Department of Health and Social Care

Danny Beales Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Danny Beales (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Lab)]

When the Labour Government came into office last year, the NHS was in a critical state. Its fundamental promise to be there when we need it had been broken. The uplifted funding package is the first step on the road to making good that promise once again, but the pressures facing our health and care system are not over. Our system needs fundamental reform as well as investment, and achieving the ambitious 4% efficiency targets on which the Budget is premised will be challenging and will require change.

It is vital that we secure additional capital investment. We saw the previous Government continually raid the capital budgets of the NHS to balance the books, leaving the long-term productivity issues that we face today. I have seen in my own constituency hospital wards closed and unable to do procedures, and pharmacy and sexual health services desperate to do more but without the clinical space to expand. The £3 billion uplift in the future capital budget is therefore very good news. In her response, will the Minister outline that commitment to protecting capital budgets and maximising them to deliver the change that we need to see?

Through my work on the Health and Social Care Committee over the past few months, I have heard time and again, and it has become increasingly apparent, that to achieve the three shifts that the 10-year plan addresses we will have to bring together health and social care budgets and change financial flows to provide long-term funding settlements for both sectors. We will also have to fix the front door of our NHS, which is primary care, to which I will address the rest of my comments.

Primary care is best placed to provide preventive advice that keeps people well and deliver community-based healthcare that keeps people out of hospital. Yet it is precisely those primary care services—GPs, dentists, pharmacists and optometrists—that faced some of the harshest underfunding and neglect over the last 14 years of Conservative mismanagement. The Government’s new deal for GPs, announced last week, is a welcome first step in improving primary care provision, but GPs cannot do it alone. Primary care is much more than just general practice, and other components of primary care are still in a state of crisis.

Community pharmacies are on the same flat funding contract that expired in late 2024, and that funding model is clearly inadequate. Healthwatch has estimated that 400 pharmacies were forced to close permanently in the last 12 months. I recently visited Boots pharmacy in my constituency and saw the great work that it is doing on vaccinations, health advice and so much more, and it is desperate to expand the range of services it offers.

On optometry, having recently met the team at Uxbridge Specsavers, it is clear to me that optometry is much more than just glasses and contact lenses. Through advanced testing, they have recently diagnosed people with a range of conditions, such as high blood pressure and even brain tumours. On dentistry, the dental contract is no longer fit for purpose, with many practices no longer delivering NHS appointments and those that are doing so at a financial loss. In Uxbridge and South Ruislip, the majority of practices are now closed to new NHS patients—both adults and children—and that clearly cannot go on. With that in mind, the provision of 700,000 extra urgent dental care appointments on the NHS, announced last month by the new Government, is a vital and desperately needed action. But clearly, more is needed.

Will the Minister confirm whether the dental budget will continue to be ringfenced? Will we ensure that, unlike the last Government, we will not underdeliver and underspend on the vitally needed dentistry budget? Will she also confirm that negotiations for the new dentistry contract will begin in earnest this year to permanently fix the dentistry crisis?

The mental health investment standard has been crucial in protecting mental health spending, as part of a vital shift to giving mental health parity of esteem. As we shift to neighbourhood health, I hope the Government can explore how to better track community-based health and preventive spending, ideally protecting and growing the share of the NHS budget seen by primary care.

The task of rebuilding our health estate and our primary care system is an immense challenge. However, it is not insurmountable. Labour has turned around the NHS before, and I am confident that this Government will do it again, creating a genuine community-based health and care system.