Health

Geraint Davies Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

No, I am going to make some progress.

On the day of the Gracious Speech, 60 senior NHS leaders wrote to a newspaper to warn

“that the NHS is at the most challenged time of its existence.”

Just when it needs real leadership, it is being offered a period of drift from an increasingly dysfunctional Government and, sadly, the same is true on public health. The Government should have used this moment to regain the initiative and publish regulations on standardised packaging for tobacco and smoking in cars. Ministers announced on 3 April that they would publish the draft regulations on standardised packaging later that month—that was what the Minister responsible for public health, the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison), said. They have not, and since then almost 40,000 children have taken up smoking.

The public health Minister wrote to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger), the shadow public health Minister, saying

“we will now push ahead”

with banning smoking in cars following the vote in this House, but we are still waiting. We did not hear anything on public health from the Secretary of State today. When will they show some leadership and set out a timetable for these important measures?

It is not hard to guess the reason for this pre-election period of NHS silence. On every measure that matters to the public, contrary to what the Secretary of State said, the evidence is clear that the NHS has gone downhill under this Government and that it is getting steadily worse.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

On the subject of preventive measures, my right hon. Friend might be aware that in Britain today child mortality among those below the age of five is the worst in the western world bar Malta, at one in 500? Washington university explains the cause as the welfare and austerity changes—food banks and the like. Will he comment on the impact of some of the welfare and other changes that have made the very weakest weaker, poor and unhealthier and are making them die earlier?

[Andy Burnham]

It is well documented that the policies of this Government in a range of areas are damaging the health of the nation, but what we get instead is drift from the Government on public health. There is no momentum at all to improve children’s health and the Queen’s Speech had absolutely nothing to say on it. Where are the measures that the Minister has been proposing? What has she been doing? Why does she not introduce them?

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)]

Perhaps I may allow the House a slightly more bipartisan interlude by concentrating for the moment on a different part of the Gracious Speech, which is the part relating to our country’s national security. I was delighted to see in the Gracious Speech the Government’s commitment to the NATO alliance, which is underpinned by the hosting in Wales of the NATO summit later this year.

From 4 April 1949, when it came into being, NATO has become the major instrument of stability and security in Europe. It has taken in newly emerging democracies, such as Greece and Spain. It has been extended to countries formerly in the Warsaw pact, creating a far more safe and stable continent. It has embraced countries such as Norway in the far north and Turkey, giving us security in places where we perhaps have greatest strategic vulnerability.

However, as we approach the summit in Wales, we need to accept that there are big weaknesses inside our major military alliance. To an extent, the political and military roles that we clearly understood during the cold war have dissolved away, and western countries existing in peace and freedom have become fat on the prosperity and security that they have come to take for granted. Only four members of the NATO alliance currently meet the 2% of GDP floor of spending that they undertook to meet when they joined and, as a consequence, the European continent gives a lower priority to defence and is ever more addicted to welfare. As the Prime Minister and Chancellor Merkel have regularly pointed out, we have now reached a situation in which the European Union represents 7% of the global population, 25% of global GDP and 50% of global social spending. That picture is utterly unsustainable. It is a situation in which the pressures of defence have become great.

Of course, NATO has had recent success in the way it took charge of operations in Afghanistan, what it did in response to the invasion of Kuwait and, perhaps more successfully, what happened in the Balkans. However, not long ago the Libyan conflict showed us how many weaknesses the alliance has. We did not have enough of some key assets—such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or air-to-air refuelling—to the extent that we would not have been able to carry out the Libyan campaign without the United States being on board. Such is the current weakness of European NATO.

We are confronted with a growing threat in the shape of Putin’s Russia, and we have stood by and watched serial bad behaviour from the Putin Government. They cut off gas to Ukraine, in breach of the NATO-Russia treaty, and we did nothing. We saw a cyber-attack on Estonia, and we did nothing. Russia invaded Georgia, parts of which it still occupies, and we did far too little. I am afraid that the signal the House sent after the debate on Syria only gave Putin the understanding that further aggression would not be rewarded with real resistance by the west, and I am afraid that the events we have seen in Ukraine are, at least partly, a result of how such decisions have been interpreted. We must be careful to ensure that our behaviour does not further reinforce that position.

We have allowed wishful thinking on Russia to replace critical analysis. We have all wanted to see Russia develop as an open, democratic, pluralistic system, but that is not going to happen, at least not under the current regime. The quicker we understand that, the better for the wider security picture. It is a bullying and thuggish regime that is not likely to change. Its modus operandi is clear: it pumps money into regimes or city states—wherever it can—to try to encourage them to be more Russia-friendly. It issues huge numbers of Russian passports to citizens in those places and then claims that it has to defend them.

The whole debate about the Ukrainian crisis misses one essential point: it is not to do with strategic or even tactical interests; it is a direct challenge to international law. Putin has said that the protection of ethnic Russians—not even Russian citizens—lies not with the states in which they live, or with the laws, constitutions or forms of government of such states, but with an external state, Russia, which can intervene to protect ethnic Russians wherever they may be. If we allow that to stand, there will be no international law, because it will sweep away every norm of international behaviour that has been accepted since world war two.

[Geraint Davies]

President Obama has made it clear that he is against Britain leaving the European Union or Scotland leaving the UK. What does the right hon. Gentleman think President Putin’s position would be on those issues?

[Dr Fox]

With all due respect to anybody outside our own borders, what the United Kingdom decides to do is a matter entirely for the United Kingdom, and what Scotland decides to do is a matter for Scotland. Nevertheless, since the hon. Gentleman asked me what I think about President Putin’s view on those issues, I will tell him what I think about Scotland. Any fragmentation would be not only a fragmentation of our country’s defences but a potential weakness inside NATO, and that is unlikely to help or give comfort to anyone other than those who are a potential threat to our national security. The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, in that events that take place inside the United Kingdom may well have resonances that are not naturally considered when decisions are being taken.

I want briefly to mention another area of national security of which the House must be very cognisant: the changing nature of the threats we face. We have gone from state threats in the cold war to the domestic terror threat we faced from the IRA, and we now face a transnational terrorist threat. That threat has come at a time when we have seen a huge growth in the internet, which allows a lot of the enemies of this country to hide. Back in 1995, when President Clinton was President of the United States, there were 130 websites in the world; at the end of 2012, there were 654 million. That is a lot of places for our enemies to hide.

Our security services need to be able to operate in the same environment as our enemies, and that to me was the essence of the great betrayal of Snowden. We depend on a moral and legal relationship between our employees and the Governments of our allied states to maintain our security, and there were three elements to what Snowden did. The first was his disclosure about the extent of National Security Agency surveillance. Had he done that inside the law it would have been a legitimate debate in a democracy, but to go further and set out the means by which our security forces carry out their business, or even potentially to set out the names of particular operatives, goes well beyond what is acceptable. In my view it goes from legitimate debate into the business of treason.

We do not have massively overwhelming security apparatus in this country. We spend 0.3% of Government spending on all our agencies put together, which is what we spend on the NHS every six days. We have good, strong oversight of our security services in this country that we should be proud of, but we must be clear when it comes to national security that peace and security are not the natural state of the world. Those things have to be fought for with every generation, and we have a responsibility to fund that appropriately. We can have neither such restricted freedom that we start to become what we claim to oppose, nor go off on a libertarian rant that takes us to a place that leaves us far less secure than we ought to be. If we get that balance right, we will be doing our duty in this House.

[Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)]

I wish to speak specifically about the pensions tax Bill and the private pensions Bill in the Queen’s Speech. The Government have proposed the biggest reform to pension tax rules in nearly a century. There is no denying that it is popular to give citizens—especially those with small pension pots—the choice to take lump sums that may be more beneficial to them than eking out a living from the small annual payments on which they would otherwise rely. Paying off a mortgage or a loan on retirement by drawing down a lump sum may well be better for such pensioners, but there is real danger in destroying good annuities. That has been going on for a few decades now, and is bequeathing a nightmare that Government policies are nowhere near capable of preventing.

We have a rapidly ageing population that is dumping a huge additional burden on the young, many of whom are already leaving university with massive debts thanks to this Government’s dysfunctional policies. Now they will be saddled with subsidising through their future taxes older people who are being encouraged to live for today and not protect themselves for tomorrow.

The closure of defined benefit schemes and the shift towards defined contribution schemes has been an utter catastrophe. Accelerated further by record demographic changes, that shift is a worldwide phenomenon and a product of the neo-liberal orthodoxy worshipped by the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), which has gripped Governments from the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and which this Government still seem to be in the grip of. In the US, for example, the number of defined benefit schemes halved in under 30 years, while direct contribution schemes tripled. Australia, also worshipping such neo-liberalism, saw an 80% reduction in the number of workers covered by defined benefit schemes from the 1980s.

That is the background, but there are disadvantages to the new pension freedom. For example, people might decide to spend all their pension savings at the point of retirement, dooming themselves to poverty later in life. Having saved into a pension fund, received tax relief for many years and reached retirement with a pot of money, they might be tempted to blow the lot at once, meaning that they will never have the benefit of the extra income that they would otherwise have had as they got older. If that happens, the tax relief they receive would not fund a pension, and employer contributions that they may have received along the way would end up funding immediate consumption, rather than providing a long-term income. We know that some people will do that; we do not know how many but we hope the number will be relatively low. Pensions expert Ros Altmann suggests that about 7% of people currently say that they would spend it all. In truth, it impossible to predict that accurately.

[Geraint Davies]

I am sure that my right hon. Friend is a supporter, as I am, of the idea of a British investment bank. Does he think that the Chancellor should have set up tax incentives to encourage people who have liberated their pension pots to reinvest in a British investment bank and create jobs and wealth for the future, instead of it being blown on everyday consumption?

[Mr Hain]

That is a very good point.

The new flat-rate state pension, which is cited in mitigation for this new approach to pensions, still means that a lot of people will fall back on the state having spent all their pension savings. Around 20% of pensioners will still be on means-tested benefits even after the new system starts. People might also try to game the system by taking all their pension money and recycling it into a new pension fund, getting more tax-free cash and another lot of tax relief. That could mostly benefit those who are reasonably well-off with high incomes in later life, and it could be costly in extra Exchequer spending on tax relief.

This is mainly a market problem, and it should perhaps have been possible to reform that market without the draconian retreat from annuities proposed by the Government. Would it have been possible to insist that insurers are obliged to treat customers fairly, and ensure they would be liable if they did not carry out suitability checks to identify which type of annuity was best and offer a good rate? Would it have been possible to reform the way annuities work, and allow more freedom but not complete freedom? What protections will be built into the new system to ensure that unsophisticated consumers are not left at the mercy of product providers offering poor product choices, or higher risk products that people simply do not understand and through which they end up losing significant sums? The Financial Conduct Authority needs to be on top of that right from the start, but judging by past form can we be confident of that? I have very serious doubts.

If guidance is delivered by product providers, those providers are liable to entice their customers towards more poor-value products. Experience shows that they will do whatever they can to try to keep customers’ money, or give them poor value and make extra profit. The annuity market has worked poorly for years, with rising profits to insurers and reducing value for customers. How will the Government ensure that the new products developed finally offer good value, and that the charges are fair and terms reasonable?

The Government are right to legislate to permit collective defined contribution pensions, but I warn Ministers about over-hyping the benefits. In principle, such pensions ought to be better for employers than traditional final salary schemes and better for workers than traditional defined contribution schemes, but in practice they still suffer from market and actuarial risks. Ros Altmann points out that lower earners may subsidise higher earners, and younger members may subsidise older members. The new pension freedoms to take most, if not all, of the pension pot in a lump sum, however attractive and justified that may be to certain people, may also mean that people prefer pure defined contribution schemes that they can access in retirement if they wish. Collective defined contribution schemes, admirable as they may be in principle, usually mean that people cannot just take the cash, which means they may well be less attractive for members.

My challenge to the Government is this: rather than leaving the private pension system to market providers and their whims, why not build a new system that works? We need a system with longevity that savers will understand and find confidence in—a lack of confidence in this Government’s approach to pensions is something that I imagine savers and I share. While the Chancellor’s right hand further fragments and individualises pensions through these tax proposals, the pension Minister’s left hand makes legal collective direct contribution pensions. Why should any employer move to that collective system when they can see the Treasury going down precisely the opposite route? I doubt whether many will do so.

The Government are not doing anything like enough to face up to the time bomb of our ageing society and the whole person social care that the shadow Health Secretary eloquently advocated, or anything like enough to face up to the pensions needed to underpin the new life that is rapidly overtaking us, and the whole person care necessary to protect us. The whole Government philosophy of leaving private pensions to the market and saying to citizens, “Effectively, you are on you own” has failed abysmally in the past, just as I believe it will fail abysmally in the future at a terrible cost to all of us—pensioners, taxpayers and the public in general. I urge the Government to look again and come back with proposals that really begin to meet the scale of both the pension challenge and the whole person care challenge that haunts the whole of this country.

--- Later in debate ---

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

Living in and representing a constituency on the border has given me a unique insight into the different systems that have now grown up in the NHS in Wales and the NHS in England. One thing has become absolutely clear—not just to me but to any independent organisation that has looked into this—and it is that the standards of care being delivered by this coalition Government are far higher in England than they are in Wales, where the NHS is run by members of the Labour party.

The reality is that, judged on virtually any single indicator that one would care to look at, standards of treatment are better in England than they are in Wales. The waiting times for cancer have not been met in Wales since 2008; the four-hour accident and emergency target has not been met in Wales since 2009; the ambulance response times targets have not been met in Wales for 21 months; and in Wales the funding for the NHS from Labour, which claims to be the party of the NHS, has been cut by 8% while NHS funding has been ring-fenced in England.

That has led to all sorts of situations. For example, an Opposition Member talked earlier about cancer in England. In England, of those people being diagnosed with cancer less than 2% have to wait longer than six weeks for their diagnosis, while in Wales 42% of people being diagnosed with cancer have to wait longer than six weeks to receive a diagnosis. The treatment times are also different; in Wales, people wait around 26 weeks, whereas in England the wait is just 16 weeks.

Behind these dreadful statistics are a range of human stories. I was grateful to the Secretary of State for Health for allowing me to meet him with a constituent of mine, Mariana Robinson. She had been trying unsuccessfully to get treated in Wales for months and there was absolutely no interest in helping her. She wanted to be treated in England; she was one of many people who would rather be treated by this coalition Government in England than by the NHS in Wales. Finally, after a great deal of correspondence and after receiving advice from the Secretary of State in London, the NHS in Wales has finally relented in this instance, and Mariana will now be treated in Bristol. I am grateful to the Secretary of State for his help.

Even this afternoon, while I was waiting to speak, I had yet two more e-mails from people who are totally dissatisfied with the treatment they are receiving in Wales at the moment and who would be prefer to be treated in England. I was contacted by an 88-year-old veteran who had served in the Korean war in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy. He is in constant pain at the moment and unable to sleep because of a problem with wisdom teeth. He has been told that he will have to wait nine months for treatment in Wales. I do not believe that such a thing would be allowed to happen in England, but he has been told that he cannot seek any treatment in England; he has no right to transfer his health care to a place where it can be provided more efficiently.

Labour Members talked about the privatisation of the NHS. The Conservative party will never privatise the NHS; we have always believed that treatment should be free at the point of service. It is members of Labour in Wales who are responsible for supporting private health care, because they are putting patients in Wales in a situation where the only chance they have of being treated is to go and seek private health care. The 88-year-old veteran of the Korean war was told that if he wanted to have something done about the constant pain he is suffering, he would have to go private.

I was also contacted today by a lady, the retired head teacher of a school in my constituency, who found a lump in her breast. She expected to be seen by someone almost immediately, as she would have been in England, but she was told that the first appointment she will have will be some time in late August.

That is the reality of what is happening in Wales under a Labour-run NHS, and the Leader of the Opposition has said that we should “take lessons”—this is to quote him—from how the NHS is being run in Wales and try to implement them in England. My message today is to warn everyone, particularly Government Members, not to let these people be in charge of the NHS, because what we will end up with in England is longer waiting lists, slower ambulance response times, people not being diagnosed properly and no cancer drugs. Apparently, 150 people in Wales have died while waiting for heart treatment. It is an absolutely disgraceful situation.

I have talked to Government Members about a suggestion that I made in relation to the Government of Wales Bill, which is to let these people put their money where their mouth is. If they think they are doing a good job with the NHS in Wales, they should allow patients in Wales and England to opt to go wherever they want to for treatment. At the moment, we have two totally separate NHS systems, so patients in Wales do not have the right to access treatment in England and, of course, patients in England could not go to Wales. A lot of patients in Wales want to be treated in England. I do not believe there are any patients in England who would want to be treated by the Labour-run NHS, but perhaps there are some out there who fancy waiting longer to be diagnosed and then waiting longer again to get the treatment that they have a right to expect.

Let us see Opposition Members supporting a change to legislation that would allow patients in England to be treated in Wales, with the money required being added to the block grant given by the Government to the Welsh Assembly every year, and patients in Wales who want to be treated in England having the right to access that treatment in England, with the money required being deducted from the block grant that is handed over to the Labour party in Wales every single year. And let us see the direction of movement, because I know that an enormous number of people will immediately opt for the lower waiting times, the better diagnosis and the wider access to drugs that are available to people in England.

[Geraint Davies]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that there are only 3 million people in Wales, and that when we compare Wales with a lot of the English regions and hospitals we do just as well? In London, we obviously have international centres of excellence. In Wales, we spend more cash per head. There is a sparser population and more nurses per 1,000 people, and we have better results on cancer than elsewhere, so there is a mixed picture. He is being completely political and undermining the morale of people working in the health service in his constituency; it is disgraceful.

[David T. C. Davies]

It is not a mixed picture at all and we should be very clear about that. People wait longer for treatment in Wales than they do in England. People wait longer to be diagnosed in Wales than they do in England. People wait longer for an ambulance in Wales than they do in England. Money for the NHS is being cut in Wales and it is being ring-fenced in England, because the NHS will be a priority.

The real disgrace is that Labour Members have always prided themselves on being the party of the NHS and have gone out of their way to do so. Because they have that reputation, they know that in Wales, and possibly in England too if they ever end up running things, they can get away with making cuts and with cosying up to the unions because they feel that people will trust them.

I say to anyone independent and impartial who wants to know what it would be like for NHS patients if Labour Members ever get into government, they should look at what is happening in Wales right now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The first line of the Queen’s Speech said that the long-term plan was to deliver a strong economy and a fair society. Failure to deliver in that regard is contributing to aggregate health costs in Britain. The question is how we use the existing budget to deliver better health, as opposed to increasing the aggregate amount of money that we spend on health to the levels that are enjoyed in the European Union and the United States. The answer must be to reduce some of the drivers of health costs and the conditions that are causing those costs in the health service.

Obviously, the first driver is smoking. The Government have an opportunity to change packaging, stop children smoking in cars and accelerate the rate of transfer to e-cigarettes. There could be great savings there. At the moment, it costs us £5 billion a year to treat people for smoking-related diseases.

The second driver is obesity. The Forsyth report suggests that, by 2050, half the UK population will be obese. There are issues about school meals and exercise. There is an option—I do not know whether the Minister is interested in this because he is looking at his iPad—to put a 20% tax on sugary drinks, which is seen in New York, Mexico, France and Norway. Oxford university thinks that such a measure would reduce the numbers of obese people by 180,000 and of overweight people by 285,000, and generate about £250 million of revenue, which could be hypothecated to fund cheaper fruit and vegetables for poorer communities.

The reality is that only 10% of young people under the age of 18 consume their five fruit and vegetables a day, but children under the age of 10 are consuming 19 grams of sugar. There is a case for a sugar tax. Coca-Cola contains 11 spoonfuls of sugar, and there is 50% more sugar in sugary drinks than is advertised. We need to discriminate between certain ingredients, such as fructose versus glucose, because of their medical impact. It has been noted in America that fructose creates a different sort of fat cell in the liver and the heart, which causes much higher mortality rates. We need to focus in on the fact that there are different sorts of fat. Ironically, the EU, which I normally support, has suddenly agreed with the fructose lobbyists that fructose should be called healthier because the high from it is not as quick, but the damage is much greater. The same goes for palm oil, which is a big killer in America.

Some of these issues are about taxing ingredients in processed foods. Madam Deputy Speaker, if I gave you a potato and told you to make some money out of it, you probably would not—or you might because you are a good person—just sell that potato. The way to make money out of the potato is to smash it up, add fat, salt and sugar, reform it as Dennis’s dinosaurs, put some packaging around it and a jingle on it and get children who are poor into the habit of consuming a large amount of it, so they die an early death. We should be aware of that, and we should be the guardians of the budget and of the people.

The same is true of advertising. If one looks at the back of a cereal packet, it will say low fat, but what it means is 50% sugar, and sugar is fat. Sugar is converted to fat if it is not energised through exercise and the like. We should be here to protect people from that, but we have dismally failed to do so. In fact, the opposite has happened. The Government’s economic policies increase stress and poverty, which are drivers of poor health and cost.

Britain now has the worst child mortality rates of the western world, bar Malta, with one in 200 children dying under the age of five. According to Washington university, that is linked to welfare cuts, which have driven people into using food banks. We just have to look at the situation on employment. We are told that there are all these jobs—I can see the Minister trying to ignore me—but 1 million of them are on zero-hours contracts. People are moving from benefits into zero-hours contracts, which leads to discontinuity in their benefits. They are having to go to food banks. They are under stress and feeling hungry, which leads to ill health for them and their children. Research suggests that 45% of people in debt have mental health problems—[Interruption.] I can hear my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) listening to this. Research in the EU has shown that recession leads to suicide. Two thirds of people on whom the bedroom tax has been cruelly inflicted are disabled.

The Government are responsible for many of the costs, which will become intergenerational, long lasting and profound. That is part of a process of saying that the health service is too expensive for the poor, so we should privatise it. Aneurin Bevan famously said:

“Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community.”

I should like to see a future in which that community is one nation—not the weakest crushed by the strongest—so that that cost is shared more evenly and is lower and Britain is healthier for it. We look forward to a more equal Britain in opportunity and outcome, where the health of the nation is better and the salvation of the health service is once more in our hands, with a Labour Britain next year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Norman Lamb]

I am sorry to disappoint the hon. Gentleman, but it was under the Labour Government that it was made clear that competition law applied to the health care system. Indeed, the Labour Government’s guidelines on the NHS replicated exactly the regulations under section 75 of the Competition Act that this Government have introduced. Time and again, we hear false claims by Labour Members.

This Government have developed a new health and care system that is totally patient-centred, led by health professionals, and focused on delivering world-class health outcomes. The difficult decisions that we have made on public finances have meant that we have been able to protect the NHS budget. The shadow Minister spoke as though the Government have had to face no financial challenge at all. She knows that across Europe, Governments have slashed pay for health workers and introduced co-payments. We have done none of that. We have protected the budget for the NHS, and we are proud of doing so; Labour did not commit to that in its manifesto at the last election. The truth is that the NHS is doing extremely well under a great deal of pressure.

This Government have laid solid foundations to transform our NHS to help it to meet the challenges of an ageing population, drive up standards, and focus absolutely on compassionate care. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Sir Peter Luff) spoke movingly about his experience of the importance of compassionate care. We have introduced tough, robust inspections overseen by new chief inspectors of hospitals, of social care, and of general practice. We have introduced ratings of hospitals, care homes and GP practices so that people know how good their local services are. We have introduced, for the first time, fundamental standards and the ability to prosecute—to hold to account organisations and directors who seriously fail patients. We have introduced a fit and proper person test for directors; for the first time, compulsory training for health and care assistants; and—I am particularly proud of this—a statutory duty of candour to ensure that there is openness when things go wrong in the NHS or the care system.

[Geraint Davies]

Given the Minister’s focus on accountability and transparency, why will he not support the regulation of psychotherapists and counsellors? My private Member’s Bill would have protected 1 million people. He or I could set up shop as psychotherapists tomorrow and see these vulnerable people who are currently at risk. Why will he not protect them?

[Norman Lamb]

The Government are not convinced by the argument for statutory regulation. The hon. Gentleman and I have had this debate many times, and I am happy to continue to discuss the matter with him.

In the wake of Francis, the Government are clear that poor or unsafe care will not be tolerated. There will be consequences for those who fail patients.

Opposition Members have criticised the lack of health legislation in the Gracious Speech, yet, as several of my hon. Friends, including the Members for Witham (Priti Patel) and for Rochford and Southend East (James Duddridge), have noted, people are not out there on the streets demanding a new NHS Act of Parliament; they want safe, good, compassionate care.

The Government remain committed to legislating on professional regulation when parliamentary time allows.