The National Health Service

Debate between Conor McGinn and Jonathan Ashworth

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I am going to make a bit of progress. The Whips are looking slightly askance at me because of the number of Members who want to speak.

There is one Bill that will have a fundamental impact on staffing, and that is the proposed immigration Bill, which will end freedom of movement and introduce a points-based system. Does the Secretary of State recognise that freedom of movement has allowed thousands of staff from Europe—doctors, nurses, paramedics, care workers, hospital porters and cleaners—to come to the UK to care for our sick and elderly? Does he recognise that our NHS and care sector needs that ongoing flow of workers from the EU? How does he reconcile the need for the NHS to continue to recruit with the rhetoric and the proposed restrictive policies of the Home Secretary?

The Secretary of State will know that Conservative campaigners have lobbied for a salary threshold of £36,700. If that were applied, 60,000 current staff in the NHS who are not covered by the shortage occupation list would be affected. Is the Secretary of State really going to allow the Home Secretary to introduce a salary threshold of that order, which will have a huge impact on the ability of the national health service to fill vacancies and recruit, and therefore have an impact on patient care?

[Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend join me and, I am sure, all other Labour Members, in conveying our solidarity to NHS workers—Unison members—in St Helens and other parts of the country who are on strike this week? Despite doing the same job in the same place and wearing the same uniform, they are paid less than their colleagues because they work for an agency. Will my hon. Friend urge Compass to do the right thing and pay those workers properly, and will he commit a Labour Government to ensuring that there is equal pay for equal work in our NHS?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is what happens when privatisation and outsourcing go wrong: workers are worse off. We should bring an end to it.

NHS Outsourcing and Privatisation

Debate between Conor McGinn and Jonathan Ashworth

Wednesday 23rd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I thank my hon. Friend for her contribution. I know that she, as the relatively new Member for Lincoln, will be campaigning for the future of health provision in her constituency.

The response of the Prime Minister to those cancelled operations this winter was to shrug her shoulders and say, “Nothing is perfect,” but by the end of the winter reporting 185,000 patients, often elderly, vulnerable and in distress, had been left waiting in the back of an ambulance or treated in a corridor for more than 40 minutes. We do not have a crisis in our NHS just in winter; we have a crisis all year round. Since 2010, we have seen a reduction of about 16,000 beds, including more than 5,000 acute beds and nearly 6,000 mental health beds—that is almost 20% of them. Among equivalent wealthy countries, only Canada and Poland have fewer doctors per head, and only two countries have fewer beds per head.

A report today in The Guardian details how old and out of date the equipment is in hospitals because infrastructure budgets have been raided. According to the OECD, we are bottom of the league for the provision of CT and MRI scanners. Meanwhile, as my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) has pointed out, eight years of multi-billion cuts to social care provision have decimated the sector and have denied 400,000 people, often the elderly and the vulnerable, the support they would otherwise get.

Years of pay freeze, and failure to invest in and plan properly for the workforce, have meant vacancies for 100,000 staff, including vacancies for 40,000 nurses, 3,500 midwives and 11,000 doctors. In the past two years, we have lost more than 1,000 GPs. In our communities, we have seen district nurses cut by 45%. We have lost more than 2,000 health visitors in two years. We have lost nearly 700 school nurses. There are 5,862 fewer psychiatric nurses and 4,803 fewer community health nurses than in 2010, and the Prime Minister’s hostile environment has meant the Home Office has turned down visas for at least 400 staff.

[Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)]

In the St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, the spending on agency nurses has quadrupled since 2011. Is it not a fact that under this Tory Government we have a retention, recruitment and resources crisis in our NHS?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend has, with great eloquence, explained why failing to plan properly on the workforce is such a false economy. It means that trusts are spending more and more on locums and expensive agencies.

I trust that no Conservative Member will try to pretend in this debate that it is possible to reduce beds, reduce staff, cut social care and fail to invest while patient numbers are increasing without the quality of care suffering. If any Conservative Member does try to tell us the opposite, they should look at the latest performance standards. The lack of hospital capacity and staffing means that the waiting list has risen to more than 4 million. Simon Stevens, of NHS England, has warned that

“on the current funding outlook, the NHS waiting list will grow to five million people by 2021. That’s an extra million people on the waiting list. One in 10 of us waiting for an operation—the highest number ever.”

The blanket cancellation of elective operations has seen waiting lists rise by nearly 5% compared with last year, and we have waiting times up and performance against targets down. In overcrowded A&Es, in the past year, 2.5 million have waited more than four hours. Just 76.4% of patients needing urgent care were treated within four hours at hospital A&E units in England in March—that is the lowest proportion since records began in 2010.