National Health Service

Clive Efford Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Commons Chamber

[David T. C. Davies]

I checked the Order Paper this morning, and no one had tabled a question about the NHS in Wales.

The shadow Secretary of State for Health, the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), said earlier that he was not responsible for Wales, but the reality is that there are 20,000 patients in England who are registered with Welsh GPs and who have their health care provided in Wales. The right hon. Gentleman is, to some extent, responsible for the poor level of service that those people are currently receiving.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[David T. C. Davies]

I am happy to give way, but I have to say that Opposition Members have used up rather more of their allocation than Members on this side.

[Clive Efford]

The hon. Gentleman seems to be talking about records. This Government came in with no mandate whatever and planned to close nine of the 31 accident and emergency departments across London. What state does he think the A and E service in London would be in if his Government had been successful in every case? They were prevented from achieving their aim by public campaigns, including the one in Lewisham, in my part of London.

[David T. C. Davies]

I am absolutely certain that the A and E situation in England would be far better under this Government than it is in Wales, where, according to the House of Commons Library report, 13% of patients in major departments wait more than four hours in A and E. That is approximately double the percentage recorded by major departments in England. The question of ambulances has been raised several times today. Wales has the worst ambulance response rate in the United Kingdom, with around 55% arriving within eight minutes, compared with more than 70% in England.

The shadow Secretary of State talked about privatisation, but it was the Labour Government who, quite rightly, started using the private sector to improve the national health service. I have here a quote from the Labour Secretary of State in 2002; I will not mention his name. He said of the private sector that

“we intend to use it when it can bring expertise or resources to help improve services.”—[Official Report, 26 February 2002; Vol. 380, c. 547.]

We have carried on doing the same thing. A few years later, a different Health Secretary said:

“The NHS has always made use of the private sector and will continue to do so”.—[Official Report, 25 October 2005; Vol. 438, c. 163.]

She also promised that, the following year, patients would be able to choose from any health care provider—NHS or independent sector—that met NHS standards.

It was Labour’s policy in government to use the private sector. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is totally ridiculous for Labour Members now to pretend that the Conservatives are trying to privatise the NHS. That is a big lie: we will never, ever privatise the NHS, but we are quite happy to use the private sector when it can provide a better service, just as the Labour Government did. The last word on this came in 2005, when Professor Allyson Pollock wrote a damning book about the privatisation of the national health service. She was criticising the Labour Government.