Hospitals
Debate between Helen Morgan and Ben Coleman(5 days, 21 hours ago)
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Helen Morgan
I will make some progress.
One of the main reasons those problems have not been rectified is successive delays from successive Governments. Shropshire is, again, a prime example. This is not related to the new hospital programme, but none the less, £312 million was granted for the hospital transformation programme in Shropshire back in 2018. Seven years later, while the country has been through five Prime Ministers and eight different Health Secretaries, Shropshire is still waiting for that transformation to take place. Opposition from both the Labour and Conservative councils that serve the area, along with the ridiculously lengthy process that capital expenditure has to go through to be signed off, means that desperately needed improvements have been horribly delayed as construction costs rise. As a result, the original plans have been scaled back and their value diminished.
Helen Morgan
I will give way to the hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Ben Coleman) because he has tried to intervene before.
Ben Coleman
I am most grateful to the hon. Lady for her delayed response. I am struck by her lack of response to two of my colleagues. She did not acknowledge to my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter) that in my constituency of Chelsea and Fulham, the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is getting money from the Government as a precursor to rebuilding the hospitals promised to it. More importantly, she did not address the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Josh Fenton-Glynn) that we are all reaping the whirlwind of the decisions taken by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government. The Liberal Democrats made a choice to go into that Government, to take on roles including as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and as Health Ministers, and to make those cuts and destroy the NHS. We are now reaping the whirlwind of the decisions that she and her colleagues made. Is it not a little bit cheeky of her to make some of the points and claims she is making today?
Helen Morgan
I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman’s hospital is being dealt with, but I am sure that the residents of Torbay will not feel the benefit of that. I am slightly surprised that he thinks that the decade since the Liberal Democrats were in power has had no impact whatsoever. I did address the point that when a party comes into government and has to clear up the appalling mess left by the previous Government, there are difficult choices to be made. His party knows that. Labour Members, for example, have voted to retain the two-child benefit cap and keep a quarter of a million children in poverty—something that no one in my party has ever voted for.
The last time I opened a Liberal Democrat Opposition day debate was in October, and the topic was primary care. I explained how the Government’s failure to invest in primary care was a false economy that increased pressures and costs in the critical parts of the system. The management of our hospital buildings displays that same false economy. Just as spending money on critical care instead of prevention and public health is a poor approach to managing a health service, waiting for the roof to collapse is an irresponsible way to manage NHS buildings. As problems are ignored and investment is poorly targeted, it is the patients and the hard-working staff striving to help them who are forced to suffer.
This is not just about the new hospital programme. Across the country, there are thousands of GP surgeries that need urgent improvement if they are to provide the care that patients deserve. More than 2,000 hospital buildings across England were built before the foundation of the NHS in 1948, while the state of GP surgeries varies wildly. Many surgeries are simply no longer fit for purpose, having been built in the 1950s. Prescott surgery in my constituency, for example, has long been recognised as somewhere that needs to drastically increase in size because the population of the village has increased drastically itself. Despite the land and the community infrastructure levy funding being available, there is no sign of a new surgery being built. As the delay continues, the costs are rising and the challenge grows for both the council and the integrated care board, which are already under immense pressure to cut their costs.
Instead of pursuing fantasies like the Conservatives or false economies like the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats would invest to save by starting construction now, and ending the epidemic of cancelled operations, closed-off wards and huge sums wasted on emergency repairs. That would save the taxpayer money in the long run and benefit patients much sooner.
Helen Morgan
There have been successive failures in NHS management that all parties need to hold their hands up for—that is a fair point. We should, though, focus on the task in hand rather than continually going back decades, either to the coalition Government or to the Blair Government before that. That is not helpful to our constituents, who want a solution now.
Helen Morgan
No. I have been very generous with my time and I am going to make some progress.
We are also campaigning for a review of outdated Government finance rules that prevent NHS trusts from investing the funds that they have raised into their own buildings. Even NHS managers struggle to access common-sense investment in their facilities due to overly complex rules and glacial processes. Trusts are prevented from using unspent funds on improving their buildings. We need root-and-branch reform, combined with our 10-year programme of investment, to bring our local health facilities up to scratch.
In conclusion, the recent history of the NHS is one of short-term decision making and of the failure of successive Governments to grasp the nettle of long-term sustained investment in the things that matter: hospital buildings, GP services, dentistry, pharmacy and, crucially, the unspoken crisis of social care. The outcome is an organisation that is spending millions of pounds to go backwards. It truly is a false economy.
This Government have spoken warmly of the need to reform the NHS and improve productivity, and we support them in that, but we cannot expect to retain staff and provide high-quality care when so many doctors and nurses are negotiating leaking roofs and sewage backing up on the wards. Dealing with the new hospital programme is a matter of urgency, and I urge the Secretary of State to, at long last, grasp the nettle.
Department of Health and Social Care
Debate between Helen Morgan and Ben Coleman(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
I thank the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), for securing this debate and for his excellent opening speech.
We all know that we have reached a crisis point across the NHS and care sectors, with more patients than ever waiting for treatment. That is affecting not just those in need of care and treatment, but those who work tirelessly across the NHS and care sectors, who are feeling the full brunt of the crisis. The Conservatives have a legacy of hours-long waits for ambulances, treatment in crowded hospital corridors—captured in horrifying detail by the “Dispatches” documentary, which looked into the hospital that serves my constituents in North Shropshire—and communities grinding to a halt under the weight of all sorts of waiting lists and backlogs. We urgently need to move forward.
The Secretary of State has repeatedly outlined the need to shift from treatment to prevention and from hospital to community, and the Liberal Democrats absolutely support him in that endeavour—indeed, we called for many measures that would achieve that shift in our own manifesto. Stronger primary care and community services were the strong recommendations of Lord Darzi’s report, which was commissioned by the Secretary of State and has been broadly welcomed.
There has been a great deal of consensus across the House today that we need to take those measures, but I fear that these estimates paint a picture of an NHS that continues to pour money into the previous, failing model in which capital budgets are drained to pay for day-to-day services and a huge proportion of increased spending goes on NHS staffing, while community care and primary care providers wrestle with the huge increase in employer national insurance contributions.
When that is combined with the decision to scrap targets on mental health and community services for the sake of prioritising targets on elective care, we must ask: when will the stated objectives of the Secretary of State really be matched by actions? The latest estimates are an indictment of the broken state of the NHS after years of Conservative neglect, but we urge the Government to go further and faster to address the failure.
Ben Coleman
Having heard the hon. Lady’s comments and the comments of those on the Conservative Benches, may I share with her my confusion? She seems surprised that she has not heard the full solution of what this Government are going to do with the NHS, when it is quite clear that there will be the three shifts, a 10-year plan and a huge amount of reform coming down the line. As that seems to have escaped the Opposition’s attention, has it also escaped hers?
Helen Morgan
There is clearly a point in the debate at which we need to urge the Government to go further and faster. As a constructive Opposition, that is exactly what we will do.
Primary care providers are on their knees, and I am afraid to say that that has been made worse by the national insurance hike announced in the Budget. They cannot meet demand for local appointments as things stand, and in many cases the constraining factor is the estate in which they operate. Prescott surgery in Baschurch in North Shropshire wants to provide additional services to the community and keep people away from hospital, but the surgery is physically not big enough. A local developer has provided land for a new surgery, and the local council has community infrastructure levy funding for that building, but it cannot be done because the ICB will not pay the notional rent, which everybody has agreed to forfeit. It is crazy. I hope that the Minister can commit to finding some kind of easy solution to that kind of nonsensical situation that we find ourselves in.