NHS Funding Bill
Debate between Gareth Thomas and Justin MaddersTuesday 4th February 2020
(4 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Legislative Grand Committee (England) Amendments as at 4 February 2020 - (4 Feb 2020)
Justin Madders
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I understand his frustration absolutely. I think he has a very fair point, Dame Rosie, that because of the Barnett consequentials there is a role for SNP Members—indeed, all Scottish and Welsh Members—in this debate. Clearly, that is a separate issue to the whole English votes for English laws process, but the fact is clear that on the face of the Bill there are Barnett consequentials, which mean that the devolved nations ought to have a say.
It is really no wonder, given the background I have just set out, that children are reaching a crisis point before getting the support they need, and that the number of children attending accident and emergency for their mental health in a situation of crisis is increasing year on year. That is not inevitable. With real investment, we could reverse the trend of long waits, rationed treatment and inadequate care if we allocated more of the NHS budget to mental health. As we know, mental health illnesses represent 23% of the total disease burden on the NHS, but just 11% of the NHS England budget. That is a long way off the parity of esteem that we all seek to achieve.
We know that the Government plan to put in an extra £2.3 billion a year by 2023-24, but that is not enough. The Institute for Public Policy Research has said that to achieve parity of esteem for mental health services, funding for those services needs to grow by 5.5% on average not just next year, but over the next decade. The NHS plans to spend £12.2 billion on mental health funding in 2019, but the IPPR estimates that that needs to reach 16.1 billion by 2023-24 alone.
Of course, we support the increased funding for mental health in the Bill, but we know the NHS has to live within the 3.3% uplift provided under the Bill. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Health Foundation, NHS providers, the British Medical Association and many of the royal colleges say that health expenditure should rise across the board by 3.4% just to maintain current standards of care. By definition, there will actually be less money for funding in other areas. That means there is a risk of further raids on the mental health budget. In previous years, money allocated to mental health services, particularly children and adolescent mental health services, has been diverted back to hospitals to deal with the crisis there.
Labour would have done what was desperately needed. We would have put in an extra £1.6 billion a year immediately into mental health services, ring-fenced mental health budgets and more than doubled spending on children’s mental health. That is why we are seeking to amend the Bill to ensure mental health services do not lose out because of other financial pressures in the system. We are calling on the Government to ensure that guarantees for mental health funding are protected by ring-fencing mental health funding. We also seek to require the Secretary of State to come to the House annually to report on the amounts and proportion of funding allocated to mental health services, and on their plans to achieve parity of esteem for mental health services.
On the Labour Benches we are not convinced that mental health is a priority for this Government, despite what they say. They may want to position themselves as the party of the NHS, but as long as they continue to neglect mental health and push services deeper into crisis, they will not come near that aim. We intend to push amendment 2 to a Division, because we want to hold the Government to account. We want transparency on mental health spending and we want a clear road map from the Secretary of State on how he intends to make parity of esteem a reality.
Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)
I wonder if I could raise with my hon. Friend an example that I think makes his point, which is the state of NHS finances in north-west London, in particular of the acute hospital that serves my constituents, Northwick Park Hospital, and the clinical commissioning group. Both the trust and the CCG are over £30 million in deficit. As a result, they have cut back on community mental health services and, indeed, on a range of other things. Unless there is parity of esteem and unless there is a significantly higher funding boost for the NHS in north-west London than that currently being suggested by the Conservative party, I fear that mental health services, as he so rightly says, are likely to be cut even further.
Justin Madders
My hon. Friend sets out very clearly the challenge that the Government face from the debt situation in the NHS. Both in-year deficits and total debt to Government have not been addressed adequately or taken into account in the Bill and that is clearly of huge concern.
Amendment 5 deals with patient safety, which should be front and centre in the NHS. When things go wrong, as they sadly do from time to time, it can have tragic consequences for patients and their loved ones. When three in four baby deaths and injuries are preventable with different care, it seems particularly tragic when things go wrong during birth, leaving families devastated by the loss of a child or having to cope with the long-term impact. There have been many things over the years that I have disagreed with the previous Secretary of State—the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt)—about, but on Second Reading he raised the important issue of maternity safety training, calling on the current Health Secretary to reinstate the maternity safety fund. We absolutely agree with him on that, which is why we have tabled amendment 5.
Improved maternal health is one of four priority areas in the long-term plan for care quality and improved outcomes, and it includes action to achieve 50% reductions in stillbirth, maternal mortality, neonatal mortality and serious brain injury by the middle of the decade. As a party, we have pledged to legislate for safe staffing and to increase funding for NHS staff training, including reinstating the maternity training fund to help to improve maternity safety in our hospitals. The leaked interim report of the Ockenden review last year exposed widespread failures in maternity care at Shrewsbury and Telford hospital trusts and demonstrated, sadly, that Morecambe Bay was not a one-off.
An evaluation of maternity safety training from 2016 found that it had made a difference and improved patient safety, yet it was still axed. Just two years later, the “Mind the Gap” report found that fewer than 8% of trusts were providing all training elements and care needs in the “Saving Babies’ Lives” bundle and called for the maternity safety training fund to be immediately reinstated to address, as it said, the
“clear…inadequate funding for training”.
Given the clear evidence of the need for the training fund’s reinstatement, I very much regret that it is not within the scope of the Bill for us to submit an amendment to include its reinstatement. However, with the amendment we seek to put a greater spotlight on the issue, and hopefully, that will require the Government to set out how much they are spending on improving maternity safety and care for mothers and babies each year in order for them to demonstrate their commitment to improving maternity and foetal safety. I believe that that will enable us to judge and evaluate their commitment to those aims.
Gareth Thomas
In support of the case that my hon. Friend is making, I again mention Northwick Park Hospital, which serves my constituents. It has a huge maintenance backlog. Since the cancellation of the Government’s “Shaping a Healthier Future” NHS reform plan for north-west London in June last year—that programme of reform had been going on for seven years —there has also been no replacement money identified for investment in intensive treatment beds, an extra 30 of which are needed to help to tackle some of the problems in A&E at Northwick Park Hospital.
Justin Madders
My hon. Friend is again showing what an assiduous and determined constituency MP he is. He might want to look at the NHS providers’ report today, which sets out some of the challenges from the lack of a long-term capital investment programme. As we have heard, including from him and in relation to other various examples around the country, this is not just about a lick of paint, but about really vital work that impacts on patient care.
Justin Madders
Across the piece, some areas in Wales are actually performing better than areas in England. The direction of travel is the right one. If the right hon. Member is so interested in the performance in Wales, he should stand for the Welsh Assembly; he will have the opportunity to do so in the not-too-distant future. I am sure he was aware when he stood for this place that health was a devolved issue.
Gareth Thomas
I want to raise again the example of Northwick Park Hospital, which serves my constituents. It has not met the four-hour A&E target since August 2015. One of the latest issues responsible for the increasing pressure on waiting times at Northwick Park is the closure of our walk-in services, which were one of the great reforms of the previous Labour Government. Alexandra Avenue, which served my constituency, closed in November 2018, and Belmont health centre, which served the constituency of Harrow East, closed in November 2019. The last walk-in service in the London Borough of Harrow, the Pinn medical centre, which currently is in the constituency of the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), is also due to close, and yet it is increasingly difficult to get an answer to a request for a meeting to discuss that closure with Ministers or the chief executive of NHS England.
Justin Madders
There has to be a correlation between the number of closures my hon. Friend is seeing and his CCG’s debts, which he was referring to earlier. The pressure on frontline services is making these decisions, which it is more and more likely can only impact on performance. I hope that when the Minister responds he will be able to give him the satisfaction of at least a meeting to discuss the issue further.
The funding in the Bill is insufficient to reverse the decline in recent years, let alone deliver the aspirations set out in the long-term plan. It is not just the opinion of Her Majesty’s Opposition that the performance targets cannot be met; NHS England has also made it clear that the core treatment targets cannot be met because of the funding settlement imposed by the Government. And who loses out month after month when performance targets are missed? It is patients. Whether for pre-planned surgery, cancer treatment, diagnostic tests or emergency care, our constituents are waiting longer and longer, often in pain and distress, to access the health services they need. The figures do not lie.
We must remember that the figures are also real people. They are real people stuck on waiting lists: the total number of people on waiting lists in England is now 4.41 million, which is the highest since records began, and up from 4.1 million, when the right hon. Member for West Suffolk first became the Secretary of State. They are real people waiting for treatment: the target to treat 92% of patients within 18 weeks has not been met for four years—not since February 2016—and obviously has never been met by the current Secretary of State. They are real people waiting for cancer treatment: the Prime Minister himself agreed last month that it was unacceptable that the target for treating cancer patients within 62 days of urgent GP referrals had not been met for five years. That is five years of failure. They are people waiting on hospital trolleys: the number of people waiting four hours or more on hospital trolleys reached 98,452 last December, which is not only a 65% increase on the same point the previous year, but the highest on record.
As we heard on Second Reading, the failure to meet these targets has real consequences. Research from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine shows that almost 5,000 patients have died in the past three years because they spent so long on a trolley waiting for a bed in an overcrowded hospital. As we have said several times during our consideration of the Bill, the true increase in funding is about 4.1%—I will not list again all the bodies that agree with that figure—yet the money in the Bill will not be enough.
This is all before last week’s news about the Chancellor looking for 5% savings in all Departments, including this one. That might not affect the figures in the Bill, but there might be cuts across the wider Department that do have a knock-on impact on service delivery. Let us take a look at A&E. There is increased demand on our A&E services, for many reasons, including the years of cuts to social care, but that is not covered in the Bill. Will the 5% cut come from there—if it does, more and more people will be forced into A&E by a collapsing social care system—or from public health, as we have heard previously, which would inevitably store up problems in the short and longer term?
None of this can be said to be likely to have no impact on performance targets, which for too long have been treated as a poor relation by this Government. The Government have widely ignored them, to the extent that they are spending more time dreaming up ways to get rid of them than to meet them. We say that patients deserve better. We will push the new clause to a vote, because we believe it is clear that the Secretary of State will not be able to drive down waiting lists or drive up performance with the level of health expenditure that he proposes to enshrine in law.
Rather than presenting the Bill as a panacea, let us ensure that the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister are held to account for the promises that they make, and that the Secretary of State comes to this place every year to tell us whether, in the Government’s opinion, the funding allocated for that year will be sufficient to meet those performance targets. If it is not, the Government must set out what they are going to do about it. It is simply not good enough to continue, year after year, to have a Government who treat the targets as an inconvenience. If those standards are to mean anything to patients, and if the Government are serious about persuading us that they mean something to them as well, they will have to come here every single year and tell us, unambiguously and with reference to the funding package for this year, how they intend to meet those targets.