NHS (Government Spending)

Debate between Helen Goodman and Mark Spencer

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.

Local Government (Review of Decisions) Bill

Debate between Helen Goodman and Mark Spencer

Friday 23rd January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is pure chance that I am here today, but I am very glad that I am because the Bill is of great interest and significance in my constituency. Everybody here has heard of the miners gala, but what people probably do not know is that before the big gala in the city of Durham, every village around the county of Durham can have, and traditionally does have, its own mini-gala. This involves a parade with the local brass band behind the banner of the local mine. This is a long-standing tradition; it has been going on for more than 150 years.

The problem nowadays is that the organising committees for these mini-events throughout the county have to secure the agreement of the police and of the local council. The organisers are required, on health and safety grounds, to put up traffic notices three weeks before and those have to be paid for by the local organising committee. The committee must go to a professional firm to have new traffic notices made for each village with the date, the time and so forth. The cost might be several hundred pounds, but in some villages it is over £1,000. This cost is so great that organising committees are deciding not to bother. Villagers are getting on the bus and going straight into Durham for the big gala, rather than having their own little galas.

At the other end of my constituency, which is very rural, a number of traditional carnivals take place. People there face a similar dilemma: they have to get traffic notices for children’s fancy dress parades—there will probably be a brass band and there may be a carousel and so on. Such obligations are crippling these village events.

The situation is completely counter-productive. A village is a community in which people do things together—and the more they do together, the better and stronger the community will be. The police’s attitude is completely counter to their own crime reduction strategy. People are much more likely to notice a stranger or criminal who turns up if they know everybody in their village and if everybody feels connected and that they can rely on each other. The situation is totally perverse.

The amendment tabled by the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) is sensible—speeding things up will make it easier for local organising committees—but what I am not clear about is whether the Bill will tackle the issue of cost, which is the inhibitor on these local community events that we all find so valuable. In 2006 I did a survey of all parish councils in County Durham, so I know that the costs are leading to the end of events across our county. That is greatly regretted by people in County Durham.

[Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

I should like to speak briefly about the amendment. It is important that the Bill should remain fairly simple. Although it might be enjoyable and good sport to criticise our district councils and local authorities, it is worth putting it on the record that the majority of them do a fantastic job in assisting community groups to put on these events. The Bill is designed to prevent situations in which that goes wrong and the system breaks down.

I understand the desire of my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot), who tabled the amendment, to make the process speedy. In the Bill there is provision for the local government ombudsman to review and turn around decisions rapidly. However, I am personally keen that we should leave those processes and decisions about review and how an appeal may take place to local authorities. I do not want to put undue financial pressure on local authorities. It is important that we should leave it to local authorities to consider how they review these decisions. If things go wrong, there is provision in the Bill for the local government ombudsman to step in quickly and make sure that the authorities understand where they may have gone wrong.

Common Agricultural Policy

Debate between Helen Goodman and Mark Spencer

Monday 7th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Lady is right. Newcastle university estimates that the average income of a farmer in my constituency is £11,000 a year. Many of them are on working tax credits—or were on them under the previous Government, but I am not sure how many of them are still getting the working tax credits.

The Select Committee report is excellent on the major problem such hill farmers face, which is to do with delivery: the totally inadequate service that the farmers receive from the Rural Payments Agency because of the requirement to apply for money online and because the system is constantly collapsing. The Select Committee report states at paragraph 34 that

“farmers can be heavily penalised for a genuine mistake but not appropriately compensated when it is the Rural Payments Agency who is in error.”

What has happened repeatedly in recent months is that the farmers have gone to upload their data and information, and the RPA computer system has been down, necessitating the farmers to go home and come back another day. That is absolutely absurd. Sometimes they have a round trip of 20 miles to access the computer in the UTASS centre in Middleton in Teesdale. When the system is down, they have wasted several hours and have to go back another day in the vain hope it will be up again. I wrote to the Minister about this, and I really think he should not be penalising the farmers when the RPA is at fault.

The next extremely pertinent recommendation from the Select Committee is recommendation 36, which states:

“The IT system remains, however, one of the standout challenges of this round…Given the lessons of the past we question whether this is the right time to be introducing a new IT system.”

How very right the Committee is. It is not just about a new IT system, with all the risks, complexities and problems that a new system always seems to entail in this country; one of my local farmers calculated that because DEFRA’s systems are so complex, and because he has to apply to so many different things and for each system he is meant to have a different authentication, he is supposed to remember 27 different personal identification numbers. This is absurd. This is grotesque. This is Kafkaesque. I find it difficult to remember my bank number and the number to get into the House of Commons, so how can these farmers, whose real job is farming up on the hill, be expected also to run the sort of complex IT system that would make a banker blench?

The Select Committee’s next point, which is absolutely right, was about the importance of encouraging and supporting people to apply online but realising that

“there will be some for whom such an approach is not appropriate. A paper-based application process must be retained”.

That is absolutely essential. Once upon a time, the farmers got the forms through the post, sat at their kitchen table, had a cup of tea, filled the forms out, put the stamp on the envelope, shoved it in the post box and, boom, the whole thing was done. Now that is not possible and the farmers have to drive to the library or the UTASS centre to get help with the uploading.

The whole thing is completely inefficient because, as recommendation 38 indicates, the rural broadband programme has not succeeded so far. We know that 5 million people in this country do not have access to broadband. Until 100% of people have access to broadband, how can it make sense to have a totally online approach and not have a paper-based approach alongside it? In my constituency, 40% of the farmers have no access to rural broadband, so DEFRA and the RPA are taking an absurd approach. It is essential to maintain a paper-based system. It is not reasonable for the Government to make public spending cuts through a digital-by-default process and pass all the burden back to the farmers for delivering the Government’s own administration system. The farmers experience that as oppressive and nerve wracking; it raises anxiety levels to a completely unreasonable pitch, given the significance of what the Government have to do.

[Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

I hope that the hon. Lady is not painting a picture of the old system through rose-tinted spectacles. As I am sure she will recall, when the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) was in charge of DEFRA there was a paper-based system whereby farmers were not paid for years, never mind weeks. At least under the current regime the majority of farmers are paid on 1 December, allowing their cash flow and business to flourish.

[Helen Goodman]

We will see whether the hon. Gentleman’s picture of the current system turns out to be right—I do not think it is accurate. I do not think that my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby South was particularly happy with the criticisms I made of the system in the previous Parliament—they were also significant—but the fact is that this Minister is in the DEFRA hot seat now and it is his responsibility to run a system which is usable and farmer friendly. That patently is not happening at the moment. I am extremely concerned to hear the Chair of the Select Committee say that the head of the Rural Payments Agency is considering not having a paper-based system when we know that the rural broadband roll-out programme will take another three or possibly four years. It is absolutely plain that we need a paper-based system for another five years, and I hope that the Minister will be able to stand at the Dispatch Box, allay all the fears of our farmers and tell us that that is what he will ensure happens.