Sudden Cardiac Death: Young People

Greg Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 1st September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

I have initiated this Adjournment debate on behalf of my late constituent and his family. It concerns a tragic case that raises serious questions about emergency response, clinical training, information sharing, and whether the systems meant to save young lives are fit for purpose.

On 31 January 2024, Adam Ankers, aged just 17, collapsed while playing football for the Wycombe Wanderers Foundation’s under-19 development team. He was a much-loved son, brother, friend and team-mate. He dreamed of a career in professional football, and on the captain’s armband that he was wearing that day he had written the words “strength, inspiration, leader, desire.” Despite the presence of first-aid-trained coaches, despite a defibrillator being brought straight to the pitch, and despite multiple calls to 999, no one recognised that Adam was in sudden cardiac arrest. No cardiopulmonary resuscitation was started.

The coroner found that Adam’s brain had been was starved of oxygen for about eight minutes because no one had attempted CPR, and heard evidence that for every minute without CPR, the chances of survival decrease by 10%. South Central Ambulance Service’s serious incident review reached the same conclusion independently, acknowledging an eight-minute period in which CPR should have started and did not. The ambulance arrived within 11 minutes of the first 999 call, at 2.31 pm, but by then the critical window in which to act, having been led by telephone, had already been missed.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

The hon. Member has raised a heart-rending and very difficult case, and I congratulate him on that.

The British Heart Foundation estimates that in Northern Ireland one person under the age of 35 dies every month from an undiagnosed heart condition. In view of that, does the hon. Member agree that more must be done to ensure that the public are equipped to perform effective CPR and to use a defibrillator, and are confident about carrying out bystander CPR?

[Greg Smith]

I do agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I will explore many of those issues later in my speech.

When paramedics arrived, they found Adam cold, blue, not breathing, and without a pulse. They immediately started CPR, and took him to Harefield hospital, with the support of Thames Valley Air Ambulance. Despite the best efforts of clinicians, Adam was declared brain-stem dead on 4 February—in law, that was the moment of his death—and his heart stopped for the final time on 5 February, when life support was withdrawn. His parents, Alastair Ankers and Naomi Wakefield, both work in healthcare. Through devastating experience, they came to the conclusion that Adam’s death could have been prevented.

Adam’s parents fought for more than two years for a proper, in-depth inquest, rather than the four-hour online hearing first offered. They were represented by a single barrister, paid for by remortgaging their house, against an array of solicitors and counsel for the NHS bodies and the Football Association. That is not a fair fight. The underlying condition was arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy—ARVC, a genetic heart disease, the first sign of which can be sudden cardiac arrest. This was a failure to identify a life-threatening emergency in real time, and it is why recognition, escalation and response matter so much.

The inquest raised serious concerns about the handling of 999 calls and the ability of call handlers to recognise abnormal breathing and cardiac arrest. Ambulance services in England use one of two systems: MPDS—the medical priority dispatch system—and NHS Pathways. NHS Pathways is used by just over half of 999 services and by all 111 services in England, and it was the system used on the call that day. The inquest heard expert evidence from paramedic David Davis—not the one of this parish—who told the court,

“I am unable to say that NHS Pathways as is currently configured can always properly support members of the public to identify agonal or ineffective breathing. I am also uncertain as to whether NHS Pathways can adequately identify potential out-of-hospital cardiac arrest where there is seizure-like activity at the outset.”

That is about as serious a warning as an expert witness can give. If the system cannot reliably recognise the signs of cardiac arrest, people are being put in danger, and if the public are left uncertain about whether to follow the advice they are given or to act on instinct, that is a public safety problem.

The coroner issued a five-point prevention of future deaths report on 16 April this year. It was addressed to 13 bodies, including NHS England, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Football Association, South Central Ambulance Service, the UK National Screening Committee and Cardiac Risk in the Young. Responses were due by 11 June. There is a pattern in those responses: every organisation expressed sympathy and described some work under way, but almost none attached a date to anything. NHS England says that a genetic service specification is “currently being revised”, but with no timetable. Staff at Resuscitation Council UK say that responsibility sits with NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care, not them. The Association of Ambulance Chief Executives says that it is

“not constituted to mandate or instruct ambulance services”.

Everybody has pointed to somebody else, and there have been warnings for years about call handlers and cardiac arrest, sepsis and other conditions, with no clear public evidence of improvement. Why?

I therefore ask the Minister to instruct the Care Quality Commission to urgently and regularly assess ambulance services on call-handler skill in detecting and managing abnormal breathing and suspected cardiac arrest. A CQC inspection of South Central Ambulance Service before Adam’s death had already found call handlers struggling to recognise abnormal breathing, with serious incidents leading to patient harm as a result—this is not new information to the trust. South Central Ambulance Service’s own response to the coroner’s report suggests that the public should understand that call handlers follow a fixed script, and that callers may need to act independently of the advice given. If it is genuinely the Government’s position that people in the worst moment of their life should second-guess the emergency services, the public deserve to hear that plainly, not discover it buried in a filing after a child has died.

Training alone will not be enough. NHS Pathways plays a central role in how millions of emergency and urgent care calls are handled every year, yet there is strikingly little publicly available data on its safety and effectiveness. That is not good enough. Will the Minister commit to a fully independent review of the effectiveness and the culture of NHS Pathways—not simply a restatement that the National Clinical Assurance Group already provides oversight? That body assures the clinical safety of dispositions; it does not examine culture. Its terms of reference are set by NHS England and it reports to NHS England, which is the body that runs NHS Pathways.

I want to press further on one other point, because it speaks to whether the Government can even get the basic facts right in responding to a dead child’s inquest. NHS England’s own prevention of future death response states that Adam was triaged through “Protocol 12, Convulsions/Fitting”—an MPDS reference. However, the coroner’s findings state that NHS Pathways, a different system owned and run by NHS England itself, was used as the script for that call. Why did NHS England’s response point to the wrong system entirely, rather than confront the failings of the system it actually runs? Did national leadership check its own response against the coroner’s findings before sending it? Will it now formally correct the record and explain how that error ever happened?

Moving on, there is the question of how genetic risk is communicated within families. Distant relatives in Scotland had known since 2018 that a genetic variant, PKP2, which is associated with ARVC, ran in the family, but that was not passed to Adam’s immediate family in full until after his death, and only then because Adam’s parents themselves had to go back to that distant relative and ask directly whether there was a letter he had not shared. There was. Once the risk was confirmed, the genetic service’s answer for cascading that information further to the wider family was a brown paper envelope containing 10 photocopied letters, which the family were left to hand round themselves—a grieving family doing the NHS’s job of tracing and warning their own relatives, with no support offered.

Adam’s grandmother had, in fact, raised the family history with her cardiologist at Papworth hospital, who accepted that it was recorded in three places in her notes but said he had not seen it. A 2022 referral from the GP was read by this doctor but never followed up due to an administrative error. Separately, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, which held the original genetic records, refused to disclose them to the English coroner’s inquest as it fell outside its jurisdiction. The coroner considered applying to the Scottish High Court to compel co-operation, but decided against as it was not a proportionate use of public funds. No family should be told that it is not proportionate to pursue the truth about their son’s death across a devolved border. I ask the Minister to raise this issue with counterparts in the devolved health systems, so that no hospital anywhere in this United Kingdom refuses to co-operate with an inquest into a child’s death ever again.

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an incredibly powerful case. The tragic case of Adam will be felt across the country, including by my constituents in Sandhurst where we remember the tragic death of Lewis Marsh in not dissimilar circumstances while he was taking part in a sporting activity. The hon. Gentleman will be aware that screening is available for young people who might be at risk of cardiac death. I pay tribute to the work of the charity Cardiac Risk in the Young. Does he agree that we should see more of that rolled out, so that young people, in particular those who might be at a heightened risk, have screening made available so that they know they face that risk?

[Greg Smith]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I agree with him on that point and I will come on to screening in one or two moments.

Families should not be left to act as their own caseworkers in the aftermath of grief. We need to review how genetic findings are communicated to all relatives, and how families can be properly supported in doing that work; we should not simply be told, as NHS England and the British Society for Genetic Medicine have both said so far, that a service specification is under review with no date attached.

The coroner also asked whether there is adequate sudden cardiac arrest training for coaches and referees at organised football matches. If young people are taking part in organised sport, those supervising them must know how to respond when something goes wrong. I welcome the fact that the Football Association is exploring improvements and that Adam’s parents have engaged constructively with that work, but this should not depend on a grieving family campaigning after a tragedy. It should be standard for every club, not just the accredited ones.

I am also concerned that the English Institute of Sport, Sport England and the Faculty of Sport and Exercise Medicine UK—all recipients of this prevention of future deaths report, and all in receipt of public or national lottery funding—did not respond to it at all. Public funding should carry a basic obligation to engage when a coroner writes to them about a child’s death.

Finally, I come on to the point made by the hon. Member for Bracknell (Peter Swallow) about screening, and here there is a specific, checkable gap. Cardiac Risk in the Young estimates that 12 apparently fit and healthy young people die of undiagnosed cardiac conditions every week in this country, with no prior symptoms in about 80% of cases. These are not abstract numbers; they are lost sons and daughters.

The UK National Screening Committee is currently consulting on the evidence, and the Government should be guided by that work. However, I have checked directly what that evidence map actually contains, and I want the House to hear this clearly. Its literature searches were conducted on 10 April 2025. On 24 February 2026, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology published the largest and most relevant UK study ever conducted on this exact question. With outcomes from over 104,000 young people screened by Cardiac Risk in the Young over a 10-year period, led by City St George’s, University of London, it had real-world data on what actually happened to people after a positive result, which is precisely the evidence the 2019 review said was missing. That study did not exist when the map’s searches were run, and I have confirmed directly against the published document that it is not in it. If anyone reaches tonight for the map’s citation of an unrelated 2022 cricket screening paper by a different MacLachlan study, I want it on the record now that that is not the same study.

So my question is direct: will the Government confirm that the evidence map has not considered the February 2026 JACC study, and commit tonight to its being formally included in the deliberations of the committee when it meets in November, rather than filed away for a further three-year wait, as the map’s own conclusion currently recommends? If the committee does not recommend population-wide screening, will the Minister commit to implementing the FIFA 2025 consensus statement, which recommends screening young footballers aged 12 to 18 as best practice? This is football’s home country and football is our national sport. We should be asking whether we do enough to protect the young people who play it.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

My constituent Sue Carter lost her son Ryan, aged 25, to sudden arrhythmic death syndrome, and her friend Charlie Gradidge lost her brother, Danny, who had been a friend of Ryan’s when they were at scouts together. Had they been screened, both those relatives believe that their lost ones would still be alive. They now spend their time fundraising, £7,000 at a time, and they have done this three or four times to enable CRY to screen 100 youngsters and pick up people with irregularities. That is great work, but it ought not to be done by private individuals, ought it?

[Greg Smith]

I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend and commend his constituents’ wonderful fundraising, but his master point that it should not be left to individuals to have to fundraise for that is absolutely correct and well made.

To conclude, I have seven requests: first, that the CQC regularly assesses call handlers’ skill in recognising cardiac arrest and abnormal breathing; secondly, a fully independent review of NHS Pathways’ effectiveness and culture; thirdly, a correction to the record on which triage system was used, and how that error occurred in Adam’s case; fourthly, a dated review of how genetic findings are communicated to relatives, including funding—currently dependent on British Heart Foundation charity money—to embed genetic testing into coronial pathways; fifthly, proper consideration of the FIFA 2025 statement and the JACC study by the National Screening Committee before it reaches its conclusion in November; sixthly, a statutory duty requiring NHS hospitals in one devolved UK nation to co-operate with coronial inquests in another, so that no hospital anywhere in this United Kingdom can again refuse to disclose records relevant to a child’s death; and seventhly and simplest, a meeting between a Minister and Adam’s parents. The Football Association has already met this family, and I struggle to see why the Government cannot manage to do the same.

Adam’s family deserve answers, and they deserve action. Every organisation that responded to the coroner has been sympathetic, and I believe that sympathy is sincere, but sympathy did not bring Adam home and it will not stop the next 17-year-old collapsing on the next pitch this winter. What will stop it is somebody in Government saying, “This is mine to fix and here is the date.” Adam’s family have shown extraordinary patience throughout an inquest, a prevention of future deaths process, and now this debate. What they are asking for is not extraordinary: that the Government read the evidence, tell the truth about what their own agencies have and have not done, and commit—with dates—to ensuring that no other family buries a child because a system could not tell the difference between a boy fighting for breath and a boy breathing normally. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Amanda Hack (North West Leicestershire) (Lab)]

rose—

Pharmacy First: Withholding Payments

Greg Smith Excerpts

Thursday 12th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dr Ahmed]

I am reminded that Liberal Democrat Front Benchers always welcome funding for the NHS, but can never explain where the money should come from. I have already mentioned the record funding that we are putting into pharmacy. I have reiterated that there is ministerial engagement with the pharmacy sector—not just through the Minister with responsibility for pharmacy, but through me, as Minister with responsibility for health innovation. Our relationship with the pharmacy sector is in a good place, and we continue to develop it.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

Pharmacy First was undoubtedly game changing. When I visit pharmacies around my constituency, many of them are keen to expand Pharmacy First and to offer more lines. However, I can give an example similar to the one that my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) gave. The people at Wendover Pharmacy took me through their books, and on many of the services that they offer, they either barely make any money or make a loss. The Minister said in answer to my hon. Friend the Member for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Mohindra) that pricing was set with the sector, so clearly something is going wrong, because the experience of Wendover Pharmacy is quite different.

[Dr Ahmed]

The hon. Member is right that under the Pharmacy First programme, contractors receive a monthly fixed payment upon delivering a minimum number of consultations, as per the 2025-26 agreement. That can go up and down month to month, in a dynamic process, depending on how many patients are seen in pharmacies. I completely take his point that we are evolving our care system, and ensuring a move from hospital to community, but are not quite there yet; however, I think we are on the road. Through our neighbourhood health programme, we are solidifying the relationships between general practice, pharmacies, opticians and other allied health professionals in primary care.

National Cancer Plan

Greg Smith Excerpts

Thursday 5th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ashley Dalton]

I thank my hon. Friend for highlighting such amazing work happening in her constituency. From the very beginning, we have said that this Government’s approach is to take the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS. Using the NHS app and the new national co-ordination of activities, we hope to share some of that best practice a lot more widely.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

I very much welcome the plan. I see the Minister’s commitment to it, and in the interests of all our constituents, I absolutely hope that it works and comes through. In the last Parliament, I did a lot of work on the all-party parliamentary group on minimally invasive cancer therapies—the group no longer exists—which, notwithstanding the commitment to innovation and technology that the Minister has outlined, is one area I have not heard much about. Could she outline to the House how this plan will bring through faster, and on a less of a postcode lottery basis, the new minimally invasive therapies?

[Ashley Dalton]

Harnessing technology right across the cancer landscape is what this plan is about. Where it is appropriate for less invasive treatments to be used, we are looking to explore how we can roll them out across the country, regardless of postcodes. Lots more people are surviving cancer with treatment, but what is important is that the side effects of invasive cancer treatment can be significant—I know: I have several of them—so, where possible, we want to use innovative, less invasive treatments so that people can live longer, more fruitful and less painful lives.

Oral Answers to Questions

Greg Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Karin Smyth]

The hon. Lady has raised a really important issue. She highlights the work that the Secretary of State is putting in place to address these issues and finally bring all that together to produce a plan that will assure people, and we are working at pace to ensure that those recommendations are implemented.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

4. If he will make an assessment of the potential merits of siting a neighbourhood health centre in Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire, as part of the 10-year health plan for England.

[The Minister for Care (Stephen Kinnock)]

This Government aim to establish a neighbourhood health centre in every community by 2035. We are starting in areas of greatest need where healthy life expectancy is lowest, including rural towns and communities with higher deprivation levels. Planning work has already begun. The hon. Gentleman will know that I updated colleagues yesterday in a “dear colleague” letter around integrated care boards and local authorities being invited to apply to participate in the national neighbourhood health implementation programme.

[Greg Smith]

I am grateful to the Minister for that answer. He will have heard me put the case for Long Crendon many times over many years, and given the proposals for neighbourhood health centres in the 10-year plan, Long Crendon offers a very quick win. The community has the land, the planning permission and a GP practice willing to serve there; it just does not have the funds for the bricks and mortar to build it. Can I ask the Minister to meet me and the members of Long Crendon parish council who are leading on this, so that the Government can get a quick win on neighbourhood health centres?

[Stephen Kinnock]

The hon. Member is clearly a doughty campaigner—I am sure that will mean something good will happen for him in the reshuffle that we are all watching with bated breath. I am happy to have that discussion with him. As I said, the neighbourhood health process will be driven primarily by identifying areas where healthy life expectancy is lowest and deprivation is highest. Clearly, he makes a case for his area, and I would be happy to have that discussion with him.

NHS 10-Year Plan

Greg Smith Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

It was coincidence rather than causation, as my hon. Friend the cancer Minister says—although, given both our experiences, we will rethink our visit schedule to Bury.

On a serious note, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Frith) is absolutely right to make the link between poverty, particularly child poverty, and ill health. The last Labour Government lifted 400,000 children out of poverty; I am so proud to think that when in the first year of this Labour Government we chose to extend free school meals to half a million children from low-income families, with that one measure on one day we lifted 100,000 children out of poverty. That is the difference Labour Governments make, and that is how we will deliver not just an NHS fit for the future, but a fairer, more equal, more just society.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

I look forward to studying the detail of this plan, but I welcome the Secretary of State’s commitment to neighbourhood health centres and likewise his commitment in a previous answer to rural communities. May I therefore offer him a golden opportunity? He will have heard me over many years in this House call for funding to build a new health centre in the village of Long Crendon, which lost its GP practice during the pandemic. They have the land, they have the planning permission and it will cost less than his lower number of £200 million to build. Will he convert words to delivery and commit to Long Crendon?

[Wes Streeting]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his support with the plan, which I am sure is in no way connected to the fact that he wants some money out of us for that neighbourhood health centre. I will take his question as the first bid we have had from those on the Opposition Benches, and I look forward to receiving those representations from him.

Spending Review: Health and Social Care

Greg Smith Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Karin Smyth]

My hon. Friend is right to raise the issue of ambulances. We ensured that they were a key part of our urgent and emergency care plan, which was issued the week before last, I think—I cannot remember the exact date. We recognise how crucial that issue is, and how much more can be done by ambulances by the roadside. I was privileged to go out with the South Western ambulance service recently; it is so impressive to spend time on the frontline with people who are dealing with whatever comes at them. We know that they can do more, including remotely. We are very keen to ensure that ambulances do not spend time outside hospitals; that is why we have introduced a 45-minute turnaround time through the release to rescue scheme, which has worked very successfully in many parts of the country. We are keen to see that scheme rolled out across the country, so that we do not have ambulances queuing outside of hospitals with people, but put them back on the road where they need to be.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

We have been here before with Governments of all different political persuasions. Ministers come to the Dispatch Box and trumpet what seem like very attractive amounts of money for the NHS, but the reality on the ground is that that money just about covers pay rises and inflationary pressures. On care, Buckinghamshire council and no doubt all councils are worried that the money being offered up may only just cover things such as the fair pay agreement. Can the Minister confirm from the Dispatch Box that with increasing amounts of councils’ budgets rightly being spent on care, they will get funded for things such as the fair pay agreement separately from core social care spend?

[Karin Smyth]

The hon. Gentleman says that we have been here before, and we really have. I was on a primary care trust board under the last Labour Government, so I saw at first hand what good government, working with local systems, can deliver: the best patient satisfaction in the NHS’s history, the lowest waiting lists, and the best access to GP and primary care. We have been here before, and that is what we will do again. From the hon. Gentleman’s questions, I do not understand whether he wants more spending or less. That is what the Conservative party is still not saying; its Members stand up and ask for more, like Liberal Democrat Members, but they will not identify the means of raising that money—in fact, they oppose them.

To respond to the specific question that the hon. Gentleman asked, over the coming weeks, my colleagues from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government will obviously be outlining in more detail how the spending review will fall out.

National Cancer Plan

Greg Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Gwynne]

Through my hon. Friend, I would like to pass my condolences on to Nikki for the loss of Ethan. As I have said, we have not made anything like the progress we would want to make on treatment and survival rates for brain tumours. That will form an integral part of our national cancer plan, and we will utilise all the latest advances in technology and science to try to get the better outcomes that we so desperately want.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

I genuinely welcome the Minister’s commitment to the upgrading of radiotherapy machines, but I share the concerns of the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on radiotherapy, the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), about the scale of the ambition. In defeating this horrible disease, technology and innovation is our friend. What is the Minister’s ambition for minimally invasive cancer therapies in the national cancer plan? These technologies are coming along every day, but awareness of them and the ability to get them rolled out on the frontline is slapdash at best. Will he commit to looking at those emerging therapies and getting them rolled out as soon as possible?

Women’s Health Strategy

Greg Smith Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Karin Smyth]

My hon. Friend makes a very powerful case and talks of an experience that he and his wife went through forty years ago, which highlights that it can sometimes take an unacceptably long time to get what is known as good practice through the system and to have that consistency for women and their families across the overall system. We absolutely need to ensure that maternity services understand best practice and that it is rolled out properly across the country.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

In an earlier answer, the Minister rightly talked about the arrangement the Government have over spare capacity in the independent sector. My female constituents and women up and down the land want to know what that actually means in practice: what does that mean for the 260,000 women waiting more than 18 weeks for gynaecology treatment? How many treatments will the independent sector be delivering, and to what timescale? We need to get those women the treatment that they need.

[Karin Smyth]

The hon. Gentleman can tell his women constituents what I hope everyone across the House will be able to tell their constituents: this Government inherited 600,000 women on those waiting lists, and we are committed—as said in our elective reform plan, which highlighted gynaecology in particular—to getting those waiting lists down from 18 months to 18 weeks in the lifetime of this Parliament.

New Hospital Programme Review

Greg Smith Excerpts

Monday 20th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

With that track record, my hon. Friend might want to tell us this week’s lottery numbers while he is here. In all seriousness, he makes a good point. Although today’s statement is about the new hospital programme, the challenges across the health and social care estate are enormous. That is why the Chancellor committed at Budget to the capital investment that will deliver not only this programme but a significant investment in the general practice estate. We have an enormous array of capital challenges in health and social care. I ask Members on both sides of the House to bear in mind that while I have to struggle to weigh up the competing priorities across the health and social care budget, the Chancellor and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury have to do so not only for health and social care, but for education, transport, defence, justice, the police estate—right across the board, we have inherited a country left in an enormous hole. We are taking the necessary decisions to get our country out of that hole and beat a path to a better future.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

One of the hospitals that my constituents and wider Buckinghamshire residents rely on for treatment is Wycombe hospital. It is not a RAAC hospital, but severe maintenance issues in the ageing tower mean that it is losing about 2,000 hours of operating time per year. In the spirit of the transparency that the Secretary of State speaks of, will he tell the House where the elongation of the new hospital programme leaves the works at Wycombe hospital, and will he meet me to discuss constructively how to move that work forward so that Wycombe can get the new surgical hub that it needs?

[Wes Streeting]

I am always open to constructive representations. As I said in my statement, the capital envelope that the Chancellor has given my Department—the biggest since Labour was last in office—includes funding for exactly those sorts of maintenance, backlog and disrepair challenges in the NHS estate. It is not just about new units or hospitals; it is also about ensuring that the current estate can deliver the quality of care and the value for money that our constituents deserve. I would be happy to take representations from the hon. Gentleman.

Health and Social Care: Winter Update

Greg Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about the challenge caused by the Conservatives’ failure on general practice, which has placed pressure not just on stretched GPs, of whom there were thousands fewer when the Conservatives left office than in 2015, but on other parts of the system. That is not just worse for patients—it is certainly not a pleasant experience at the moment to be sat waiting in A&E for treatment—but more expensive for the taxpayer, because while it costs £40 for a doctor’s appointment, it can cost £400 for accident and emergency attendance. That is the legacy of the Conservative Government: things are worse for patients and more expensive for taxpayers. That is the rotten legacy that we are seeking to overturn.

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

Last week, the UK Health Security Agency warned of elderly people suffering from heart attacks, strokes and chest infections as a result of the recent severe cold weather. Is the Secretary of State any closer to admitting that taking away the winter fuel payment from some of our most vulnerable pensioners was not just cruel, but life threatening?

[Wes Streeting]

It is irresponsible, as well as inaccurate, to suggest that the Government have taken winter fuel payments away from vulnerable pensioners. In fact, it is thanks to the decisions taken by the Chancellor that winter fuel payments were protected for the poorest pensioners. They continue to be worth £200 to eligible households, or £300 to eligible households in which there is someone aged 80 or over. We also continue to stand behind vulnerable households by delivering the £150 warm home discount for low-income households and providing £742 million to enable the extension of the household support fund. Of course, over 12 million pensioners will see their basic or new state pension increase by 4.1%, thanks to the Government’s commitment to the triple lock.

This is a running theme from Conservative Members. They seem to welcome the investment in health and social care that the Government are providing at the same time as opposing it. They cannot have it both ways. If they do not support the decisions taken by the Chancellor, they have to admit that had the Conservatives remained in power, this winter, they would have been cutting the health and social care services that pensioners really rely on.