NHS Commissioning Board (Mandate)

Dennis Skinner Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

There are parts of the country where acupuncture is available on the NHS. This will be clinically led. It needs to be driven by the science, but where there is evidence, and where local doctors think that it would be the best clinical outcome for their patients, that is what they are able to do.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

As a customer of the national health service, I was lucky enough to have cancer treatment and a heart bypass in those days—halcyon days, almost, by comparison—when 80,000 nurses and 20,000 doctors were recruited, and the money increased from £33 billion to well over £100 billion. Does the Secretary of State know that the optimistic outlook that existed in those days has now been replaced by a climate of fear? That is what I find at the sharp end in hospitals when I go to see the same people I met at the end of the last century. What I say to you is that the figures might sound grand and all the rest of it, but when you start sacking 60,000 people in the national health service, set against a background of elderly people living longer—people like me who need the treatment—the net result will be a catastrophe and not those halcyon days of yesteryear.

[Mr Hunt]

Let me say to the hon. Gentleman that we have 17,000 fewer managers than when his party was in power. We also have 3,500 more doctors and there are more clinical staff in the NHS today than when his party left office, so I think the record speaks for itself. There is not a climate of fear—I reject that. There is an understanding that the NHS is under a lot of pressure, with an ageing population and more people using and needing its services every year. That is why today’s package is so important to support the NHS in delivering what the public need.