Access to Primary Healthcare

Ellie Chowns Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dr Johnson]

Essentially, because there is more clinical acute need in primary care hospitals. Given the choice, with one amount of money, between saving a life and preventing a problem for later, it is inevitable that money gets shifted towards acute care. That is where the pressure is, but I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we need to work harder to prevent people from becoming ill in the first place.

[Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)]

On that point, will the shadow Minister give way?

[Dr Johnson]

No, I will not give way again, because I know that you will give me eyes if I do, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Labour has spent 14 years in opposition. The Secretary of State has had plenty of time to consider what he would do if he gained office, so, further to the intervention of the hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Ben Coleman), what have the Government achieved in 14 weeks to help the health of the nation? I will tell you, Madam Deputy Speaker. They have opened the Department’s doors to their Labour mates. They have awarded an inflation-busting pay rise to junior doctors without negotiating any modernisation or productivity reform in return. They have overseen GPs entering industrial action and nurses rejecting their pay offer. They have scrapped the social care costs cap. They have produced a report of selected statistics with no policy recommendations. They have broken their manifesto pledge to deliver the new hospital programme. They have taken the winter fuel payment from millions of vulnerable pensioners. They have even stopped the children’s cancer taskforce.

That dire record, underlined by the Labour legacy in Wales, fills me with huge trepidation for the future of the NHS. I hope that when the Government’s plan eventually comes, it is a good one, for all our sakes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)]

The Darzi report made it very clear that our NHS is under- funded, overstretched and too hospital focused. That has also been a focus of today’s debate so far. I welcome what I heard from the Secretary of State, in last week’s debate on the Darzi report, about investment and reform, and a shift from hospital to community and from sickness to prevention. We all want those things, but they will not happen without more investment, and without a crucial reform in the way the NHS is funded. We have seen a drift towards an increasing focus on acute services and on hospital services at the expense of investment in preventive healthcare and the primary services that we all recognise are so needed, and that my constituents in North Herefordshire so desperately want. They want to be able to see a GP, and they want to see the community frontline services that will save their health, and will save the NHS money, in the long run.

Can the Minister assure me that she and her colleagues have been doing everything possible to urge the Chancellor to make available the billions of pounds of investment in the NHS that are necessary to bring us back up to scratch in comparison with our peers? Darzi said that we are underfunded in comparison with similar health services. Will she assure me that the Government are considering putting in place some sort of mechanism to protect funding for primary and community care, and indeed to ratchet it up over the years? The way things happen at the moment is that hospitals constantly overspend and those overspends are constantly plugged, which is why the money is going more and more into hospitals and less and less into primary care. Will we get the billions of pounds of investment in the Budget that we need, and will we get that protection and ratchet mechanism for primary care funding that is the only way to ensure that the extra doctors, extra appointments and so forth are delivered?