Rural Phone and Broadband Connectivity

Debate between Guy Opperman and Anne Marie Morris

Tuesday 3rd February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Anne Marie Morris]

That is an excellent point, and I am sure that the Minister will take it on board.

My fifth point is this. I do not feel that businesses are at the forefront of the challenge. Broadband is now as necessary as electricity and gas—it is the fourth utility—and if businesses cannot be supported, we are not doing our economy justice. Business parks and business estates are not automatically connected, and BT has been reluctant to deal with that, telling my constituents that it would not be profitable. That, to me, is a real challenge, because I think that businesses must be seen in a very special way.

[Guy Opperman]

I entirely agree with what my hon. Friend is saying. I think that it applies not only to businesses and commercial premises, but to planning for housing estates. It is vital for the respective departments and planning authorities to talk to each other as the houses are being built. Superfast broadband should be built into new developments, rather than individual constituents having to apply for it after buying their houses.

[Anne Marie Morris]

That is an extremely good point. BT may claim that the development is in an area that they do not expect to expand enough to justify the commercial cost, but that is not an argument. We know that development will continue. Broadband should be built in at the start: it is no good waiting for it to be a challenge later on. As for businesses, I find it rather horrifying that 35% of business people who work from home still rely on mobile broadband and 45,000 businesses still rely on dial-up. That simply cannot be right.

I have reached my sixth point. The House will be pleased to know that the list is shortening. I think that the promise that everyone will get at least 2 megabits per second poses a real challenge to the Government, because, in my view, that is not enough.

Community Hospitals

Debate between Guy Opperman and Anne Marie Morris

Thursday 6th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) on securing this debate. We are discussing an important topic and there are many wide-ranging issues to be addressed. I also congratulate the Minister on having been appointed to her new role. We all look forward to working with her.

Community hospitals do not just provide excellent clinical medical care. They are also places where patients feel the warmth of the community, which adds to a sense of well-being that is also part of their recovery. One reason why people feel so strongly about having community hospitals close and accessible is because it means friends and relatives can attend, which helps to make patients feel well. That is not just emotional clap-trap.

My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes put her finger on a key point when she said that this is about the community and trying to extend and expand the range of community services that are available. My community hospitals in Teignbridge are going from strength to strength, and there is a move towards integrating social and health care. That will be the salvation of community hospitals in the future. I support my hon. Friend’s comments about volunteers, too. The league of friends and the community transport in my three hospitals are first class. Without them, our community hospitals would not be nearly as successful and happy.

My three hospitals are quite different, but they all have minor injuries units and X-ray facilities, and provide a variety of services to the old and the young. Dawlish was the first private finance initiative hospital ever built, and patient surveys consistently put it in the top three of the 22 Devon hospitals. Remarkably, Teignmouth still has an operating theatre, as well as a physio unit funded by the league of friends—well done! Newton Abbot got the 2007 PFI deal of the year. Unusually, it has a maternity unit, as well as a first-class stroke unit.

My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes also raised the important issue of ownership. I raised this matter last year in a Westminster Hall debate. It is crucial that we get clarity about how ownership is to be managed once the asset is transferred from the primary care trust. In the case of Teignmouth hospital, the property is owned outright by the PCT. As I understand it, that property will be transferred to NHS Property Services Ltd. My local community has put in £850,000, so how does it feel about that? What will happen on future fundraising? Will the money just go into a central pot? What terms and conditions will be imposed on the service provider?

The situations at Newton Abbot and Dawlish are much more complicated, because those hospitals are the subjects of PFI contracts. That means that the buildings are owned by a private contractor and are, in effect, rented out to the service provider subject to two charges, an availability fee and a service charge, both of which have historically been extraordinarily high. In those cases, the contracts will be transferred to the NHS Commissioning Board. That raises a number of legal questions about the validity of the transfer, given the nature of that contract, and about the ability of the new owner to renegotiate the contract. Why do I talk about renegotiation? I do so because it is well known from evidence in the press that some of the charges that have been levied are disproportionately high. What can we do to enable such a renegotiation? Clearly it will be completely inappropriate for a local trust provider to undertake such a renegotiation, so will the NHS Commissioning Board do it?

My hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) has been brilliant in raising a campaign to look at renegotiating these contracts. The Government have already started to look at the whole management issue of these contracts to see whether costs can be cut, and they reckon that a substantial saving has been made and 5% savings can be achieved. They have established a fund of more than £1.5 billion for this; that is the amount that any one trust can get over 25 years to assist with the blighting cost, but that can be obtained only in exceptional and historic circumstances. The fund has been used, but generally that has been in much larger cases involving much bigger hospitals; I cannot see a community hospital being able to pass the test of having exceptional and historic problems. So what can the Government do to help those hospitals blighted with the burden of a PFI contract? I have heard of hospitals that, under the service charge, have had to pay £333 just to change a light bulb. I am pleased to say that that was not the case in my local hospital, but my goodness me that sort of situation has to change.

[Guy Opperman]

My hon. Friend rightly raises the issue of PFI and asks what the Government can do. I would venture to suggest that the previous Health Secretary’s decision to approve the county council’s assistance to the health trust so that it could buy out the PFI contract that was crippling Hexham hospital is exactly the right way forward. Under that approach, a PFI arrangement is bought out and a much better financial basis is put in place—an ongoing future financial basis approved by all.

[Anne Marie Morris]

My hon. Friend makes absolutely the right point, but the tragedy is that few communities can afford that sort of buy-out. As he rightly says, if we could achieve that, it would undoubtedly be the answer.

All we need from the Minister is some clarity as to exactly how these properties are to be transferred; what the position with the local community will be when properties are owned by NHS Property Services Ltd; and what the position will be on the PFI contracts when they get passed across to the NHS Commissioning Board. Clarification on those matters would be helpful and it is now urgently needed, because local trusts that are looking at continuing to run these hospitals need certainty about what they are going to be including in their budgets, and the sorts of figures that the availability fee and the service charge take out are phenomenal. The availability fees at my local hospitals range from 18% to 35%; that is the fee simply to repay the funding costs of the overall PFI arrangement. The service charge can also be high, reaching 18% to 20%. Set against that, private investors are currently seeing returns of up to 50%. That is huge and it seems unreasonable. The previous Government entered into a voluntary arrangement whereby any excess profits, particularly as a result of contracts being bundled by external private bodies, should be shared between the taxpayer and the private investor.

All those tools, which are available for the Government, need to be used. We need certainty and manageable budgets so that our community hospitals can thrive and so that money is available for what we really need—the services.

VAT on Air Ambulance Fuel Payments

Debate between Guy Opperman and Anne Marie Morris

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House supports wholeheartedly the work and actions of the Air Ambulance Service nationally, and all the individual crew members and staff, who provide an outstanding service to people up and down the UK; notes that the Air Ambulance Service is a charitable organisation, funded by donations given by the general public, and without any direct funding from Government; further notes that the Air Ambulance Service has saved successive governments millions of pounds; notes that the Air Ambulance Service provides an emergency service similar to the Lifeboat Service, and that the Lifeboat Service has been excluded from the EU VAT Directive on fuel costs since 1977, whereas the Air Ambulance Service has been required to pay for VAT on fuel; notes that successive governments have failed to provide a rebate or exemption to the Air Ambulance Service for this VAT; calls on the Government to conduct an urgent review of this situation; and further calls on the Government, in the next 12 months, to consider providing for grants to the Air Ambulance Service commensurate to the sums incurred by the Air Ambulance Service for the VAT on the fuel they purchase, and to publish the outcome of that review within this timescale.

This is a cross-party debate arising from an e-petition that has approximately 150,000 signatures and is supported by many Members up and down the land. Our support for the air ambulances and the e-petition derives from a constituent of my co-sponsor of the motion, the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley), to whom I give my thanks. The constituent is Mr Ken Sharpe. I also thank the Backbench Business Committee for its support and Mr Speaker for finding time for it to be heard.

On 1 August the eyes of the world will be on London for the Olympics. For months I have been rigorously training my body to be at the peak of physical perfection. But I shall not be lining up against Usain Bolt. I shall be in the sleepy village of Edale, in north Derbyshire, where I, the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) and other hikers will be about to commence a 280-mile hike along the greatest walk in the world, the Pennine way. I shall not be walking for a gold medal. My goal is not gold, but hard cash to support the Great North air ambulance service, which is of course the finest of all the air ambulance organisations. Others may be cheering on Jessica Ennis and sipping the corporate champagne, but this ageing, fattening ex-jockey will be existing on a prime diet of beer and flapjacks as I wearily trudge my way north to Northumberland. Usain Bolt has nothing to fear.

This debate is supported not only by the e-petition, but by a petition run by my local paper, the Hexham Courant. Other newspapers up and down the land have also done a great deal to raise the profile of this debate. It is a cross-party debate, giving the Treasury a fantastic opportunity, over the next 12 months, to consider all the information to do with air ambulances, how they are funded and how VAT applies to their fuel, and to come back with a possible solution after the Budget next year.

What is certain is that the issue derives from Europe, an issue that may have been occupying some of our minds these past few months. When our illustrious forebears took us into Europe—purely, as we all understood, for economic reasons—there was a requirement to sign up to the EU VAT directive, which covers UK VAT legislation. In 1977, the lifeboat service was exempted from the VAT on marine diesel. However, as the air ambulance did not exist at the time, it was not exempted and has subsequently been required to pay VAT on fuel costs. We are in this situation today because of that anomaly. As we have learned since the Budget in March, the Government are keen to clear up VAT anomalies.

We Back Benchers are often asked by Whips to believe many outlandish things—that the European Union always makes sensible decisions or that we will one day win a penalty shoot-out or have a Wimbledon singles winner. Today I will ask the House to accept one basic principle: that there is no real difference between a lifeboat and a helicopter. The lifeboat services are exempt from the VAT exclusion but the air ambulance charities are not—but they are both, I suggest, providers of life-saving emergency services that deserve all our support and all the exemptions made available for their vital work so that they may continue.

My constituency is the second biggest in the country; it has schools with catchment areas almost the size of the M25. It has rough, rural country, often without roads. In the west of Northumberland, our nearest hospital is well over an hour away; sometimes the four-wheeled ambulance struggles to be with us within an hour, if at all.

When I was a thinner and better jockey, I met many other jockeys who had struggled after a fall when they needed to be airlifted to hospital. People frequently have to be supported and airlifted to safety from the A1. This is not just a rural issue, but one that affects cities and towns just as much, when there is a lack of access or urgent transfers are required.

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

I absolutely commend my hon. Friend’s argument. Devon Air Ambulance in my constituency is absolutely vital. There are very rural parts of the countryside and I entirely agree that it seems disproportionate that it should have to pay VAT, unlike the lifeboat services.

[Guy Opperman]

I endorse everything that my hon. Friend has said; she is a great supporter of that organisation.