Covid-19

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Wednesday 18th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jo Churchill]

If the hon. Member will bear with me, I will continue.

The NAO report examined potential conflicts of interests involving Ministers and the awarding of contracts and found none. It states:

“we found that the ministers had properly declared their interests, and we found no evidence of their involvement in procurement decisions or contract management.”

The report recognises that there are robust processes in place for spending public money, to ensure that critical equipment got to where it needed to go as rapidly as possible while ensuring value for money. I welcome the report, because we can all learn.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I want to make a very different point, which is about how well prepared we were for this year and how prepared we would be if all this were to happen again. The truth is that we tend to run the NHS at 90% to 95% capacity, and it takes the requirement of only a tiny smidgen of increased capacity for the whole thing to fall over. I am particularly conscious of that in relation to intensive care. We have had to cancel elective surgery just to keep intensive care going. If we had the same number of beds per head of population as France or Germany, we would not have had to do that. Another affected area is neuro-rehabilitation after brain injuries, which was already struggling and will even more so because covid clearly leads to some neuro-degenerative conditions.

[Jo Churchill]

The hon. Member is an incredible campaigner in the area of neural injuries. When elective procedures are stood down, those are clinical decisions. We have ensured that many can keep going in the second wave, but this must be done on a local level. There is surge capacity in the Nightingale hospitals, with an additional 2,000 beds, and we have the ventilator capacity that was built up during the first wave of the pandemic. I recognise what he says, but I do feel that these decisions have to be made locally by the clinicians who are involved in delivering the care.

[Chris Bryant]

rose—

[Jo Churchill]

I will give way briefly but then I would like to push on.

[Chris Bryant]

I am not having a go at the Minister; I am simply trying to ask a question for the country, in a way. For the future, we will have to have much more capacity in the NHS, won’t we? We will have to nearly double the amount of capacity we have in some areas, particularly in intensive care, in neuro-rehabilitation and, for that matter, in radiotherapy.

[Jo Churchill]

I will come on to the area of cancer, in particular. Strides have been made in different ways of treating virtually, so that fewer people go into the hospital setting, and so on. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point about capacity, but that is why the Government have committed to building 40 new hospitals—because there is a need to ensure that sufficient capacity is available across the country for people.