Access to Primary Healthcare

Christine Jardine Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Karin Smyth]

I thank the hon. Lady for her assiduous work in opposition. Looking at the capital estate is one of my favourite new responsibilities, and our commitment to a neighbourhood service means that we need to bring services together. We need to look at this across the piece, to make sure that primary care is provided where it is needed. We often hear about hard-to-reach groups, but I do not think they are that hard to reach. Frankly, services are sometimes located in the wrong area. One of our key commitments is to shift services into communities, and the neighbourhood service programme is part of that.

Just three in 10 NHS dentists are accepting new adult patients, and geographical inequalities are vast. More than 1,200 pharmacies have shut their doors for good since 2017. Again, the record speaks for itself: public satisfaction with general practice has fallen from 80% in 2009 to just 35% last year. If there is any reason why the Conservative Benches are empty, it is because dissatisfaction with access to primary care is so stark, as we learned in July’s general election.

It is absolutely clear that primary care is broken, but NHS staff working in primary care did not break it; the last Government did. They cut funding for the community pharmacy contract, they failed to incentivise enough dentists to perform NHS work, and they pursued a disastrous top-down reorganisation of the NHS, with which we are still living.

The last Government might have broken the NHS, but it is not beaten. NHS staff remain as passionate, dedicated and skilful as ever, and this Government will work in lockstep with them, their counterparts in social care and local partners across the country to fix the NHS.

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Karin Smyth]

I am tempted, but I know that many of the hon. Lady’s colleagues want to speak, and I am sure she is on the list.

Fixing the NHS will take years of discipline and hard work, and we are in this for the long haul. However, we must first clean up the mess we inherited, and that work has begun in earnest. We have found the funding to recruit an extra 1,000 GPs this year as our first step towards fixing the NHS’s front door and making the system more flexible.