Healthcare: Hampshire

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Gwynne]

I am sure the officials in the Box will have noted the concerns the hon. Gentleman rightly raised about his ICB. I will ensure that that is communicated back to the Minister for Secondary Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth), so she can look in more detail at those concerns and communicate with the Hampshire MPs. If a meeting is necessary at the end of that, I am sure she will be more than willing to meet him and his colleagues.

We want to ensure that every part of our NHS is working as well as it can and, as I say, good performance will be rewarded as part of our reforms. Alongside a college of executive and clinical leadership, that will ensure the NHS continues to develop and attract the best talent to top positions, bringing the best outcomes for patients and taxpayers alike.

Let me turn to some of the specific issues that the hon. Member for Winchester raised. On local hospital provision, patients deserve to have safe, compassionate and personalised care in a fit-for-purpose environment. That is why this Government have committed to building and refurbishing hospitals across the country. The new hospital programme includes a new hospital for north and mid Hampshire and a major refurbishment at Winchester to provide specialist and emergency care. As part of the proposal, I am aware that the local trust explored changes to the current obstetrician-led maternity services at the Winchester site. I know the hon. Member has been a strong champion of that, having raised it with the Prime Minister in October.

As announced in the Chancellor’s autumn Budget, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will set out further details of the review of the new hospital programme in the coming months, alongside a new and realistic schedule for delivery. The Hampshire hospitals scheme is in scope of the review, and I acknowledge the local concern over the proposal and the impact on the Winchester site and on maternity services.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

My constituents use both Winchester hospital and Basingstoke hospital, as well as others, such as Frimley Park, the Queen Alexandra and Guildford. I understand that a clinical assessment was made about urgent treatment and services at Winchester, but there is a need for a new hospital in or near Basingstoke. In what the Minister said about a review of the new hospital programme, I accept he says a statement is coming soon, but will he confirm that it is about timing and that he or a colleague will come forward to the House soon with the certainty that people in Hampshire need?

[Andrew Gwynne]

Absolutely. I will try to be as unpartisan as I can, but the hospital programme that we inherited from the right hon. Member’s Government did not have anything like the money it needed to back it up. Conservative Members can shake their heads, but it is true. It had nothing like the money needed to bring forward those hospitals. As I have said, we will review that. Our intention is to bring forward those schemes, but that has to be done in an achievable programme, with the finances to back it up. When we announce to the House how we will schedule the hospital programme, I expect that all the answers he wants will be there. We intend to introduce the hospital building programme, but it must be done with money—we cannot build them with fresh air.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Gwynne]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. No part of the United Kingdom holds a monopoly on wisdom, and if we are doing something good or if there is innovation in one part of the United Kingdom, it is incumbent on Health Ministers across the devolved Administrations and here in Whitehall to share best practice—to work together and, where possible, take a four-nation approach. I hope I can reassure the hon. Gentleman that since this new Labour Government came into power, we have really tried to reset our relationships with the devolved Administrations and with the various Ministers. I have had several meetings with Mike Nesbitt on a range of health issues that appertain to the whole United Kingdom on which we want to ensure there is consistency of approach. I am more than happy to communicate further with Mike Nesbitt and colleagues in the Northern Ireland Executive on how we reform our health and social care services in England to see whether things can be taken by them in Northern Ireland. Vice versa, if there are good ideas from Northern Ireland, I am more than happy to consider them in how we transform NHS services in England.

The hon. Member for Winchester mentioned social care, and he is right to raise winter resilience. I have spoken about fixing the front door to the NHS through primary care reforms. We also have a serious job to do to fix the back door and ensure that patient flows through the system are not held up because of a lack of social care. On winter resilience, I hope he will understand that we are working to ensure that there are no crises and that we tackle the issues of social care. Getting beds in appropriate places is a key part of our plan.

In the long term, there are no quick fixes. The Dilnot reforms were announced by the previous Government, but it is fair to say that, when we came into office, we found that the money apparently set aside for the Dilnot reforms had already been spent on other NHS pressures. Laudable though it may have been to spend that money to try to get waiting times and waiting lists down and to fix some of the problems that that Government had created, it left us with a bit of a social care issue, given that the reform money had gone, had disappeared and was no longer there to be spent.

Over the next decade, this Government are committed to building consensus on the long-term reform needed to create a national care service based on consistent national standards, including engaging across the parties. It is good to see the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Melton and Syston (Edward Argar), in his place, and I am sure he will be very willing to work with us, as indeed will the Liberal Democrats. We genuinely want to make sure that we get cross-party consensus on the future of our adult social care, so that we can finally grasp this nettle once and for all, and to fix it without it becoming such a contentious issue, as it became, sadly, in 2010 and 2017. Neither of the two main parties has a good story to tell on this, because we have both shamefully used it as a political football from time to time. It is now appropriate that we set aside those politics and get on with fixing social care. I hope that, in due course, we will be able to move forward on that agenda.

I assure the hon. Member for Winchester that we are acutely aware of the problems with mental health services. We both agree that waiting lists are unacceptably high. Indeed, the people of Hampshire and most of England are not getting the mental health care they deserve. He has spoken previously about Lord Darzi’s report, which has shone a searing spotlight on the waiting lists that young people face, in particular. I am immensely proud that this Government are intent on tackling the issue head on, with specialist mental health professionals in every school in England. That is our aim. These NHS-funded mental health support teams in schools and colleges will work with young people and parents to manage mental health difficulties and to develop a whole-school approach to positive mental health and wellbeing.

[Damian Hinds]

Can I just check whether I heard the Minister correctly? Did he say there would be a mental health specialist in every school in England?

Infected Blood Inquiry

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

This truly has been one of our nation’s worst ever scandals and injustices. Thousands of patients contracted HIV or hepatitis viruses, or both, from contaminated blood, and this was not an accident or something that could not be avoided. Nor was it down to pure negligence or people not being sufficiently attentive, although there was plenty of that. The report is clear about the

“systematic, collective and individual failures”

in identifying and managing infection risk from blood products, and in the response of the health service and the Government.

This issue affects the constituents of very many MPs, but it has a particularly tragic depth of salience in my constituency. East Hampshire is home to Treloar’s, a non-maintained special school and college that delivers outstanding education, nurture and care to children with some of the most profound disabilities. However, it was also the place where there was a terrible concentration of victims of this scandal. Because 40 to 50 haemophiliac patients were there at any one time, it came to be seen as a unique opportunity to study the disease, and a haemophilia centre was established at the nearby hospital in 1972. Towards the end of the 1970s, the hospital still catered to the needs of the wider community, but the haemophilia centre was relocated to the school grounds. The inquiry report dedicates an entire chapter to the experiences of pupils at Treloar’s, and to how research objectives often outweighed the best interests of the children. The inquiry heard that of the 122 pupils with haemophilia who attended the school between 1970 and 1987, only around 30 remain alive.

I have spoken to a number of my infected or affected constituents over the years, including Adrian “Ade” Goodyear, a man who speaks with remarkable dignity and determination. I will quote briefly from his most recent message to me:

“The camaraderie and unity of we former pupils—well the handfuls of us that are left…We have stuck together to get to the truth due to the promises and pacts we made towards our lost when they were living, as well as for their families.”

We have been waiting a very long time for the truth about a string of failures, omissions and wrongdoing, starting with the failure to achieve domestic self-sufficiency, and the decision to allow the importation of higher-risk factor VIII concentrates, which in many cases were procured via commercial arrangements that made infection more likely because the products came from high-risk groups, including prisoners and drug users. We were complacent about the risks of hepatitis C and slow to respond to the risks of AIDS, and we permitted research to be conducted on people without telling them—or, in the case of children, their parents—or informing them of the risks. In some cases, we failed to tell people that they were infected, thus closing down the possibility of their managing the progression of their disease or its transmission to others. In other cases, people were told starkly and insensitively about a diagnosis of HIV. There was defensiveness, a lack of candour, the active destruction of evidence and, of course, the absence of a meaningful apology or redress for so many years.

In his statement on 21 May, my right hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen) rightly accepted Sir Brian Langstaff’s recommended five categories of pay awards and confirmed additional interim compensation payments. There now needs to be clarity about the basis on which claims can be assessed, and the speed of those payments. Campaigners have raised concerns about the information sources available, and I hope that the Minister can provide assurance that steps will be taken to ensure that there is easily accessible information to support people making compensation claims.

I have been asked by former pupils at Treloar’s to ask about the compensation amounts of £10,000 and £15,000, which have been mentioned by the hon. Member for Eltham and Chislehurst (Clive Efford). It would be helpful to have on the record, and in Hansard, an explanation of those sums of money.

We have talked about memorialisation and the national memorial. The inquiry also recommended that there be a memorial dedicated specifically to the children at Treloar’s, and that it be provided at public expense. I hope that the Minister can provide an update on that, either in his closing remarks or in follow-up correspondence.

I hope that one of the positives that can come from this generation will be the instituting and institutionalising of a duty of candour, in both letter and spirit. The report recommends a review of the existing statutory duty of candour, which requires NHS organisations to be open and transparent about mistakes and harm in care, and requires leaders in health service organisations to be personally accountable for responding to concerns about safety. I think we all welcome the Bill appearing in the King’s Speech. For this generation, we need to make the duty of candour an established principle across the whole of public service, which is something in which we are all involved, in our different ways, as parliamentarians and members of the Government.

Nothing can ever make up for all these failings, but we can at least ensure that the compensation scheme works as well as it can, and that we as a state face up to our failings and truly learn the lessons, so that we can have confidence when we say, “Never will this happen again.”