NHS (Government Spending)

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Spencer]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. What my constituents who are in the unfortunate position of suffering from cancer care about is whether they are going to get better. Is the service going to deliver a service that makes them better and gets them over the disease? Frankly, if it does not cost constituents any money, and if the level of care and service is the highest, I think that is what really matters to them.

It is easy to stand here and talk. Politicians talk—they will always talk—but we have to look at what politicians do. This Government, to their credit, have in this Parliament put in an extra £12.7 billion. Let us compare that with how politicians have operated in Wales, where the budget has been cut by 8%. I think it says a lot to our constituents about how the NHS is going to be managed in future and how much we genuinely care about and want to support the NHS system.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

Is the hon. Gentleman not aware that central Government have cut the Welsh Government’s money by 10% and that health spending in Wales is now at an all-time high?

[Mr Spencer]

Of course, I am the first to admit that there is financial pressure within the system. The previous Government borrowed enormous amounts of money and ran up an enormous deficit. Any Government coming in at that time would have had to take difficult decisions, but the simple fact is that spending in England has gone up under this Government, while spending in Wales under the control of the hon. Lady’s party has gone down. There are some 850,000 extra operations a year taking place in our NHS by comparison with 2010.

The issue that upsets me most and has brought me to attend this debate is the state of my own Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. It “benefited” from a PFI deal signed under the previous Government, which now costs the trust £40 million a year out of its budget. That is where we went wrong under the previous Government. Let us spin that out: we were fortunate enough to invest £320 million in a new hospital, but it will cost £2 billion in repayments. I put it to Members that they would get a better interest rate from Wonga than they would out of that PFI deal. If we look at what happened nationally, we find that £11 billion-worth of investment through PFI matches up with £55 billion-worth of repayments. That means £44 billion being taken out of the NHS because of the shocking PFI deals signed by the previous Government.

Labour Members talk about the cost of our reorganisation being £3 billion, but that is frankly nothing by comparison with £44 billion. It is an enormous amount of cash that could be spent on doctors, nurses, cancer patients and putting our NHS services in the right place.

I am very fortunate that the Secretary of State has agreed to meet me and my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) to try to help Sherwood Forest hospital trust out of the hole that the previous Government put it in. Hopefully, we can assist in dealing with the £40 million a year being sucked out of the trust.

I am conscious that other Members want to speak, so I shall end there. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to speak.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer). Last Saturday, I sat with my constituent Joanna Redfearn, who is a mother of four. Her 11-year-old daughter, Kelsie, has complex medical needs, including epilepsy. Joanna was telling me about the increasing difficulty she experiences in getting an ambulance to come when her child has a fit. She has been subject to waits of between an hour and two hours—clearly, that is totally unacceptable, because it is extremely dangerous for her child.

A recent low point was when a paramedic turned up, who was told that a St John ambulance—not an NHS ambulance—was about to come. The paramedic rang the North East Ambulance Service to say, “Sorry, that will not do. They are not equipped to deal with this child’s needs. We need a proper ambulance.” My constituent is so desperate that she is considering moving house to be nearer to the hospital.

This is part of a pattern in my constituency. When an elderly woman fell out of her wheelchair outdoors last summer, her husband, whose hearing is very bad, rang the ambulance service. The people on the other end of the phone began to challenge him and ask him a series of questions, but he could not answer them because he could not hear them. He could phone up and say, “I need an ambulance now”, but he could not hear well enough to engage in a long conversation with the ambulance service.

After three phone calls a paramedic turned up, who then called a proper ambulance. The old man had to stand, propping his wife up for over an hour while the paramedics gave her the medical support she needed. It was fully two and a half hours before the proper ambulance came to collect her and take her to A and E. The worst case, however, is the one I raised with the Secretary of State a few days ago: that of Violet Alliston. Her partner rang 999 several times, but the ambulance arrived so late that she died.

Everyone knows that the North East Ambulance Service is in crisis. The patients know, the GPs know and the paramedics know. The only people who do not seem to know are the Ministers. It is a shame that the doctor is no longer with us, because he made a number of comments, and it is unfortunate that he will not hear my response to them. He challenged what had been written by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, which was set up by the Government to audit their public spending plans. It was the OBR that said that the Government’s plans would reduce spending to 1930s levels, and reduce by 1 million the number of public service jobs. It would be nice if the Minister responding to the debate told us which NHS staff will be included in that 1 million.

Government Members seem to think that this is just a rhetorical device, and that none of us on the Opposition Benches have any such personal experience. That is not true. In the 1930s, my grandmother used to collect for an ambulance friendly society. What happened in the 1930s, under a 1930s system, was that if people did not pay, they did not get an ambulance. No one wants to return to that system.

The problems I have described obviously have knock-on effects in hospital A and E departments. County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust met the four-hour waiting time standard on only 74% of occasions. Furthermore, services are constantly being removed from Bishop Auckland general hospital. The latest service the trust wants to remove is the maternity unit. Again, I am sorry that the doctor is not here to respond to my account of the problems we are experiencing. We have been told that maternity services are not safe because if something goes wrong during labour, the trust cannot guarantee that an ambulance will arrive to transfer the patient, even though the ambulance station is right next to the hospital. Of course the ambulance service is not working.

I said to representatives of the hospital trust, “You are still dealing with home births. Surely the problems involved in collecting people from Bishop Auckland hospital by ambulance are exactly the same as those involved in collecting people if a home birth goes wrong.” They replied, “It is true that home births are risky, but people expect to be safer in a hospital.” In other words, what they are really bothered about is not health outcomes, but the risk of litigation. That is no way to run the health service.

What the health service needs is a proper, well-funded plan, and that is what Labour’s motion sets out. We need to see changes in the culture, in the resources and in the management. Labour’s plan is honest, truthful, transparent and clear, and it is what the British people want.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jane Ellison]

I will make some progress; the hon. Gentleman has made a contribution.

Not only has NHS funding in England been protected; it has risen in every year of this Parliament. That is an indisputable fact that flies in the face of the Opposition’s financial scaremongering. As a result of the additional £2 billion funding for 2015-16 the Chancellor announced in the autumn statement, funding in 2015-16 will be £16 billion higher in cash terms than in 2010-11. Those are the facts. That equates to an increase of £6.8 billion in real terms. That additional investment is a down-payment on the NHS’s own plan, which was set out in the “Five Year Forward View”. The chief executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens, has said that the autumn statement gives the NHS what it needs for next year.

Winter is always challenging for the NHS. This year, it comes on top of a significant increase in A and E attendances, which have been higher than in any year since 2010. On average, 3,000 more patients each day are being seen and treated in under four hours than under Labour. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) set out clearly in going back over the past few years, the additional funding the Government have put in emphasises the priority we place on the NHS. That makes utter nonsense of the claim that we are going back to 1930s levels of funding. That is ludicrous, and Opposition Members parroting that because they have been told to insults the intelligence of every Member of the House. It is nonsense.

[Helen Goodman]

The OBR says that the Government’s plans involve cutting 1 million public service workers. Will the Minister say from the Dispatch Box which 1 million public service jobs are going to be cut?

[Jane Ellison]

I remind all Opposition Members of their predictions about employment at the beginning of this Parliament. If any of them wants to remind us of those, they can be my guest.

We recognise the significant and continuing pressure on services in the short term and the need to invest in new ways of providing care for the future.

This Government have put more performance data in the public domain and have put an unprecedented emphasis on transparency. Indeed, some of the statistics Members quote in these debates are in the public domain only because the Government have put such an emphasis on transparency. Transparency is one of the key drivers of safety in our system.

As public health Minister, I welcome the focus on prevention in the “Five Year Forward View”. I think this is common ground across the parties. Prevention has to be a key part of the NHS’s plans. When we keep people healthy and out of hospital, it is a win for them and a win for the NHS. Mention has been made of the national diabetes prevention programme. We will be the first country in the world to implement such a programme at scale to help prevent the onset of the disease and reduce demand on the NHS. Investing in the NHS with a focus on prevention is one of the keys to a sustainable footing for the NHS in the long term.

Thanks to the work of NHS staff and the funding protection provided by the Government, the NHS is treating more patients than ever. Again, that flies in the face of all the dire threats about its peril. There are 9,000 more doctors and 3,300 more nurses. The additional funding announced by the Chancellor in the autumn statement will enable the NHS to continue to meet the rapidly rising demand in the short term, while making investments in new services and facilities to transform care for patients and ensure that the NHS is sustainable in the long term.