NHS Risk Register

Emma Reynolds Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and when he was Chair of the Public Accounts Committee he constantly told the last Government that they should do something to ensure rising productivity in the NHS. He was not alone in that.

[Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Mr Lansley]

I will in a moment. Perhaps the hon. Lady would like to explain the views of not only my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) but his successor as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the right hon. Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge), who said:

“Over the last ten years, the productivity of NHS hospitals has been in almost continuous decline.”

[Interruption.] I hear Labour Front Benchers ask, “What about the risk register?” I will tell them what the risk to the NHS was before we came into government. It was that a Labour Government would carry on failing to increase productivity in the NHS. Productivity would have declined, and the NHS would have been unable to provide patients with the service and care that it should provide, because Labour wasted money on bureaucracy instead of spending it on patient care.

[Emma Reynolds]

I am proud of our record on the NHS, given that patient satisfaction with the NHS is at an all-time high. Does the Health Secretary agree with the analysis of Professor Black in his report in The Lancet that Tory Ministers’ claims that productivity declined between 2000 and 2009 is based on a myth?

[Mr Lansley]

I have just quoted what the Labour Chair of the Public Accounts Committee said on the basis of advice from the National Audit Office, which is precisely in line with data published by the Office for National Statistics. I think I will rest on that.

I want to make it absolutely clear that I appreciate what NHS staff do and the fact that they are delivering improving outcomes. We published 30 indicators of NHS outcomes just two months ago, and 25 of them showed that performance had been maintained or improved. They had not all gone up, but that is why we are focusing on those outcomes, and not just waiting times. However, the average time for which in-patients waited for treatment was 7.7 weeks in December 2011, down from 8.4 weeks at the last election. For out-patient treatment, the average is down from 4.3 weeks at the election to 3.8 weeks now.