NHS Winter Crisis

Chris Elmore Excerpts

Wednesday 10th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

It absolutely does, and no one campaigns more vigorously for his local trust than my hon. Friend. Just before Christmas, I visited his trust’s Gloucester site and met the management and staff. The situation there is extraordinarily impressive and a great inspiration to many parts of the NHS.

I finish on the issue of funding. The shadow Health Secretary has been using very strong language, but he has conveniently overlooked the fact that in the past four years, real-terms funding for the NHS has increased by £9.3 billion, which is £5.5 billion more than his party promised in 2015.

[Chris Elmore (Ogmore) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Hunt]

I will conclude, because a lot of hon. Members want to speak.

The shadow Health Secretary is right that there are real pressures, so what are the facts? We spend 9.9% of our GDP on health, which is 1% above the EU average, and about the same as the EU15—the western European countries—but we want to spend more, so in England, from 2011, funding went up by 15.6%. In Wales, Labour chose to increase funding by only 8%. This motion is about money. When it comes to NHS funding, Labour gives the speeches, but Conservatives give the cash.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Whitford]

I completely agree that establishing accountable care organisations only through secondary legislation is utterly wrong. We have had multiple debates about STPs, and I have said that going back to place-based planning is the right way to integrate and develop a local service, but there should not be a private company at the top making the decisions. There needs to be a publicly accountable body. There is going to be yet another big reorganisation in NHS England, and the proposed structure needs to be debated in this place, not behind closed doors. Yes, money is tight, with the NHS seeing rises of just over 1% a year in the past seven years compared with almost 4% in the past, but it is estimated that between £5 billion and £10 billion is being wasted in the healthcare market itself, through bidding, tendering and profits, and now through this habit of companies suing if they do not win a contract.

It is crucial to move back to developing services for a community. It is also crucial that health and social care should be integrated, and I welcome the combination of both titles in the Secretary of State’s role, if that means that we are going to work towards meaningful integration, but it must be done in a structured, responsible and legalistic way.

[Chris Elmore]

The Government spend an awful lot of time attacking the Welsh NHS. In terms of the Secretary of State’s new cordial attitude in not attacking any NHS services, will the hon. Lady join me in condemning former Prime Minister David Cameron’s comment that Offa’s Dyke was the line between life and death, depending on which country one lived in? Wales has an integrated health and social care service, which is also integrated with local government, with a £60 million fund having been established over the past five years. She referred to the cross-party working that could happen, particularly if the Government were willing to engage properly in these services rather than attacking the Scottish and Welsh Governments on NHS care. Does she agree that we could use such working to learn good practice?

[Dr Whitford]

The four health services are very different. In essence, we have four laboratories. NHS England is by far the largest, but they all face different as well as similar challenges. I am sure that if there were more discussion of how things have been done, there could be more lesson-learning in different directions.

In 2010, we were promised that there would be no more reorganisation. The same promise was made in 2015, but NHS England is now facing another reorganisation, in the STP system and in accountable care. It is crucial that the focus should be not on bottom-line, budget-centred care but on patient-centred care. It is wrong that any such changes should be introduced through secondary legislation. They must be introduced in this place—either through debate, in Committee, through convention or in a royal commission—to enable us to come up with a structure that will function. Since 2013, the deficits have gone up, the waiting time failures have gone up and the stress on staff has gone up, making it even harder to keep hold of people. Let us put the patient in the middle, but let us also support the staff who look after the patient.