National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill

Emma Lewell-Buck Excerpts

Friday 21st November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

I would like to offer my support for the Bill and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) on bringing it to the House.

Members will be pleased that I intend to keep my comments brief. Our NHS is a monumental achievement and one that my party remains deeply proud of. There are many people alive today who remember what life was like before the NHS and who would never go back to a time when the poor could not afford treatment for preventable illnesses. That is the generation that truly understands what the NHS means and why we must protect it.

That is not to say that people today take the NHS for granted. In fact my inbox, like those of other hon. Members, has been overflowing with e-mails from constituents worried about the future of our health service. They want the principle of free and equal access protected and the needs of patients put before profit, as they should be. I and those people are afraid of the direction the NHS is heading in under this Government. We see the Tories wedging open the door for private companies to come in and deliver services, and we see hospitals encouraged to take on ever more private patients.

People do not believe the Government’s spin: they know that the changes are part of the creeping privatisation being encouraged by the Tories and that the reorganisation in the 2012 Act was all about Tory ideology, not patient care. The reorganisation wasted £3 billion and has seen millions more spent on tendering exercises and competition lawyers which could have been spent on treatment for those who genuinely needed it. They also know that they cannot trust a Health Secretary who has previously backed calls to dismantle the NHS or a party that brought the NHS to the brink of collapse the last time it was in power. Back then, it took a Labour Government to save the NHS, and now history is repeating itself.

The constituents who have written to me, the people I was proud to join on the NHS march earlier this year and those I joined last night for a vigil outside Parliament understand what is at stake. The NHS is more than just a service; it is a principle of fairness. Illness and accidents strike us all at some point, often without warning and leaving us little time to plan, and before the NHS, this kind of misfortune could destroy lives and condemn families to extreme poverty. Now we have a service that says nobody, whether rich or poor, should have their life ruined by misfortune. That is the principle that my hon. Friends and I are standing up for today.