NHS (Government Spending)

Emily Thornberry Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

Let me begin by thanking the Minister for his contribution today—particularly as he is a doctor. I also thank him for helping those of us with our Tory NHS debate bingo cards to show that he has used all the words we were expecting—“weaponise”, “Wales”, “long-term economic plan”—and for the additional benefit of sharing his understanding of the international banking crash, which is that it was Mr Brown shovelling money out of the back windows at Lehman Brothers that caused the entire world economy to crash.

Let me move on to perhaps a much more important point. How are we going to fund the national health service in the future? What the Minister did not address—which is a grave disappointment—were some of the matters in the motion that we are supposed to be debating. My constituents prioritise the NHS probably over everything else. For them, it is all about our working together as one community and looking after everyone: no one is more important than anyone else; we all stick together; we pay our taxes and support the weakest; and all of us should be able to get world-class health care. We are very proud of the national health service, which has delivered that. However, my constituents are profoundly concerned about what is going to happen in the future. Can the national health service survive another five years of a Tory Government? The answer they come to very rapidly is no.

The question is a simple one. How can the Prime Minister stand up at the Tory party conference and say, “We’re going to make £7 billion worth of tax cuts,” and not tell us where the money is coming from? How can the Prime Minister or the Chancellor of the Exchequer say that state spending is going to decline to the level it was in the 1930s, when in the 1930s we did not have a national health service? How does that work? How do we square that circle? Without answers to profoundly important questions such as those, the public simply say, “We don’t trust you with the most precious thing we have as part of our British identity. We want to be able to have a national health service that will hold us together.” How can the NHS be safe in the hands of this Government?

[Dr Poulter]

rose—

[Emily Thornberry]

I give way to the doctor.

[Dr Poulter]

The hon. Lady will of course be aware that our plans for public spending will only put it back to the level it was in 2002, under the previous Labour Government, which is hardly the bleak picture she paints. At the same time, we will be able to invest money in our NHS.

[Emily Thornberry]

I still do not understand why, therefore, the Office for Budget Responsibility says that the percentage of state spending will be at the level it was in the 1930s. In the end, although the Minister is a doctor, I would prefer to take the word of the Office for Budget Responsibility. Indeed, I urge the Minister to speak again to his party leader and say to him, “When we come to make manifesto commitments, let’s run them past the Office for Budget Responsibility,” so that the public know whom they can trust on money and particularly on the NHS.

I remember serving on the Health and Social Care Bill Committee for many, many weeks—months, in fact; indeed, I believe it was almost a year of my life. I remember my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) and I pleading with the Government not to go ahead—not to waste time and money on a top-down reorganisation; not to waste people’s heart and soul on a reorganisation of the national health service in a way that was unnecessary. We said, “All you’re doing is opening the door to privatisation. What you are doing is wrong for the national health service. You must stop. You must think again.” And there was indeed a pause—a pause for an awful lot of spinning—but the Government still forced through a profound reorganisation of the national health service that has allowed the market to come into the NHS and wasted £3 billion.

We also said that if we needed to look again—and we did—at making our national health service appropriate for the 21st century, we should look at how to bring social care and health together. It is difficult, because social care is largely provided by local authorities. Very often it is means-tested and provided locally, with local accountability, whereas the national health service was much more nationally accountable, had much better funds and was not means-tested. However, without those two things moving and working together, we cannot have proper health care in our country, because—and we all know this—most people who use the national health service are elderly. They come to A and E in crisis, and once they are in they are unable to get out again. It is demeaning. It is humiliating. It is something that all of us in the Chamber will face unless something is done.

People must be supported in the community so that they are able to live their lives as healthily as possible—yes, fighting off three or four long-term conditions, but still as healthily as possible. However, while this Government have been cutting the money to local authorities—it is being shovelled out the back door by Eric Pickles—the Health team have been saying, “Oh, it’s all right: we’re giving more money to social care.” But the Government know—and all of us who have friends, relatives or constituents who are using social care know—that there is not enough of it around. Old ladies are getting up and being taken out of bed and are sitting in their chair three hours later than they were before. They are getting visits of 15 minutes. They are not being looked after properly. They have the choice between having a bath and having a meal. In the 21st century, in one of the richest countries in the world, that is a disgrace. How can we really be looking properly at the future of the health service and allowing that to happen? Of course, if people are kept in bed until 11 o’clock in the morning and then being put back to bed at 5 o’clock in the evening, they will become unhealthy. They will end up in A and E in crisis and they will not be able to get out again.

More and more local authorities are cutting back on social care and are giving social care only to those in the most acute need. In the time I have left—I do not have very long, so I am going to rattle through—I want to say what Islington does. Despite having the sixth-worst levels of child poverty in the entire country and one of the worst mental health records in the country, Islington provides social care on a level of which we should be proud. It provides social care at moderate levels. It is working with Whittington Health. The hospital in my constituency is working with the local authority, providing health in the community. The hospital sends people out; we have GPs working in the hospital. It is a model on which I hope the next Government’s—ours—model for proper health and social care will be based: the idea of people working together, looking at the whole person, giving the health service time to care and look after people properly, and giving people the right to die at home with dignity and support.

I want to use the 30 seconds I have left to give due credit to Camden health services for allowing my father-in-law to die at home with true dignity and proper palliative care. It gave him the choice to die in his bed, next to his wife, for which I am profoundly grateful. I know that he was very privileged in being allowed to do that, because up and down the country that is not being allowed. It saved money, gave him what he wanted and gave him pride. Why are we not dealing with problems like that, instead of introducing the private market into our precious national health service?