NHS Funding Bill

Jamie Stone Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 27th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Craig Mackinlay]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. How much do trusts spend on recruitment consultants? There is a whole panoply of expenditure on other things that the NHS, as a very big procurer, could get at competitive, keen prices.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) made a good point about the cost of medicines and repeat prescriptions. That has to be a major issue: across the country, £20 billion a year—nearly one sixth of the NHS budget—is spent on medicines, many of which are on free, repeat prescription. My wife, a pharmacist in the community, far too often sees bags full of expensive drugs come back to the pharmacy after the demise of a loved one. They have to be thrown away, and the money is completely wasted. We need to ask some difficult questions about the NHS. Let us not try to throw more money at it in the hope of a better outcome, because we need to be rather more clever. Great as it is—it has become a national institution, greatly loved—the NHS does not always do things perfectly.

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and I have been listening with great interest to the excellent contributions of new Members.

There is some evidence that NHS provision in Scotland is somewhat rackety. The hon. Gentleman has described the cost of bits of paper, and so on. Would it not be a good idea to apply the same tests to the delivery of NHS services in Scotland?

[Craig Mackinlay]

Obviously the hon. Gentleman takes a great interest in Scotland. This is a debate about England, but I think there should be a serious debate in every part of the country about whether the NHS is operating as we would operate if this were our own business, and I think that in many areas of procurement, whether the item in question is paper, telecommunications or power, the answer will be “Probably not.”

I have benefited from a couple of interventions adding to my time, but I will end by saying this. As I said earlier, the NHS does not always do things perfectly, and in that regard I reflect on the death of young Harry Richford at the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital maternity unit, and on what the coroner said last week. The coroner said that the death of young Harry—who died after a week, following a very difficult Caesarean—had been “wholly avoidable” and “contributed to by neglect”, and that “Harry was failed”.

We cannot just keep saying that we will learn from these things. We need to embed improvements so that our healthcare system in this country is much the best on the planet, and I am sure that the Government will deliver that.