns and villages out in the cold, served only as a bit on the edge of a larger urban area. Equally, as services move more and more online, consideration must be given to the challenges in rural communities that cannot get good broadband or wi-fi, for reasons beyond their control. Finally, we must ensure that development in rural areas comes with the local healthcare infrastructure that we know communities need. For too long, that has not happened, and communities such as mine in Mid Bedfordshire have paid the price.
Several hon. Members rose—
Blake Stephenson
I shall speed through, Dr Huq. I thank the Minister for summing up and covering an awful lot of ground—I am certainly grateful for that. He gave a lot of additional information, so I am sure he will forgive me if I go back to Hansard to look through it and follow up with a letter if anything is unclear. It has been a wide-ranging debate and there was a lot to cover. I thank all hon. Members for standing up for their communities, putting rural communities on the Government’s agenda and making sure that they get the healthcare services they deserve.
Oral Answers to Questions
Blake Stephenson Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Stephen Kinnock
We are recruiting 8,500 more mental health workers by the end of this Parliament. The Mental Health Act 2025 reforms will ensure that people with a learning disability, autistic people and people with the most severe mental health conditions have greater choice and control over their treatment and receive the dignity and respect they deserve.
Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
Constituents of mine have been reporting that they have been directed to hospital for regular blood tests, rather than having them at their GP surgery. Will the Secretary of State outline how he will ensure that blood tests are done in a community setting, which surely must be much better value for the taxpayer and much more convenient for patients?
Wes Streeting
The hon. Member is absolutely right, and that is why a big part of our modernisation approach is to shift care out of hospital and into the community, making greater use of community diagnostic centres, community pharmacies and GPs. As his question shows, 18 months in, lots done, but a lot more still to do.
Budget Resolutions
Blake Stephenson Excerpts(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to nip out to my Delegated Legislation Committee without missing my spot.
I met with businesses this morning, and it is clear that the people who take risks, invest, create jobs and drive tax receipts are busy scratching their heads to find some positive from this Budget. The truth is that it is a disaster for everyone in Mid Bedfordshire and right across the country—for young people looking for their first job, for hard-working families, and for aspirational business owners and job creators. Our country does need investment and renewal, but to pay for it, we need strong businesses and a strong business environment. The Chancellor is delivering the absolute opposite. Just like last year, she has launched a calculated assault on all our constituents; they are now paying the price for spiralling welfare and higher debt costs with their jobs, all to save the Chancellor’s own. The simple truth is that this Government are backing benefits Britain, not alarm clock Britain, and with broken promise after broken promise, the Chancellor is slipping into a black hole of her own making—one that cannot come quick enough for most of us.
Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)
The hon. Member asked whether there were any positives in the Budget. Does he not think that raising more children out of poverty than any other Parliament on record is a positive? Does he not welcome that—does he not think it benefits all of us?
Blake Stephenson
I think everybody in this House wants to bring children out of poverty. The way to do that is to get more families into jobs, so that they can afford to bring their children up and take responsibility.
Conservative Members know that it is business that invests, creates jobs and grows our economy, which enables investment in our public infrastructure. The backbone of our economy includes our high streets. Labour Members may visit their local pubs and cafes and post on social media expressing how much they back their high street—even posting about visits to businesses that have since closed—but the truth is that they have been standing idly by while the Chancellor has thrown the local businesses they rely on and claim to champion under the bus. They did it last year; they will do it again this year when they vote this Budget through; and if the Chancellor comes back for more, as she will, they will do it again.
Let us look at the damage being done to a typical high street pub in Bedfordshire. Charged £7,448 in business rates by the last Conservative Government, that figure increased after the last Budget to £24,309. While local authorities are yet to publish the charge for next year, after the three-yearly business rates revaluation and the abolition of retail, hospitality and leisure relief, the charge is likely to be around £45,000 when transitional relief ends. That is a whopping tax increase of roughly 500% over the course of this Parliament before a single penny has been taken in sales. That is an absolute disgrace. It is an attack on our ambitious small business owners—on our constituents who leap out of bed at the sound of their alarms, work hard, play by the rules and create jobs. Is it any wonder that many of them are now asking themselves, “What’s the point?” Business rates for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses must be abolished, and that is exactly what a Conservative Government will do.
Who is paying for the price for this Budget? It is the very working people whom this Government pretend to support, especially young people starting out as I did—washing dishes in the pub, waiting on tables and working in local shops. Labour Members pat themselves on their backs with smiles all around for increasing the minimum wage, but they are doing so while crushing jobs. It makes absolutely no sense to do this at a time when the market can least afford it. Unemployment is through the roof; some 1 million 16 to 24-year-olds are not in education, employment or training, and that number is rising. That is an absolute scandal that this Government’s economic plan does nothing to fix.
Blake Stephenson
My hon. Friend is absolutely right—it makes it worse. The benefits of an increased minimum wage are meaningless for those who do not have a wage. We should be investing in a brighter future for young people, one of aspiration, hard work, investment and wealth. Only the Conservatives have a plan to do that, by bearing down on welfare spending, cutting taxes, and repealing every job-destroying, anti-business, anti-growth measure in the Employment Rights Bill. We will kick-start young people’s working lives with a £5,000 first jobs bonus.
Blake Stephenson
I have no time.
We will back young people to buy their first home. We will not stifle the chances of a good job, punish people with higher taxes when they do find employment, push graduates into higher student loan repayments or make it harder to save for retirement, which is what this Government are doing. The appeal of fleeing socialist Britain has never been more obvious, nor has it ever been so easy, and the exodus has already begun.
Carla Lockhart (Upper Bann) (DUP)
Despite all the “lines to take” that the Labour Whips have handed their MPs in an attempt to sell the Budget as something positive, the reality is very different. The content of this Budget is deeply damaging to pensioners, employees, employers and the wider economy. This is a Government who, it appears, are making up reasons to take back double or treble. While the rise in pension is welcome, it is not a new policy. Yes, the protection for pensioners’ ISA savings is welcome, but it penalises those who have not yet reached pension age and limits their ability to save. Where do hard-pressed workers get the benefit to invest their money? At the same time, saving into pension schemes has become yet another tax grab.
We have been consistently told of a £20 billion black hole, and for weeks we have been fed the line that it has ballooned into a £50 billion crisis in just one year, but now we hear that there is no black hole at all. The OBR has been keeping both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor updated on a bi-weekly basis in respect of their forecasts. We now know that when the Chancellor and other Labour Ministers were out in the media painting their stories of doom and talking down the situation, creating volatility in the stock market, the Government knew all along that their briefings were inaccurate.
What we have in this Budget penalises those who work. I noted a quote yesterday from the Leader of the Opposition about how a working family needs to earn £71,000 per year to be as well-off as a family of three on benefits. This Budget is a burden on workers, and it is clear that Labour Members are not the friends of workers. For years in opposition, they made great promises to the nation that they would lead, but the reality has been very different, with broken promises and broken manifesto pledges, and they are slowly breaking our country’s workers, who cannot give any more.
Looking closer at the Budget, the increase in the minimum wage is positive in principle, but it will mean little in practice when employers are hit with the double blow of the national insurance rise and higher wage costs. Retailers and other businesses will inevitably raise prices to cover these additional burdens, and perhaps have to make redundancies, wiping out the benefit for many workers.
Blake Stephenson
Does the hon. Lady agree that while Labour in government pretends that it is the party of fairness, this Budget is deeply unfair to both her constituents and my own constituents?
Carla Lockhart
I thank the hon. Member for his point.
The poorest will become poorer while workers are asked to pay more to support people who come here from overseas and go straight on to benefits, with little incentive to work. The system means it is more lucrative not to work than actually to contribute. It is time that this Government put British citizens, British workers and British employers first. It is time for the Chancellor to get tough on tax avoidance and offer genuine support to the hard-pressed workers who are doing the right thing and paying their way.
Perhaps the most appalling tax grab in this Budget is the attack on our family farms. The announcement making business property relief and agricultural property relief transferable is a meaningless gesture and an insult. The family farm death tax remains fully intact—farmers gain nothing. Across the UK, the picture is grim. The Government seem intent on taxing family farms beyond profitability. It is a tax on death and a tax on tragedy. What can be more immoral? This path will damage agriculture at its core. Farming is the backbone of our nation. Food security is national security. Undermine it, and food prices will rise and we will rely on lower-quality imports at higher cost. There is no good news for farmers in this Budget, and when we vote on that resolution later, I urge Members to do the right thing.
Furthermore, the Budget does nothing to remove the trade barrier separating Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom. The £16.6 million package does not change the reality that businesses still face checks, paperwork, delays and extra costs when trading with Great Britain. If the Government remove the checks, they will save the £16.6 million immediately. We look with some envy at the Department of Government Efficiency in the United States, and wonder why the UK cannot match that level of waste reduction. There are quick, real-time savings available such as to cut excess immigration spending, make work genuinely rewarding, ensure everyone pays the tax they owe, pulp the costly madness of net zero and tackle waste across Government.
This Budget offers presentation rather than substance. It fails workers, employers, farmers, policing, health, hospitality and our taxpayers. There is a clear solution: get tough on immigration, tough on crime and tough on tax evasion, and get our country back to being the envy of the world. That is where we belong.
NHS Pensions: Frontline Patient Care
Blake Stephenson Excerpts(7 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Karin Smyth
The hon. Gentleman highlights yet another mess that we inherited due to his party’s lack of proper engagement with the workforce over the last decade to resolve the disincentives to making the system work more effectively.
Making the system work more efficiently and more effectively is a key part of our 10-year plan announced, I think, only last week—the days keep rolling by. We not only involved the public in those conversations but had valuable conversations and received insights from all staff groups. There is a real spirit of optimism that everyone wants to pull together to ensure that the incentives are right for staff at all levels—over 1.5 million of them—to make the NHS fit for the future, and that is what we are focused on.
Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
The Minister knows that I have a keen interest in NHS reorganisation and the impact on frontline services, particularly in Mid Bedfordshire. Given the failures of NHSBSA, has consideration been given to reorganising that authority? I also repeat the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild): given the failures, will the Minister rule out bonuses for the NHSBSA’s leadership?
Karin Smyth
I am totally focused on remedying this situation and learning from the mistakes. If further action is required, I will happily update the House at that point. My absolute focus at the moment is on getting everybody in that organisation and the independent review focused on sorting out the pension situation for those who have already lost out.
Oral Answers to Questions
Blake Stephenson Excerpts(8 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Stephen Kinnock
I thank my hon. Friend for that question and her relentless campaigning on this issue. She is right that the 700,000 urgent dental appointments are a first step, and we are looking to embed that so that it goes forward every year of this Parliament. The broader issue is around contract reform. There is no perfect contract system—the current one clearly is not working—and we are looking at options around sessional payments, capitation, and getting a contract that works and brings dentists back into the NHS.
Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
The Secretary of State will know that my local ICB in Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes is set to merge with Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. The new ICB will cover a population of about 3 million people. Given the difficulties we have had securing a GP surgery in Wixams, will the Secretary of State set out how supersizing that quango will help rural mid-Beds to get the local healthcare it needs?
Wes Streeting
May I respectfully say that that was part of the problem with Conservative thinking? They thought that the answer to the NHS crisis was more quangos, and they measured success in the number of ICBs, not the number of appointments and the size of the waiting list. We are taking a different approach, slashing bureaucracy and reinvesting in the front line. We are not centralising but decentralising, and cutting waiting lists—a record that the Conservative party cannot begin to touch.
Oral Answers to Questions
Blake Stephenson Excerpts(10 months, 1 week ago)
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Stephen Kinnock
ICBs are responsible for the commissioning of these services, which are clearly extremely important, and the early intervention side of eye care is particularly important. I would be more than happy to look into that issue with the hon. Lady’s ICB if she wrote to me and made further representations.
Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
The Minister for Secondary Care (Karin Smyth)
Our mission-driven approach to this issue means that we are working with all Departments to deliver an NHS fit for the future. We expect integrated care boards to work closely with their mayors to maximise public health and contribute to the Government’s health and growth missions.
Blake Stephenson
Funding and delivery of a GP surgery for Wixams in my constituency continues to fall between the cracks of developers, local councils and the local ICB. Does the Minister agree that to break those deadlocks and build the infrastructure that our communities require, new mayors should have the power to direct ICBs, making locally elected politicians responsible rather than unelected quangos?
Karin Smyth
The hon. Member tempts me slightly on local accountability, on which he has been a strong campaigner. As he knows from meeting me, I agree that it is important that such local bodies respond properly so that where there are expansions of housing, which we want to see, they are supported by local infrastructure. I am happy to come back to him with any further detail.
The Minister for Secondary Care (Karin Smyth)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that this is exactly the sort of thing that is being rolled out across the country, and that we are committed to delivering care closer to where his residents live.
Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
Wes Streeting
Thanks to the investment that the Chancellor committed to, we are investing in the NHS estate, which is in a sorry state. I am afraid that that is an investment that the hon. Gentleman did not vote for, and his constituents will be fuming when they find out who was responsible.
Hospice Funding
Blake Stephenson Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Karin Smyth
As Lord Darzi’s report announced, the entire sector has been under pressure and struggling since the disastrous Lansley reforms—they were part of the coalition Government—through to when we took over in July. We will fix the NHS and rebuild it to make it more sustainable and fit for the future. That includes everything from diagnosis to end of life care.
Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
For my sins, I too will be running the London marathon next year. I will be running to raise money for Keech hospice; I know, as do other hon. Members who represent constituencies in Bedfordshire, what fantastic work that hospice does and the care it provides to our county. The Minister has been asked lots of times to comment on the impact of the NIC increases, which are going to hurt hospices in constituencies all around the country, so may I ask the question in a slightly different way? Does the Minister think that Keech hospice, taken in the round, will be financially better off or worse off next year as a result of both the Budget and this announcement that she has been dragged to the House to make?
Karin Smyth
I have not been dragged—I am very happy to be here. The reality is that the health sector in its entirety, from diagnosis to end of life care, will be better off this year than it was last year or the year before under the hon. Gentleman’s Government.
Oral Answers to Questions
Blake Stephenson Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Andrew Gwynne)
We are committed to expanding community diagnostic capacity to build an NHS that is fit for the future. However, we are clear that independent sector providers have a role to play in supporting the NHS as trusted partners to recover elective services.
Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
The Minister for Secondary Care (Karin Smyth)
As Lord Darzi outlined, capital development in the NHS is shocking, with a backlog of £11 billion in maintenance. I would be happy to meet the hon. Member to discuss his problem.
Healthcare Provision: East of England
Blake Stephenson Excerpts(1 year, 6 months ago)
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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.
Oral Answers to Questions
Blake Stephenson Excerpts(1 year, 7 months ago)
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The Minister for Secondary Care (Karin Smyth)
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point about the stress that people face when waiting, and we have talked about the disaster of the past 14 years. People with potentially deteriorating conditions are waiting, and we absolutely need to address this issue as part of our work to reduce waiting lists.
Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
Wes Streeting
I am proud that the Deputy Prime Minister will be delivering the commitment to build 1.5 million new homes. It is absolutely vital that the infrastructure needed is delivered alongside those new homes, and we and other colleagues across Government will be working very closely with the Deputy Prime Minister to make sure that the social infrastructure is also provided.