NHS Capital Spending

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The White House in Harrow, thanks to NHS capital money, will shortly become even better than its American namesake. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Bobby Dean) for the way in which he introduced the debate. I agree very much that levels of capital investment into the NHS do not get the attention that they deserve in this place. He is certainly right about the impact on NHS capital spending of the austerity over the previous 14 years of Conservative health administrations. He rightly referenced the shameful spectacle of Conversative Health Secretary after Conservative Health Secretary handing back capital moneys to the Treasury at the end of March. My hon. Friend the Minister will be pleased to know that I have a solution to that problem if she faces it this year.

The White House, which is located at Harrow college, close to Harrow-on-the-Hill station, is set to become one of Harrow’s neighbourhood care centres thanks to NHS capital. NHS capital is allowing the local NHS to convert the White House, which is part of the college at the moment, into a new, expanded GP surgery and care centre. It will offer two opportunities for students enrolled at the college to begin a career in health and social care. Crucially, it will create a hub for care services that can keep people out of hospital and, in particular, out of accident and emergency queues.

The White House is set to be one of a number of new neighbourhood care centres, including Belmont health centre, Alexandra Avenue health and social care in Rayner’s Lane in my constituency and the Pinn medical centre in Pinner. This planned expansion of primary care over the next two years, using NHS capital moneys, builds on a recent significant increase in the number of GP surgery appointments. The nightmare of having to get an appointment to see a GP once lines open at 8 am is beginning to ease, but much more progress still needs to be made. GP appointments in Harrow have increased substantially since July 2024. Just under 120,000 appointments took place that month, but by October last year the total number of appointments each month had risen to more than 145,000—a 22% increase. For face-to-face appointments in particular, there had been a 30% increase.

I welcome the difference that NHS capital allocated to Harrow will make for primary care in the coming years. The funding for GP Direct, a surgery currently based in west Harrow, to expand and offer more and better primary care services, and for a neighbourhood healthcare centre located at the Alexandra Avenue clinic, is set to make even more of a qualitative difference to primary care services in my constituency.

However, I hope to make the case to the Minister for the allocation of further NHS capital investment at Northwick Park hospital. Waiting lists are beginning to come down at Northwick Park, but, again, there is much more to do. To help maintain that progress, Northwick Park needs a new 36-bed critical care unit, with space for further expansion. A series of NHS and independent assessments of critical care across north-west London have identified a shortage of critical care beds, particularly on the Northwick Park site. The existing intensive care unit there has a series of problems that compromise the current delivery of critical care. It is not co-located with other key NHS services on site, such as the emergency department or operating theatres. It is outdated, noisy, cramped and unfit for purpose for patients and families facing critical illness—or, worse, potential end of life.

The trust has put together a proposal for a new UK-leading exemplar intensive care unit that provides additional critical care beds and a new CT scanner, which would embed modern standards of patient experience and family support. The proposal is for a 36-bed unit and allows for a potential future expansion for a further 24 critical care beds. The new unit that is immediately proposed allows for 30 of the 36 beds to replace existing critical care beds that are located in other parts of Northwick Park hospital, which will free up extra bed space and, in turn, help to alleviate pressures on other parts of the hospital, notably in accident and emergency. It will also play a useful role in helping to prevent the cancellation of elective operations.

The recommended bed occupancy for critical care beds is set at 85%, according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Northwick Park has been consistently above that level for some time. The hospital has one of the busiest A&E departments in the country, receiving an average of 90 ambulances a day, rising to 140 on its busiest days. Critical care admissions are also up by more than 16% since 2018-19, and more than 80% of admissions to the trust are at Northwick Park hospital. It is worth reflecting on the experience of covid. Northwick Park was the first hospital during the covid pandemic to declare a critical incident, as the number of intensive care beds simply ran out.

An expansion in critical care beds at Northwick Park needs funding. It needs funding to improve services now, but also to better prepare north-west London for future health emergencies. The bid for funding is strongly supported by the trust board and, I understand, by the local integrated care board as well. I hope that the Minister, her Health colleagues and the Treasury will support it, and that the Minister will commit to doing all she can to give it a strong push.

Work on cancer care services is also taking place in the London North West University NHS trust. Northwick Park already sees more than 50,000 people with suspected cancer each year, and diagnoses more than 3,000 cases. However, too many cancer cases have to be dealt with outside of our area, and the quality of the experience for those being treated for cancer could be significantly improved with further investment. I hope that the Minister will duly make sure that Northwick Park is flagged up early for further investment as part of the national cancer plan.

[Matt Western (in the Chair)]

I expect speeches to be around five minutes so that we can get everyone in. Please be respectful to colleagues.

Cancer Services: North-west London

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2025 Written Corrections

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

3. What steps he is taking to improve cancer services in north-west London.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

3. What steps he is taking to improve cancer services in north-west London.

[The Minister for Secondary Care (Karin Smyth)]

Thanks to our investment and modernisation of the NHS, the Government are putting cancer services on the road to recovery by opening up community diagnostic centres on evenings and weekends, building new surgical hubs and investing in new radiotherapy machines. We are diagnosing cancer faster and treating it sooner. This year, an extra 193,000 patients received a timely diagnosis or the all-clear compared with the previous year.[Official Report, 4 December 2025; Vol. 776, c. 12WC.] (Correction) I am pleased to report that cancer services in north-west London rank among the best performing in England, and we are committed to further improvement.

[Gareth Thomas]

Northwick Park hospital is the acute hospital serving my constituents. It benefits from having excellent cancer clinicians. They are determined to go ever further to improve the speed of diagnosis and the quality of support for those diagnosed with cancer, and are developing plans for a cancer centre for the hospital. As part of the roll-out of the national cancer plan, would my hon. Friend be willing to visit and meet those clinicians, and perhaps bring the Secretary of State’s chequebook with her?

[Karin Smyth]

As my kids would say, that is a bit boomer, but I take the point. My hon. Friend is a tireless campaigner for Northwick Park and his constituents, and he has long campaigned for the improvement of cancer services. Any reconfiguration or change to services needs to be clinically led by local decision makers, following engagement with patients and stakeholders. I am sure that the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Ashley Dalton), who is developing the cancer plan, would be happy to meet him to discuss services in his constituency.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the excellent work he did as a Health Minister. It was a real pleasure to work alongside him and see what a difference he made for our constituents across the country. He asks a very good question about the work we are doing to increase the capacity of the NHS and ensure that it has the workforce it needs, including by delivering on our manifesto commitment to 50,000 more nurses for the NHS, which we have achieved.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

One way the Minister could help Harrow’s health services be better prepared for this winter and future winters would be to invest in new intensive care beds at Northwick Park Hospital, which serves my constituents. Given that the Government have been told repeatedly that their promised 40 new hospitals are about as real as the Prime Minister’s meat tax, why do Ministers not invest in a hospital that actually exists and provide a new purpose-built intensive care facility at Northwick Park Hospital?

[Helen Whately]

I assure the hon. Member that we are investing in the national health service and, in particular, supporting it to prepare for this winter, ensuring there is more capacity in the system. There will be 5,000 more beds in hospitals around the country this winter, as well as 800 new ambulances on the road. But we are also doing things differently. The future of healthcare is not just about hospitals, but about caring for more people out of hospital. For instance, we are investing in proactive care, so that in every neighbourhood, the people who are more likely to go into hospital are known and reached out to, and the care is available for them. That is one of the things we are doing to ensure that people receive care when and where they need it.

NHS Workforce Expansion

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Aaron Bell]

I welcome the hon. Lady to her place and congratulate her on her recent election. I believe that her predecessor, Rosie Cooper, is now responsible for the issue that she has just raised, so perhaps she will have some luck if she speaks to her about that—[Interruption.] Have I got that wrong? I do apologise. By the way, I would like to pay tribute to Rosie Cooper, because I did not have the chance to do so when she left. She handled herself with great dignity in the face of some very unacceptable circumstances, and I pay tribute to her. I see several by-election victors on the Opposition Benches and I congratulate them all. I cannot speak exactly to the hon. Lady’s NHS trust. I am sure that if she writes the Minister or speaks to the NHS trust directly, she might get some answers as to what is going on in Southport, but if she will forgive me, I represent North Staffordshire.

Before I detail the work that the Government are doing, I would like to praise the work of everybody in the NHS—as the Opposition Front Benchers did—and particularly those in North Staffordshire who working in our hospitals and GP surgeries, our health visitors and clinical staff, and those who support those people. It has been a difficult winter—after a difficult few years—with covid and flu peaking simultaneously in December. I am pleased to report that the most recent figures from the integrated care board for Stoke and Staffordshire show that ambulance handovers hugely improved in February, compared with where they were in January, which was unacceptable, as I said in the House at the time. There has been an 8% increase in primary care appointments, compared with a year ago, with 73% delivered face to face—higher than the national average—and waiting times for surgery are falling, including for cancer treatment at the Royal Stoke Hospital. I pay tribute to everybody working at the coalface in the NHS, because I know what difficult work it is and we are all extremely grateful.

Turning to NHS workforce expansion, this Conservative Government are strengthening the NHS workforce. In hospitals we have 5,000 more doctors and 10,500 more nurses compared with October 2021. Compared with 2010, when the last Labour Government left office, we have 37,000 more doctors and 45,000 more nurses in our hospitals. We are also building up the workforce in primary care, recruiting 26,000 more primary care staff by March 2024—a target that is on track, unlike the target in Scotland. In Newcastle-under-Lyme, the number of doctors, nurses and other clinical staff based in GP surgeries has increased by 46% since September 2019. That is 55 additional full-time equivalent people. So we are seeing a growth in Newcastle-under-Lyme as well.

Workforce expansion is also about retention, as the Minister said. Times are tough for everybody, given what Putin’s war in Ukraine has done to inflation, but we have always prioritised NHS workers, especially those earning the least. A million workers received at least an additional £1,400 in their pay packets in the last year, and we accepted the independent pay review in full. During covid in 2021, we protected healthcare workers, giving them a pay rise during a wider public sector pay freeze and when private sector wages were falling. The full-time basic salary of a newly qualified junior nurse at the bottom of band 5 is now over £27,000, and experienced nurses or midwives at the top of band 6 are earning £40,588. On top of that, they get excellent pension provision, so we are looking after our NHS staff by paying them and retaining them.

More generally, we are also increasing the number of beds across the hospital estate. A new ward with 28 beds recently opened at the Royal Stoke University Hospital, but I know Tracy Bullock wants more, and I will speak to the Minister about that. We will need more beds for next winter, because the Royal Stoke is under incredible pressure, not least because of the burden of the New Labour private finance initiative contract that costs them a fortune to maintain. A previous Health Secretary ranked the worst 10 PFI contracts, and I believe that we were 11th or 12th at the time. The hospital has to live with that burden, and I raise it again with the Minister today; we want what went wrong before to be put right.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I hope the hon. Gentleman will not mind my encouraging the Minister to look, in addition to the case for more investment in his local hospital, at investing more in Northwick Park Hospital, which serves my constituents. It needs a 60-bed intensive care unit to improve the quality of critical care and, crucially, to help attract more critical care nurses and other medical staff.

[Aaron Bell]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point; I am sure the Minister has heard it. I will not say any more about that specific case, because I do not know his constituency that well—although I did work in Harrow once upon a time.

We had 120,000 more GP appointments every day in January ’23 compared with January ’22, and we are delivering the biggest ever catch-up—it is a necessary catch-up—over the next three years, with an extra £45.6 billion in funding to help us recover from covid. That will mean 9 million more scans, 9 million more checks and 9 million more procedures for the people who need them.

We know what Labour would do. It claims to have a plan funded through non-dom status, but I doubt that would raise the money, not only for the reasons I gave in the Opposition day debate at the end of January, but because it has already committed that money to breakfast clubs and various other things. There is a never-ending magic money tree that pays for all Labour’s commitments —[Interruption.] I know that the shadow Health Secretary and others have made many unfunded spending commitments. Labour’s answer is always more money, and the answer to how that will be funded is always a non-dom tax, which would not even raise the money Labour claims, as Ed Balls said, as Alastair Darling said, and as Gordon Brown found out for himself.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

There will be a 24-hour service at Chorley as well, I hope.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

One way to improve retention and recruitment of NHS staff at Northwick Park Hospital, which serves my constituency and which I believe the Secretary of State visited last Thursday, would be to invest in doubling its intensive care beds. Did the Secretary of State discuss that issue with the chief executive of Northwick Park when he visited last week? Will he tell us when he might be able to announce funding for the new 60-bed unit that Northwick Park needs?

[Steve Barclay]

The hon. Gentleman is right to highlight the importance of bed capacity at Northwick Park, but my discussions with the chief executive were more in the context of how step-down capacity will relieve pressure on A&E. The hon. Gentleman will know that Northwick Park has one of the busiest, if not the busiest, A&Es in London on many days, and the chief executive spoke to me about the value of adding extra bed capacity from a step-down perspective, much more so than from an intensive-care perspective. If there are specific issues for intensive care, I am happy to follow them up with the hon. Gentleman.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Edward Argar]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his work supporting the NHS and healthcare in this country both prior to and subsequent to his election to this House. I would be delighted to visit Cramlington with him—indeed, on the same visit perhaps I could visit his local health facilities to see modular construction in action. I should also say that his ever-efficient office has already invited me.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

More nurses across the country, and particularly in Harrow, would make a real difference in helping those who suffer from diabetes. Given that this is Diabetes Week and that diabetes has a disproportionate impact on those from a south Asian background—particularly, for example, among my Gujarati constituents—when will the Minister put extra resources into tackling this terrible health condition?

[Edward Argar]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his important question. As he highlights, we are investing more in more nurses, but there is also a large piece of work to do on health education and improving access to those services for people with diabetes. I urge him to look forward with eager anticipation to the health disparities White Paper.

Covid-19 Update

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Friday 26th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

That is a good question, but such is the uncertainty around the variant and the rate at which it seems to be spreading that I am afraid that it is not possible to put a timeline on this action.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

If we are to help reduce the chance of further variants emerging that will threaten the health of our citizens, we clearly need to accelerate vaccination programmes in other countries, particularly in the Commonwealth. Why are Ministers therefore so determined to use the World Trade Organisation ministerial meeting next week to block progress towards achieving—as South Africa and India want—a temporary waiver of intellectual property rules to help developing countries to develop their own vaccine manufacturing capacity?

[Sajid Javid]

The answer is that a temporary waiver of intellectual property for such purposes would be a huge step backwards. It would not help developing countries and it certainly would not help if we needed new vaccines, not just for covid-19 but for a future pandemic; the industry and businesses might step back and not bother developing if they believed that the intellectual property would always be waived in such circumstances. What is important, as I think the hon. Gentleman would agree, is that the companies developing these life-saving vaccines have an appropriate pricing and access policy for each country, so that vaccines are priced appropriately and accessibly for developing countries, and rich countries such as the UK, the US and others continue to do all they can through international vaccine donation programmes.

Oral Answers to Questions

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

I am really glad to say that in Bolton and other parts of the country where we have sent in a big package of support, including surge testing—as we have done in Kirklees—we have seen a capping-out of the increase in rates without a local lockdown thanks to the enthusiasm of people locally and, of course, the vaccination programme. That is our goal. Our goal is that England moves together. That is what we are putting these programmes in place to do, and we are seeing them work.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Northwick Park Hospital, which serves my constituents, was the first to be hard hit by covid last year. At the height of the second wave in January, its remarkable staff were looking after some 600 patients. It needs investment in intensive care and recovery services. When Ministers receive the business case, can I ask them to look particularly sympathetically at it?

Coronavirus

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, of course. My hon. Friend is right to raise the issue, and we have put more testing into Buckingham. There are hundreds of tests available across Buckinghamshire for his constituents and others, and we are working hard to ensure that the overall capacity has increased as well. Our constituents understandably want to get access to a test whenever they want one, and I understand that yearning, but we have to prioritise and, as I said in my opening answer, we have to put NHS and social care needs at the top of the list. I make no bones about that prioritisation, but at the same time we need to get overall capacity up, which is what we are working incredibly hard to do.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Like elsewhere, the numbers in Harrow with covid are on the rise. Tests are available for key workers, but I am told that parents and their children cannot get a covid test “for love nor money” in Harrow or near Harrow. I say gently to the Secretary of State that that does not yet feel like a world-leading test and trace system. Will he take a specific look at the circumstances in Harrow, and in particular why the nearby test centre at Heathrow is so unused at the moment?

[Matt Hancock]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important case for Harrow and I am very happy to take a look at Harrow specifically. The capacity constraint is in the labs, rather than the centres. We have the centres available to be able to process a huge amount of tests. We have record capacity in the labs, but it is in the labs where there is the constraint. We are bringing in more machines. More are being installed all the time, which is why capacity is constantly going up. Nevertheless, we clearly need to keep driving at that, because demand is going up as well.