Health and Social Care

Eric Ollerenshaw Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods), who picked up the theme of the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) in talking about social care, which I too should like to remark on.

Unlike others, I will not be tempted into the subjects of tobacco, Europe or gay marriage but will stick fundamentally to the title of this debate on health and social care. I have a few specific points to make about the impact on my constituency. In general, though, I am proud to be part of a Government who, despite the need to eliminate the huge budget deficit left to us, have protected spending on the NHS. That has been necessary, in large part, because of the demographic changes that are happening in the UK with a rapidly ageing population. We need to do more than just target health spending on the older population; we need to change the way we think about providing care for the elderly and what this means for our society. I think that that is what other hon. Members are working towards as regards the cross-over between social care and health care.

I warmly welcome the inclusion of the Care Bill in the Queen’s Speech and the Secretary of State’s comments about personal health care and social care plans for the elderly. We can all make criticisms in saying that more should have been done, but the fact is that this Government have actually done it. The previous Government kept promising to do something about the tragedy of people having to sell their homes to pay for care; this Government have set about doing it by introducing a Bill that will end that tragedy by introducing a cap on care costs. That is remarkable given the background of the deficit we face. The implications of that will be borne out when the electorate understand that finally a Government have committed to go this far.

I firmly believe that this is the right way forward. It has been clear for some time that we needed to create a long-term solution to allow people to plan with confidence for their future. Now other generations, too, can plan how they want to look after themselves in old age because they know that the cap is there and that there will be a higher means-testing threshold allowing them to put some money aside to address these issues. We have already heard in this debate arguments about the threshold, the cap, and the way forward. However, I hope that Labour Members will recognise that, as the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) and the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) indicated, we need to find a bipartisan way to deal with this fundamental demographic issue facing the population of this country and try to shift it out of the political arena.

Having talked about social care, I now want to address NHS funding more broadly. As I have said, I am proud that NHS spending has risen in real terms over the life of this Parliament, but the historic formula used to distribute NHS money around the country needs to be reassessed. Although it is correct to factor in depravation when deciding where funds are allocated, a bigger weighting needs to be given to the age of the local population. A recent Age UK briefing note stated that at any one time about 65% of hospital patients will be over the age of 65, while, according to national statistics, areas with the highest depravation are also likely to be those with the youngest population. At present, therefore, those parts of the country with the highest numbers of older people have to deliver highly specialised services and care without a funding formula to assist them in their work. Moreover, as a Member representing a semi-rural part of the country, I see at first hand the effect that geography also has on the delivery of services and the extra costs involved in delivering quality health care over a wide area.

Lancaster is part of the Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust. It is a pleasant and wonderful geographical area, but it is enormous. It has three hospitals—in Lancaster, Barrow and Kendal. The distance between the hospital in Barrow, which offers some specialist services, and that in Lancaster, which offers others, is 50 miles by car, but the hills and dales mean that it sometimes takes one and a half to two hours to travel between the two. Nothing in the national formula acknowledges the problems faced by the trust. Specialist services need to be retained in as many of those hospitals as possible if journey times are to be kept to acceptable levels, which means that they will require proper funding to allow them to operate. I look forward to working with my hon. Friends the Members for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) and for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), as well as others, to try to tackle this unfair disparity with regard to some geographical areas.

I want to pinpoint how the problem affects us locally. The Royal Lancaster Infirmary has a vascular service unit and, despite the excellent clinical outcomes it has delivered for years, it has been suggested that it should close. That would leave a service gap between Carlisle in the north and Preston in the south of nearly 90 miles. It would leave patients from the more rural parts of my constituency, especially those from Barrow or south Cumbria, with lengthy journeys if they needed specialist treatment. Some areas are well outside the 90-minute transport target time, which is already an extension of the national target of 60 minutes.

That delay in journey time is a genuine issue for consideration when establishing where specialist services should be located, as has already been proven by the decision to retain a vascular service in Carlisle, where an exception was made to most of the scoring criteria because of the local geography and the time it would take to transport patients elsewhere. If exceptions are rightly being made in one part of the north-west, they should apply to other areas where substantial delay is likely to occur. As I have already said, under the current plans there is a huge geographical gap in service provision between Carlisle and Preston.

The closure proposal has been referred to the Secretary of State for a final decision and I sincerely hope that he and his Ministers will decide in favour of retaining the specialist provision at the RLI. That, however, is just one example. A more wide-ranging review is being undertaken of service provision across north Lancashire and there are concerns that our local A and E unit may be under threat as a result of geography not being taken into account.

The funding formula needs to change to take greater account of those parts of the country with an elderly population. It also needs better to reflect the difficulties of providing services in large geographical, sparsely populated areas. Without that and the accompanying reallocation of resources, hospitals in rural and semi-rural areas will struggle even more to provide the necessary services to their residents. I urge the Secretary of State to look into this as a matter of urgency.