National Health Service

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

Does the hon. Lady act as parliamentary private secretary to the shadow Secretary of State? Ah, she does. Well, she has the merit of consistency. I am reminded that in June 2006, when for a short period she was chair—I think—of Rochdale primary care trust, she resigned. She said that she resigned because the radical changes happening under the then Labour Government in 2006 would

“destroy the NHS as we know it.”

The hon. Lady has the merit of being consistent: she is against every Government and every change. She does not think that any steps will make the NHS into what it ought to be. I will not take any lectures from her, therefore.

I was explaining to the hon. Lady and the House what has been achieved. We have stripped out pointless bureaucracy. The number of managers more than doubled under Labour, but we have cut their number by more than 5,000, and we have increased the number of doctors in the NHS by more than 1,500. The Bill includes measures to abolish primary care trusts and strategic health authorities, but in the meantime we have clustered PCTs and SHAs together.

We are reducing the cost of bureaucracy in the NHS not only because it is necessary to do so. The transfer to clinically led commissioning in the NHS, for which there is a very good case of course, also involves reducing such costs. As the Minister of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns), has frequently made clear, as part of the transfer process we will deliver £4.5 billion in savings in administration costs this year across the national health service. The transition itself involves costs of course, but they will be recovered by the end of 2012-13, and by the end of the Parliament we will have gone on to save more than £4.5 billion in total.

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Mr Lansley]

No.

Productivity fell in every single year that Labour was in charge of the NHS. However, according to the Audit Commission, in the last year—2010-11—we saved £4.3 billion. As the deputy chief executive of the NHS has reported, PCTs are intending to save a further £5.9 billion in 2011-12. Contrary to what the right hon. Member for Leigh repeatedly said, the NHS is not failing to deliver on the quality, innovation, productivity and prevention challenge; it is on target to meet that challenge. The modernisation that is at the heart of the Bill and the White Paper is not about frustrating the NHS in that endeavour; it is about enabling it to meet the QIPP challenge.

Last summer, I announced that we would be measuring mixed-sex accommodation and then driving down the extent to which patients were put in such accommodation when they should not have been. The right hon. Gentleman said at the time:

“This hollow announcement is an attempt by Mr Lansley to claim credit for something Labour has done”.

That is absolutely wrong. The evidence showed that almost 150,000 patients a year were being placed in mixed-sex accommodation in breach of the rules. We ensured that figures were published for the very first time. The first set of results was published in December, and it showed that in that month alone there were well over 11,000 such patients. Since then, there has been a 91% reduction in the number of patients put into mixed-sex accommodation. The right hon. Gentleman was prepared to see issues of care, service and standards in the NHS covered up. We are determined to shine a light on where the NHS can, and should, improve its performance; we are determined to enable the NHS to do so and to challenge it wherever it is not doing so.

[Chris Leslie]

rose—

[Mr Lansley]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman shortly.

If the public want to know how the NHS in England would have fared under Labour since the last general election, they should look across the border at what has happened in Wales—I am not sure whether any Members representing Welsh constituencies are present. We are protecting the NHS and increasing its budget in real terms. However, I have brought along to the Chamber a report by the Auditor General for Wales that was published just a few days ago, on 14 October 2011. If I could, I would enter it in evidence, but I can at least hold it up in order to show Members a series of bar charts. They demonstrate that in England there is real-terms growth in the NHS, in Northern Ireland there is small real-terms growth that is unevenly distributed across the years, in Scotland there is tiny real-terms growth, and in Wales there is a large downward curve, which shows the reduction in real-terms spending on the NHS in Wales. Wales is the only part of the UK that is run by Labour, and there are real-terms cuts in the NHS budget there.

[Chris Leslie]

The right hon. Gentleman must know that “real terms” means taking account of inflation. For the record, can he tell the House what the retail prices index was for the last month for which figures are available? That will give us a sense of what “real terms” ought to mean in this context.

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Gentleman is a shadow Treasury Minister, so he must know that the expression “real terms” has consistently been used in relation to the GDP deflator, which is independently estimated by the Office for Budget Responsibility. That is the basis on which we do these calculations, so the Wales Audit Office will have calculated the real-terms changes in budgets in each of the countries of the United Kingdom on that basis. John Appleby from the King’s Fund has estimated an 8.3% real-terms cut in the NHS budget in Labour Wales.