Urgent and Emergency Care

Debbie Abrahams Excerpts

Monday 5th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

I fear that the question was written before the statement. In the course of the statement, we have covered the significant additional funding that is going in, whether that is in primary care with the £1.5 billion on GP capacity, the £450 million on A&E capacity, the £150 million on ambulances, the £50 million on 111 call-handling or the £30 million on St John auxiliary ambulance capacity—to name just a few areas.

As to the hon. Gentleman’s wider charge on Government funding for the NHS, I remind him that health funding is on track to be £4 in every £10 of day-to-day Government expenditure, which is a significant increase on 2010. We have also just been through a pandemic in which the fiscal response, as the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands) will know, was about £400 billion. Significant funding has gone in, and the statement today has shown that a number of factors, in particular the integration between social care and the NHS, are at the heart of solving the issue of delays on ambulance handovers.

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

For the week ending 12 August, there were nearly 1,000 excess deaths. We know that that is just the tip of the iceberg and it is likely to get worse; that is about 10% more than the five-year rolling average. What are the Secretary of State’s estimates of how much worse it is going to get over the winter months, and what is he going to do about it?

[Steve Barclay]

I have set out a range of things that we are doing to tackle what we recognise are significant pressures facing the NHS, whether that is through the taskforce that we have set up, which is targeted on delayed discharge; the intensive work that has been undertaken with, in particular, the 10 trusts that account for 45% of ambulance delays; the improved capacity within our call handling; or looking at our data, as was raised earlier, on the variation in performance between ambulance trusts on areas such as conveyancing or within the integration between the NHS and social care. I pay tribute to the huge amount of work that is being done within the NHS and social care in recognising that there are significant challenges within the system, which is why so much work has gone into addressing that over the summer.