Maternity Services (Morecambe Bay)

David Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I am not aware that they were. If that turns out to be the case, that would be extremely worrying. Since Dr Kirkup started his investigation, he has been in touch with the regulatory bodies throughout the process. He has not waited until today to refer back to them any names of people where he thinks there may be a concern.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his deep and meaningful statement. In my constituency, the effects of what has happened in our trust have been deeply felt. I would also like to reach out to my hon. Friend outside the Chamber, the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock). We have to put everything behind us. In my constituency, there is a campaign which says that the hospital is closing. The staff and the new management are beside themselves on this particular issue. Does my right hon. Friend agree that this has now got to stop? Hospitals and A and Es were never going to close down. At the end of the day, the staff are the only people who are going to suffer in all this.

[Mr Hunt]

I think this is a time when the whole House needs to unite behind the staff in that trust, who are working very hard to turn the situation around; indeed, they have made great progress. I had to call Nicola Adam of The Visitor to reaffirm the point that there are absolutely no plans to close the hospital. I hope the whole House will recognise that statement for what it is and that hon. Members will reiterate it in all their communications with their constituents.

A and E (Major Incidents)

David Morris Excerpts

Wednesday 7th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

The plans were to continue to have an A and E at Lewisham but to take some of the higher-risk patients to another hospital. Those are the plans that we originally had that have now been changed. What I will say to the hon. Gentleman, though, is that there were problems with South London Healthcare Trust for years and years. This Government dealt with them and sorted them out, and that means that his constituents are getting better care than they otherwise would have done.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend join me in congratulating the staff at Royal Lancaster Infirmary on meeting their A and E targets in November? Will he also share my revulsion at the Opposition putting out a leaflet saying that there are all kinds of things wrong with the A and E and that it is going to close?

[Mr Hunt]

That is exactly the kind of scaremongering, frankly, that is incredibly demoralising for those who are on the NHS front line right now. I urge Labour Members to think before they start doing things that make a difficult situation even worse.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Colleagues in Hansard may not even rely on the Secretary of State’s notes; they may have their own source material. They are very special people those reporters.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that concise answer. I reiterate the message to the unions, which are sticking up billboards in my constituency, that Cameron and Hunt are not selling off the NHS.

[Mr Hunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for his comments. I was quite amused to see that I have a future career as an estate agent, along with the Prime Minister, when our hopefully long careers in politics are over, but the point is that this is scaremongering and it is wrong to scaremonger about something as important as the NHS. To suggest that the NHS is being privatised is fiction. What is not fiction is Labour’s legacy of poor care.

Five Year Forward View

David Morris Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

In my earlier comments I spoke a bit about childhood obesity, which is a very important issue. I was the Secretary of State responsible for the Olympics, and as part of the Olympic legacy we set up the school games movement, which now has about two thirds of schools in the country doing Olympic-style games every year, and we have put an extra investment into school sport. We need to work closely with the Department for Education on this, and I agree that it is very important that we do so.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

May I invite my right hon. Friend to come to my local hospital and to my constituency to see what good works have been done in my area? A £25 million health centre has opened, we have a new walk-in centre that was opened by the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter). May I ask my right hon. Friend’s views on the talk about top-down reorganisation? [Interruption.] We walked into a shambles of an NHS after 13 years of Labour government and a debacle of a CQC policy that we had to reconfigure. What are his thoughts—[Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Gentleman has had a very full tilt. On the whole, it is a good idea to face the House, rather than the Government Front Bench. We are grateful.

NHS Services (Access)

David Morris Excerpts

Wednesday 15th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes comments from leading experts that the NHS and social care services are at breaking point; believes that this is linked to the Government’s decision to reorganise the NHS; further notes that one senior Cabinet minister has said that reorganising the NHS was the Government’s biggest mistake; further believes that the NHS reorganisation has wasted money which could have been spent on frontline care; further believes that access to NHS services is now deteriorating and that staff numbers are not keeping pace with demand; notes the report by the Nuffield Trust, entitled Cause for Concern: Quality Watch annual statement 2014, published in October 2014, which found that it is now becoming harder to access care in many settings, with some people facing extreme waits; calls on the Government to act swiftly to reverse the deterioration in accident and emergency, cancer and referral to treatment waiting times; further calls on the Government to publish its independent evidence on the costs of reorganising the NHS; and further calls on the Government to match the Labour Party’s plans to raise an extra £2.5 billion to invest in building the NHS workforce of the future.

Back in 1997, people were waiting months and years, and even dying, on NHS waiting lists. The last Labour Government brought that scandal to an end. Following the Wanless report we increased investment in the NHS, although that was opposed at the time by the Tories. Slowly, over the course of the past decade, the NHS rose up the international league table to the point where, in June 2010, it was judged by the Commonwealth Fund to be one of the best—if not the best—health services in the world. Of course it was not perfect, and there were terrible failings at Mid-Staffs, but the legacy inherited by this Government included the lowest ever waiting lists and the highest ever public satisfaction. That was Labour’s record: a massive turnaround in the fortunes of the NHS from the crumbling service that we inherited.

So where, after four and a half years of the coalition Government, does the NHS stand in 2014? It is at “breaking point”—[Interruption.] Hon. Members laugh, but those are not my words but those of the seven medical royal colleges and trusted organisations, including the Royal National Institute of Blind People, the Multiple Sclerosis Society, Anthony Nolan and the Alzheimer’s Society, which wrote an open letter last week to all the political parties. They said that

“staff feel undervalued and demoralised…things cannot go on like this.”

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andy Burnham]

I want to make some progress.

The letter identifies six areas of major concern, and I shall focus on three of them today. The first is GP services. The letter states:

“A shortage of GPs means that patients are struggling to get an appointment to see their doctor.”

Paul Turner-Mitchell got in touch with me today to say that getting a GP appointment is now like trying to get sought-after concert tickets with the phone stuck on redial. I am sure that a lot of people watching this debate today will know exactly what he means. It is becoming the norm for people to ring the surgery early in the morning only to be told that there is nothing available for days. This year, 13 million people have either waited a week or more for a GP appointment or could not get one at all. That figure has gone up by 2.5 million since 2011.

Why is this happening? It is happening because the GP budget has been repeatedly cut under this Government, because Labour’s 48-hour appointment guarantee has been axed and because the Government—in the words of their own GP taskforce—have presided over a “GP workforce crisis”. The number of GPs per 100,000 population increased from 54 in 1995 to 62 in 2009. However, the figure has now gone back down to 59.5.

At Prime Minister’s questions today, the Prime Minister tried to claim that there were 1,000 more GPs in the NHS than under the last Government. This is simply not true. I wonder what we can do about it, Madam Deputy Speaker. We have a Prime Minister who regularly abuses statistics at that Dispatch Box, and even when he has been found out, as he has on many occasions—

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Burnham]

I do get emotional about the NHS, because I believe in it, unlike the hon. Gentleman. That is fine, I do not mind—it does animate me. Let us have a look at Wales and, as I am about to come on to cancer care. In England, only 84% of patients receive treatment within 62 days. That is not good enough, and Wales has better figures on cancer care. The analysis of the four home nations’ health care systems found that there is good and bad in all of them and this Tory attack on the national health service in Wales has to stop.

I will move on to cancer and I will go back to the letter that I was quoting. It said:

“Thousands of patients are facing longer and even unacceptable waits to find out whether or not they have cancer, because services are under extreme pressure and referral targets are being missed.”

In 2014, 10,000 people in England had to wait longer than the recommended 62 days to start their cancer treatment. The number of patients waiting longer than six weeks for diagnostic tests has doubled in the past year—doubled, for cancer tests. That is simply not acceptable. We need to hear today what the Secretary of State is going to do about it and may I suggest that the very first thing he should do is stop the cuts to cancer care? A parliamentary question shows that expenditure on cancer services has fallen by £800 million in real terms since 2009-10; the information comes from his Department and I will send it to him. That is why the NHS has missed the cancer treatment target for two quarters running, the first time that it has ever done that.

The evidence is indisputable. The NHS has gone downhill on this Government’s watch and the question follows of what they are doing to bring GP, A and E and cancer services back up to national standards. That is what our motion and, more importantly, patients demand to know from the Secretary of State today, but they will also want to know why the NHS has gone from being a successful service four years ago to being at breaking point today. The front page of The Times on Monday offered us an answer. It quoted a senior Cabinet Minister who said:

“We’ve made three mistakes that I regret, the first being restructuring the NHS. The rest are minor.”

The Secretary of State is conveniently looking down and avoiding my eye at this point, but I am sure he has found out who that was. I am sure he knows. I know that he is avoiding looking at me, but is he prepared to tell us who it was or is he going to carry on with his head buried and avoiding—[Interruption.] He is blushing. I see that he has the good grace to do that, at least. It is an embarrassing comment, it really is, from a senior Cabinet Minister, but what use is it to people now, when people such as the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) and I were pleading with the Government to stop the process, to admit that it was all a mistake? It is an embarrassing situation for the Secretary of State to deal with, but at least we have from the very top of this arrogant Government the first admission that their reorganisation was a major mistake.

The article goes on to quote an ally of the Chancellor, who says:

“George kicks himself for not having spotted it and stopped it.”

Not having spotted it? This was famously the reorganisation so big we could see it from space. Not spotted it? What planet was the Chancellor living on? The truth is that the Government could have and should have stopped the reorganisation for the simple reason that they were elected on a promise of no top-down reorganisation and did not have the permission of a single person in this land to carry it out. That is why Thursday 7 May 2015 will be their day of reckoning on the national health service.

If this private apology now is designed to bring people back on board, it will not work. Doctors and nurses lined up to plead with the Government to call the reorganisation off, but they ploughed on. In the words of Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association:

“The damage done to the NHS has been profound and intense”.

Let me focus on just one example of that damage, staffing costs, as the Secretary of State was talking about them this week. The staff census shows very clearly that in the early years of this Parliament, when spending on back-office restructuring was at its peak, front-line nursing posts were cut by about 7,000. At the same time, the reorganisation threw nurse training into chaos. Training places were cut and have never recovered, down from 21,000 a year to 18,000 today.

The NHS has been recruiting more staff in the wake of the Francis report, but this is where the damage done by the reorganisation is hitting NHS trusts. They are being forced to recruit overseas or to turn to agency staff because there are simply not enough nurses coming through the training system.

I have been contacted by a whistleblower from a trust in Liverpool who says that it is now common for staff to receive text messages from agencies such as Pulse offering huge fees—up to £1,000—to work weekends in London or the north-east, with all travel and accommodation costs paid. That is now the norm, and it is happening on this Secretary of State’s watch. Some nurses are literally taking off one uniform on a Friday night and putting on another for the weekend. That is why the agency bill is out of control, and it is happening on his watch.

In 2013-14 the NHS spent £2.6 billion on agency staff. For foundation trusts that is a staggering 162% over what was planned. That helps to explain why trust deficits are mounting. Does not this mismanagement of the staffing budget explain why the Government are now reneging on their promise to pay nurses a meagre 1% pay rise? Is not that the real reason? I wonder how the Secretary of State thinks those nurses will feel when they read this week that senior mangers’ pay has increased by 13.8% on this Government’s watch, while their pay has gone up by only 5%. I am told that he has refused to meet the unions even to discuss it. It is not good enough. He should get to the negotiating table tomorrow and start treating the staff of our national health service with the respect they deserve.

[David Morris]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andy Burnham]

I will not.

The Secretary of State now claims that his reorganisation is saving £1 billion a year, but the truth is that that is a fantasy figure. The reorganisation, which cost £3 billion and counting, turned the 163 NHS organisations into 440 separate administrations with their own running costs. It introduced a new competition regime that is eating up tens of millions of pounds of NHS money. Perhaps that is why Kieran Walshe, professor of health policy at Manchester business school, said:

“I haven’t found anybody who thinks that this reorganisation has made the NHS more efficient and more productive… and I don’t think you find many people who think that the new system costs any less to run.”

The Secretary of State needs to clear this up today. Either he publishes the independent analysis that he claims supports his figure of £1 billion, or he stops making a claim that is simply not credible.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your guidance, Mr Speaker, in this debate about access to services.

I share one thing in common with the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), which is that I am from Leigh, as we both know. I am still under a specialist in Leigh, whom I have seen on many occasions. I have never had to wait and it has always been on time. I have seen specialists across at Tommy’s—St Thomas’s—without ever having to wait and always on time. I have also seen specialists in Lancaster without ever having to wait and always on time. I have heard all the stories about waiting lists and delays, but I personally have not experienced that. My family in the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency, where they still live, have not experienced it either. When my mother was leaving this world, shall we say, she had exemplary care from the local health trust. There was never any talk among the health professionals of cuts. They did not know who I was; I was just another person who was losing their mother.

I do not like to be tribal. The right hon. Gentleman and I have had terse words in the past, but I will say this on the record in the House: he is a good man and an honourable gentleman. I have friends who have voted for him. He is very well-regarded in his constituency. But what upsets me—I do not want to change the tone of this debate—is that in my constituency the Labour party is campaigning on the basis of an erroneous agenda of cuts, hospital closures and A and E closures that have never happened and are not going to happen. I received an e-mail today from a constituent who is absolutely terrified that the local Royal Lancaster infirmary is going to close, but it is not. There is no suggestion of it closing. In fact, I have spoken to the chief executive and she said, “I don’t know where this has come from.”

We are in the run-up to a general election and it is the silly season—that is evident to everyone inside and outside the Chamber—but it does no service to anybody in the political world, never mind the Opposition, if candidates up and down the country are going to fight about cuts and closures to the health service that are not even happening in certain areas. That will certainly not play into the hands of an incoming Government.

In my constituency of Morecambe and Lunesdale, £25 million has been spent recently on a new health centre. The Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter) opened a walk-in centre recently. We have been allocated £150 million to improve the local trust, most of which will be spent on the Royal Lancaster infirmary, which has four new hospital wards, and we have just received £2 million for GP access at the weekend. Two weeks ago, I opened a new mental health facility in my constituency.

Morecambe and Lunesdale has never seen so much investment in the NHS, yet the Labour party in my area says that everything is going to hell in a handcart and the hospital is closing down, but that is wrong. The RLI is not going to close, and neither was the hospital serving Corby, which the hon. Member for Corby (Andy Sawford) campaigned on.

[James Morris]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. In my constituency, there has been millions of pounds of new investment in the Rowley Regis hospital, which was under threat under the previous Government when all its in-patient wards were closed. The recent sign-off on a £350 million new integrated hospital in Smethwick in Sandwell, one of the most deprived areas in the country, will substantially benefit the population’s health care and also help regenerate the economy.

[David Morris]

I thank my hon. Friend and namesake for making that point.

I am passionate about the NHS and I know that the Opposition and the right hon. Member for Leigh are also passionate about it, but we should get a grip on reality. Campaigns are saying that £25 million is being cut from the local trust when £150 million has been invested in it, so the maths do not stack up. As my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) has said, we have been horse-trading figures, but we have to look at the reality of the situation. Scaremongering is not the way forward, because all it does is alienate the electorate, my constituents and the people we all live with across the nation and put fear into the services that we are trying to protect.

I am facing a third erroneous campaign on health cuts in my constituency, and my mail box is always full every time there is such a campaign. All it seeks to do is frighten the electorate, but it does not frighten me, because the electorate know the truth.

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

I was not going to intervene on the hon. Gentleman, but I sympathise with him, because Labour activists in my area have been campaigning against the closure of a treatment centre when all that happened, in fact, was that the contract came to an end. Hard work is now going on to make sure that the provision continues in another form. The big campaign was that this was about cuts and closing a treatment centre, but it was never going to close.

[David Morris]

I share my hon. Friend’s sentiments.

My hospital in Lancaster, in my neighbouring constituency, is not going to close. Like everyone else in the Chamber, I care about the NHS, but I appeal not just to the Opposition, but to all political parties that have the honour to serve here and speak: let us get a grip on reality, stop scaremongering and work towards making a better NHS. It has been an absolute pleasure to speak in this debate.

NHS Investigations (Jimmy Savile)

David Morris Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I reassure the hon. Lady that that responsibility lies with the Home Secretary, and the Home Office has a cross-governmental committee that will bring together all the lessons from all the reports. My first priority is to ensure that we are doing everything we can to make NHS patients safe, but there are much broader lessons to be learned. That is being led by the Home Office.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that what has happened is absolutely abhorrent and that it sends out a strong message to everyone in society that even a celebrity is not above the law of the land? May I also praise the work of Kate Lampard and her team in bringing this forward?

Patient Safety

David Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

There are real pressures in our mental health services, but the right hon. Gentleman should recognise the progress that the Government have made. That includes doubling the money going into talking therapies, having global summits on dementia and putting a massive amount of money towards raising the profile of dementia in this country and across the globe, and legislating for parity of esteem as between mental and physical health—something that never happened under the previous Government. There is a lot of work to do, but I think he should give credit where it is due.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

On transparency of staffing levels, does my right hon. Friend know that the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Health Trust vacancy level for nurses is now 4%, against a regional average of 10%? That is obviously an increase in nurses in my area, and I thank him for that.

[Mr Hunt]

I welcome the increase in nursing across the country, and I am surprised that Labour Members do not welcome it. When I started in this job they spoke constantly about nursing numbers, but I notice they have now stopped doing that. Although those numbers are an important first step, it is not possible to compare trust with trust at this stage because they are all self-reported numbers. Over the next months—certainly by next spring—we will go through all the figures ensuring that NICE-approved tools are used to fulfil them. We will then see how trusts are doing compared with each other, which will be useful to them.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 26th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Norman Lamb]

Labour still seems to be in complete denial about the crisis in public finances that we inherited in 2010 owing to failures by the Government whom the hon. Gentleman supported in managing public finances. What we are doing is introducing a £3.8 billion fund to pool health and social care. It amounts to a substantial shift of resources to preventing ill health and it will do exactly what we need to do for social care.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

May I thank the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter), for recently opening a walk-in centre in Morecambe? May I also set the record straight, because the centre had been closed under the previous Government? Does he not think that it is a shocking indictment that in 2006 the NHS was cut by 9% in the region—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. First, topical questions are supposed to be brief. Secondly, the Minister is not responsible for what happened in 2006. We will have a very brief reply and then perhaps we can move on.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am always pleased to hear the hon. Gentleman, but I simply point out to him that Calderdale is rather a long way from Morecambe and Lunesdale. Calderdale is the subject of the question; therefore, it is essentially closed. I hope that that is helpful to him and the House.

Hospital Mortality Rates

David Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

Absolutely, and the big point about the changes that we are bringing in—I congratulate my hon. Friend, who is a huge supporter of Kettering hospital, which he and I have visited together—is that the NHS in many ways is no different from other parts of our public services: there are excellent bits and there are bits where there is poor leadership. What we have to do if we are to sort out the poor leadership is to expose it and to make sure that the public know about it and the politicians cannot duck sorting it out. My hon. Friend’s constituents will be thinking, as a result of tomorrow’s headlines, “What about Kettering hospital?” That is why we will have an independent chief inspector who will go round and tell them how good Kettering hospital is. However much they love it, he may well find things that need to be improved, and my hon. Friend and his constituents will welcome that.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Last week it was the CQC. Now it turns out that between 2005 and 2010 there were 386 separate warnings that the last Labour Secretary of State claims never to have received, yet the trust in my area was given foundation status. Does my right hon. Friend agree that given the new revelation by Sir Brian Jarman on suppression of warnings, along with existing allegations of spin and cover-up levelled against a former Secretary of State for Health, it is now time for the right hon. Gentleman to resign?

[Mr Hunt]

That is a matter for the leader of the Labour party. What concerns me most is that the Opposition do not understand the fundamental policy mistakes they made which led to the entrenched culture of failure in too much of our hospital sector.