Department of Health and Social Care and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Mid Worcestershire (Nigel Huddleston) and to speak in the estimates day debate to mark the 70th anniversary of our NHS—the most remarkable achievement of a Labour Government to provide free healthcare for all, free at the point of delivery.

I want to speak about King’s College Hospital—a major teaching hospital, tertiary referral hospital, and local district and general hospital in my constituency. There is a strong bond between local residents and King’s. I am proud that my mum worked at King’s as an occupational therapist for 10 years. Like so many local residents, I owe a personal debt of gratitude to the tremendously hard-working staff at the hospital. I was a surgical in-patient at King’s in my 20s, gave birth to both of my daughters there in my 30s, and have subsequently been an out-patient. My family rely on the A&E to be there when we need it. As we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the NHS, I pay tribute to the staff at King’s for their skill and professionalism, commitment and dedication, care and compassion.

King’s went through very challenging times during the 1980s and ’90s, but was completely transformed by Labour’s investment and NHS reforms. By 2010, the hospital had achieved a balanced budget every year and was meeting all its major targets. Since 2010, however, King’s has faced very significant and substantial challenges, driven principally by chronic underfunding and an enforced decision in 2013 to take on the management of Princess Royal University Hospital and Orpington Hospital when South London Healthcare NHS Trust failed. King’s now finds itself in special financial measures, with an annual deficit of £140 million.

While there are some areas where the trust can make improvements—and I know that staff are working as hard as they can to do so—many of the problems that it faces are outside its control. The Government’s funding model rewards elective surgery and penalises emergency work. King’s has a regional trauma centre and a stroke centre. It is one of a small number of London hospitals with a helipad. It has a busy accident and emergency unit and will soon open a new critical care unit. These specialisms save lives daily, but the funding model does not recognise this work. As a result, the hospital is grossly underfunded, even though London needs centres of emergency excellence such as King’s—no more so than during the Westminster and London Bridge terror attacks and the Grenfell Tower fire last year, when the team at King’s were at the forefront of the emergency life-saving response.

Last year the Government refused to allocate sustainability and transformation funding to King’s, in contrast to many other hospitals, resulting in the hospital’s already challenged financial situation becoming significantly worse. In the context of a spiralling financial decline, the Government then decided to fine King’s for not achieving its already impossible financial control targets—even though it was the Government’s failure to provide adequate funding that led to the inability to meet these targets in the first place. Since King’s has been in special financial measures, the trust has been charged penal rates of interest on the money it has had to borrow to tackle the deficit it faces.

King’s does not have access to the capital funding it needs to undertake routine buildings maintenance and to invest in the infrastructure it needs to be able to be as efficient as possible. The Government love to recommend efficiency improvements. At King’s, efficiencies can be delivered if the buildings and outdated equipment are fit for purpose for the needs of patients in the 21st century. Both King’s and Maudsley Hospital across the road urgently need more funding to meet mental health needs in our communities. Too many local residents are ending up in mental health crisis because early intervention is not there, and too many of those patients spend far too long—often days at a time—waiting in accident and emergency at King’s for the mental health support that they need.

I raise these issues today because while any additional funding for the NHS is welcome, the problems at King’s cannot and will not be solved by 3.5% a year for five years. King’s needs new funding now to overcome its current challenges. It needs an end to the perverse policies of financial penalties for failing to meet impossible targets. It needs urgent capital funding to enable the Denmark Hill site in my constituency to be fit for purpose to meet patient needs. It needs revenue funding to enable it to recruit and retain the staff that it needs to run the hospital.

It is an appalling and unacceptable fact that as we mark the 70th anniversary of the NHS this week, one of the biggest teaching and research hospitals in the country, with such world-class life-saving and enhancing expertise, is in such a perilous financial state. This must be stopped. We owe it to the staff; we owe it to the patients. There is no way around the need for additional funding now. I call on the Government to acknowledge this challenge—to acknowledge the impossibility of the current situation at King’s with the current financial settlement and to step in to provide the funding it so desperately needs.