Future of the NHS

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

No, not at all, and I do not believe that Monitor believes that either. The hon. Lady can see that the proposal in the Bill is clear. It was the Labour Government who established Monitor as a regulator and who introduced competition into the NHS. The Labour Government did all those things, but Monitor’s job is not to impose competition rules but to deliver what is in the best interest of patients.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

The shadow Secretary of State is a decent man and an experienced Minister. The reason his speech was so weak is that he had no conviction because he has been forced by the union paymasters of the Labour party and of the shadow Leader of the Opposition to deliver the sort of speech previously given by the far left who inhabit the Benches way over there. My right hon. Friend should not listen to those voices; he should press ahead and make a difference for patients, not politicians.

[Mr Lansley]

I agree with my hon. Friend that the shadow Health Secretary is a decent man, and at the turn of the year he quite decently expressed his support for the Bill’s principles and his understanding that it was consistent, coherent and comprehensive. It makes one wonder what happened to him in the interim. Did the trade unions—the paymasters of the Labour party—get to him and tell him that they did not like the idea that patients should be able to get the care they need or the idea that we should get resources into the front line rather than into the vested interests of the NHS?

What we are going to do is put patient care at the heart of our reforms. We are not going to let hospital productivity continue to decline as it did over the last decade. Under Labour, we saw a 15% decline in productivity, yet we heard nothing from the shadow Health Secretary about that. It is this Government who are taking action to improve hospital performance by changing the way hospitals are paid to reward excellence—for example, by not paying for unnecessary readmissions of patients who are discharged too soon.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dan Jarvis]

I did not say the market should be ignored. The point that I was making is that ultimately it is a matter of priorities.

What will be the cost of making NHS staff redundant, before the additional cost of rehiring by the GP commissioning bodies? To me, none of this makes sense, and it leads many health officials to question whether the Health Secretary fully understands what impact the reforms will have on the front line morally, economically and logistically, and in this confusion the NHS is placed at risk.

Why not use the facilities that the Labour Government spent £100 billion building over the past decade? Would it not be simpler to keep the PCTs? Surely it makes far more sense to increase GP involvement to allow for clinical oversight, and use the facilities and the staff base that we have spent the past decade investing in. Of course there are problems in the NHS which need solving, but the Government’s plans are not just a misguided attempt at privatisation by stealth; they fail to acknowledge that the past 13 years of reforms ever happened.

As well as issues of cost, the proposed reforms are a threat to the accountability of the NHS—at a local level, with the removal of the non-executive directors, and nationally, with the transfer of responsibility from Whitehall to the NHS board. How will we know whether we are getting value for money? What impact will the reforms have on local waiting times? If the Secretary of State genuinely believes in these reforms, what accountability mechanism is he introducing to judge how well they are working? The Department of Health has not explained how the reforms will address the challenges of longer life expectancy, advances in technology and greater public expectations.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is making a thoughtful speech. The incoming Government inherited an NHS which has had a massive increase in expenditure, yet has seen a 15% drop in productivity over time. Does he have any thoughts on what reforms do need to be made? Despite having money thrown at it, the NHS was not delivering in terms of productivity and was thereby letting patients down. What is his prescription to make the NHS stronger?

[Dan Jarvis]

Although I am new to this business, if hon. Members and the Secretary of State had such faith in the reforms, it is confusing to me why they were not put in the manifesto and the people of this country given the opportunity to vote on them at the general election.

GPs will be substituting the calculator for the stethoscope. That is bad for the NHS and bad for patients. Given how far we have come, would not the first year of the Secretary of State’s tenure in the Department of Health have been better spent, for example, on a concentrated investment of effort in cancer care? We must fight the war on bureaucracy, but not at the expense of the war on cancer.

Would not the Secretary of State have better spent his time learning from our European partners how to educate our constituents about the dangers of an unhealthy lifestyle—diet, drink and drugs—and their effect, particularly with regard to cancer treatment? We need to address why a cancer sufferer in Barnsley is less likely to survive than a sufferer in Barnet. These are the NHS reforms that would make a positive difference and that the country expects us to deliver. Instead, in my constituency, the scale and pace of the Government’s cuts are making it virtually impossible for Barnsley hospital to plan ahead. Budgets are being cut while patient numbers are going up.

The Government are proposing the biggest reorganisation of the NHS since its inception—