Future of the NHS

Imran Hussain Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

It is, of course, a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. Time does not permit me to repeat the excellent points made by my hon. Friends the Members for City of Chester (Christian Matheson), and for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West), but I certainly align myself with what they said.

I want to concentrate on two areas of huge concern to my constituents. The first, which has already been mentioned, is privatisation. Three years ago, in Bradford, I fought alongside trade unions and NHS staff to stop plans to introduce dangerous back-door privatisation into our local hospitals. Although we beat those plans to move key services out of the NHS and place them in the hands of private companies, the danger of the privatisation of our NHS in Bradford has not passed.

That threat has only grown as a result of this Government’s Health and Care Bill. While removing enforced competition, the Bill does nothing whatever to roll back the wave of privatisation that successive Tory Health Ministers have unleashed on our NHS over the last decade. Rather than improving patient care, the Bill allows private companies with a vested stake in driving greater privatisation in the NHS to sit on local health boards and make decisions about our health care; at the forefront of their mind are not patients, but profits. There is no greater threat to the future of our NHS—free at the point of use and in public hands—than the Health and Care Bill and this Tory Government. We must stop both before it is too late.

We also have to look at the future of our NHS for GPs, who are at the coalface of health care but are all too often overlooked. Each week, without fail, a worrying number of constituents tell me that they have been unable to get any form of appointment, let alone a face-to-face appointment with a GP; that they have been left on hold when calling, waiting for phones that are never answered; or that, when they are given an appointment, it is weeks away, even when it is an urgent issue that simply cannot wait.

I dealt with two such cases this week. I heard from a son whose 82-year-old mother went to accident and emergency, but was sent away and told to go see her GP the next morning. Her son began ringing the GP practice first thing next morning, but when he eventually got through, hours later, he was given an appointment in two weeks’ time. In the other case, involving very similar circumstances, my constituent was once again told to wait for weeks. It is unacceptable.

That level of service would be unacceptable anywhere. However, in Bradford—where we have higher rates of deprivation, where life expectancy is below the national average and where we have greater rates of preventable illnesses—it is beyond serious, and can even be fatal. No one should have to wait for more than a fortnight for an appointment, and certainly not for urgent cases, but as the inner city of Bradford has one of the worst GP-to-patient ratios in the country, that comes as little surprise.

Although fewer GPs being forced to see more patients explains the scarcity of appointments, it does not explain the poor service that patients in Bradford are reporting to me. I want to use this debate to put on notice those practices that are letting their patients down. I want to be clear: there should be a better service to ensure that urgent cases receive urgent appointments, and to help close the health inequality gap between the richest and the poorest in Bradford.

Finally, I listened to the hon. Member for Stockton South (Matt Vickers), who opened this debate. His speech implied that he was anti-privatisation. I say this to him and all those on the Government Benches: the reality is, over the last decade, we have seen an ideological, intentional attack on our NHS. Let us not beat around the bush: if the hon. Member for Stockton South and others wish to stop the back-door privatisation of our NHS, they should be opposing the Health and Care Bill. Any form of privatisation needs to be taken out of the Bill. We do not need the smoke and mirrors that we see in the current legislation.