Accident and Emergency Waiting Times

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Wednesday 5th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

The hon. Gentleman should listen to this. One reason for the problems in Wales is that Labour cut the NHS budget in Wales by 8%, or £814 million, and cutting the NHS budget is exactly what the shadow Health Secretary wants to do in England—

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way to a Welsh MP?

[Mr Hunt]

The hon. Gentleman, as a Welsh MP, might want to listen to this. Both the NHS budget and spending—

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[Mr Hunt]

I shall make some progress, because this gets even worse for Labour.

The shadow Secretary of State wrote to me at the weekend, asking me to relieve pressure on A and E by using the health underspend to put extra money into social care. There is a way of releasing resources into social care, but it is not that, because the underspend he talks of sits largely with NHS trusts and clinical commissioning groups, which are allowed to keep their underspends and roll them over to subsequent years. If we took away that money and put it into social care, we would therefore have to take it away from hospitals, where it is needed most to help tackle pressures in A and E and other places.

Let us look at some of the hospitals that would lose money under Labour’s plans. Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust, in the right hon. Gentleman’s own constituency, had a £4 million underspend in 2012-13. It would be prevented from using that money to reduce A and E pressures, as would the Royal Cornwall, the Royal United hospital Bath, Nottingham University hospitals—

[Chris Bryant]

rose—

[Mr Hunt]

I am going to make some progress. The Royal Wolverhampton, East Lancashire, Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen, North Bristol, Coventry and many other hospitals would also be prevented from using the money. So Labour’s solution to the A and E crisis is to cut funding to hospitals—about as logical as wanting to reduce debt by increasing the deficit.

From a Labour party that wants to be a Government in waiting, this is not good enough. It is against a cut in NHS spending that did not happen, but when there is a real cut in Wales it says nothing. It is against hospital reconfigurations in England, where we are hitting the A and E target, yet says nothing about reconfigurations in Wales, where Labour is missing the A and E target. It says it is against reorganisations and it has just proposed its own huge structural reorganisation to merge the health and social care system. Why is that? It is because in the end it is more interested—we have seen this today—in party politics than the right policies. I think we can expect better from someone who used to be a Health Secretary.

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[Mr Hunt]

I shall make some progress.

Labour’s complacency on that issue is revealed as even more shocking when we look at the root causes of pressures on A and E departments, because nearly all of them involve issues that Labour either failed to tackle in office or made a great deal worse—for example, the IT fiasco, so heavily criticised by the National Audit Office. It is completely unacceptable that A and E departments are not able to access, with their consent, people’s GP records. Last year, there were 30,000 wrong prescriptions in the NHS and 11 deaths—something we know would be significantly improved with e-prescribing in hospitals. The Government have addressed that, with a fund that I announced last month and an ambitious programme to make the NHS paperless by 2018, learning from that procurement debacle for which we are now paying the price.

Let us look at other causes. The working time directive, which Labour signed up to, makes the recruitment of A and E staff very much harder.

[Chris Bryant]

rose—

[Mr Hunt]

I think the hon. Gentleman should listen to this. Professor John Temple described that as having the biggest impact on the emergency and out-of-hours parts of the NHS, which is why the Government are now having to increase recruitment into A and E through the mandate that the Government have set Health Education England. Or there is the total failure—

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[Mr Dorrell]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. We cannot blame people in the country for not understanding the need for change in the health service if politicians never explain why that need has arisen. I quite often quote Enoch Powell—not someone who wins a consensus across the House—who as Health Minister went to the equivalent of the NHS Confederation conference, which is now under way in Liverpool, to explain the need for the change in the service model in mental health. He said in his speech that

“Hospitals are not like pyramids, built to impress some remote posterity”.

That is the case that we need to begin to explain.

[Chris Bryant]

rose—

[Mr Dorrell]

I shall give way once more.

[Chris Bryant]

I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s generosity. One of the ironies is that Enoch Powell recruited a lot of doctors overseas. He would have had absolutely nothing to do with the argument advanced yesterday by one of the right hon. Gentleman’s colleagues that all the problems in A and E are to do with the arrival of migrants. If anything, we need to change immigration policy in this country, so that more doctors can come here.

[Mr Dorrell]

I have four minutes, or with two interventions, six minutes, so if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I shall not go off into a discussion about immigration policy.

I want to focus on the changing needs that the health service has to meet. I sometimes wonder whether people talking about rising demand on the health service and rising demand for emergency care have ever sat in a GP’s surgery. Have they noticed around them in a GP’s surgery the kind of people who present in a surgery and the conditions that bring them there—dementia, diabetes and drug and alcohol abuse? How can we expect a service that was designed to meet the needs of patients, inasmuch as it was designed at all, in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s to meet the needs of today’s increasingly elderly and dependent patients, without rethinking the way care is delivered?

This is—I come back to my core point—a shared analysis. It is not a subject of party political debate. It is a shared analysis between the two Front Benches, and what is even more surprising is that not only is the analysis shared, but the conclusions about the right policy response are shared.