NHS 70th Anniversary

Jamie Stone Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2018 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith) for securing this important debate. I wish the NHS a very happy birthday. I cannot understand—I get angry—when I hear politicians on the other side of the Atlantic rubbishing the NHS as a service. It is one of the greatest achievements of this country and, as has been said, credit is due to Clement Attlee’s Government for doing what they did.

Being born when I was, and being brought up in the Highlands, as a child I was part of the nascent NHS service. My late father told me what it was like before I was born. He spoke of the inequalities—how, if someone did not have enough money, their life would be shorter, because they could not pay for the doctor. That is how unfair it was. The NHS is about fairness, and that is why it is such a great achievement for this country.

I extol the virtues of the staff. Through my wife’s illness, I know how dedicated the neurosurgery team in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary is, and how fantastic the nurses were at a critical time in my wife’s life. She recovered, thank God. If there are angels on this earth, they wear nurses’ and doctors’ uniforms, believe you me.

The issue for Scottish Members is that the NHS is of course devolved, but I want to touch on something I mentioned in the summer when I questioned the Prime Minister. Within my vast and scattered constituency, we face really big challenges owing to remoteness and distance. There was a story in the national press recently about a mother who lived in Wick who had to make a 520-mile round trip to Livingston to give birth. That was due to an accidental coincidence of unavailability of services more locally. I do not want to give the staff a hard time—staff morale is crucial—and, for the record, I am not getting at the staff, but the fact that it happened should worry us all.

What we see in remote parts of Scotland, including my own constituency, is that there seems to be an impression that our network of local hospitals is not being used to the maximum it could be, in terms of treating people locally. I believe it is an issue of funding, which other hon. Members have also highlighted. What bothers me about what I think is happening in my constituency is that it seems to be taking us rather worryingly near to the sort of inequalities that my father spoke of. In other words, a person who lives in a very remote area of Caithness or Sutherland might not get the same deal as someone who lives in Glasgow, Edinburgh or Aberdeen, because it is harder to access services. That is the challenge for the Scottish Government, and for us all. Surely to goodness a person should not be disadvantaged because of where they live. That is what lay behind the Beveridge report, which in a way was influential on Nye Bevan bringing into being the NHS: the idea that no matter who someone was, or where they lived, they had an equal right to the service.

I do not know the answer. Health is devolved to Scotland, which I accept. It is rightly the property of Members of the Scottish Parliament and Ministers in the Scottish Government, who I am sure do their level best, but if there is a perception in Westminster that one part of the UK—it may be Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland—is perhaps not functioning quite as it should, and on something as fundamental to our lives as the NHS, at the very least there has to be a conversation between UK Ministers and Scottish Government Ministers to say, “Is it going okay for you? Is there something we could do better? Is there something that can be co-ordinated better throughout the UK to make sure that whether someone lives in Scotland, Wales, England or Northern Ireland, they have the same access to health services?”

I give notice that this is an issue to which I will return, while of course always recognising the difficulty of the fact that health is a devolved matter and there are therefore limits on what I can say. I do not intend to be silent on the issue.