National Insurance Contributions: Healthcare
Ellie Chowns Excerpts(3 days, 16 hours ago)
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Karin Smyth
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments and for supporting his local hospice. He is an experienced parliamentarian; he knows that this is not simple and that the provider landscape is complicated. As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), large private equity companies own many social care providers. We want to ensure that any additional funding from the Budget goes exactly where it needs to be: supporting patients—our constituents—where they live and need care. That is why, over the next few months, we will continue to talk to providers in the usual way about the allocation of those funds.
Ellie Chowns (North Herefordshire) (Green)
Since the Budget, I have been contacted by GPs, care providers and charities in my constituency, all expressing concern about the impact of the rise in employer NICs on their ability to serve the most vulnerable in our community. Will the Minister reconsider the change by finding a way to exempt the charitable sector in the same way as the public sector? I have written to Ministers and tabled early-day motions on this issue. Will she take this opportunity to assure the charitable sector that it will not be impacted by the measure?
Karin Smyth
The hon. Lady tempts me to make specific commitments, which I am not prepared to do, as I am sure she understands. She is right that people are expressing concerns about some of these decisions. That is because they are in such a precarious situation as a result of what we have inherited from the past 14 years. As the Prime Minister and the rest of the Government have been clear throughout the election and afterwards, we have a 10-year plan because it will take a long time to fix the foundations and build up the sector to make it more resilient and sustain it for the future. We want to fix those foundations, and we will talk closely with everyone affected over the coming months, but this will take a long time. Those providers are precarious because of the mess that we inherited.
Access to Primary Healthcare
Ellie Chowns Excerpts(1 month ago)
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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.
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?