Accident and Emergency Departments

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Twelve years ago I sat where the Minister is sitting, when I was the Under-Secretary of State for Health. I had responsibility for accident and emergency services in particular, and I want to impress on her that she has power to respond to what is being said in the House today.

All Members will understand that the NHS does not stand still. Reconfigurations are necessary. Changes are necessary. I was born in a constituency that had a wonderful hospital called the Prince of Wales; it no longer exists. In the Roehampton part of London, there was a hospital; it no longer exists. Things change. In London we have seen changes to stroke services. It is possible that someone in an ambulance, having been unfortunate enough to have a stroke, will drive past a hospital to get to another hospital, a centre of excellence. That was a configuration that was carried out with great consensus across London. I pay tribute to Richard Sumray, who was chair of the primary care trust in Haringey and led the consultation on changing stroke services in London.

The Minister has heard deep concerns expressed about the changes proposed in every area of our capital city—deep concerns about King George hospital in the east and about the much loved hospital in Lewisham in the south. No one can understand why Lewisham should pay for problems in an adjoining area, as currently proposed. We raised concerns about the problems in the north. I will refer briefly to the Whittington, although my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) is in his seat and will major on that. We have heard about Chase Farm and about pressures deep in the south, in St Helier and the Croydon area, which were described by my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh). We have also heard about concerns in the west of London around Ealing. That is unprecedented.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend accept that one problem is that London’s population is rising, health inequalities are rising, and health demands are rising among poorer people? Although I understand all the arguments about putting services in the community, if hospitals are closed, many desperately poor and ill people will not be properly served.

[Mr Lammy]

My hon. Friend makes the point beautifully. Let us look at the demographics of London. The Mayor’s London plan estimated London’s population to be 7.8 million. The census later showed us that it was 8.17 million at least. The London plan assumed that the population would break 8.5 million in 2027. We now believe that it will exceed that figure in 2016. By 2031 there will be 9.5 million people living in our capital city. The areas marked for growth are the upper Lea valley—Chase Farm; the Metropolitan line corridor, with nine A and E units now turning into five; and the south-east of London, where Lewisham is based. There will be 9.5 million people using services that the Health Secretary is seeing shut down. There are huge concerns.

I sat in the Minister’s seat. That was after the terrible winter flu epidemics in the late 1990s. At that point the Whittington hospital in north London was at the epicentre of a public storm because of the bed waits and other long waits. My job, set by the former Member for Darlington who was then Secretary of State for Health, was to ensure that that four-hour wait was a reality across our country. I would sit with chief execs and we would go through the so-called sitreps to ensure that those hospitals were meeting the four-hour waiting target. That was the key element of my job.

I decided to look at the sitrep for the past four weeks across London. There is a target, and if hospitals are doing badly they are flagged as red, while if they are doing well and meeting the target, they are marked as green. I was startled. Ealing, Hillingdon, Imperial, North West London Hospitals, West Middlesex, Barnet and Chase, Whittington, Barking, Guy’s and St Thomas’, King’s College, Lewisham, South London, Epsom and St Helier, Kingston, Croydon and St George all currently fail. Yet it is proposed that we can lose many of our A and E departments—eight across London—at this time. It does not make sense.

This is a health service in London that we look to when a helicopter falls out of the sky or when bombs go off in Canary Wharf or on the underground. This is an A and E service that we look to following riots. I remember the A and E serving our police officers on the first night of riots in my constituency. Londoners will be very concerned indeed that this debate is being framed and structured in this way at this time, with the lack of consultation described so well by my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock).

I was staggered when I found out about the proposed changes to Whittington hospital in Camden New Journal. In November, I had a meeting with the chair and the chief executive, with other Members of Parliament, and we found out that a third of the hospital was to be sold off, that it was apparently to be totally reliant on community services, that it was to lose 500 jobs, and that the people of north London would again have to fight to retain the hospital that they loved—a hospital in my constituency in which my two sons and I were born, and which has been served particularly by nurses from the Caribbean.

Londoners are concerned and Londoners will fight. The Minister has the power to act to put an end to the disarray that we are now seeing across London, and I ask her to do so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I will try to be as brief as possible so that the debate can be properly concluded.

This debate goes to the heart of what the NHS is about. Many Members of Parliament are deeply frustrated about health plans being hatched in their constituencies, but they have very little power to influence events. The health service is being atomised by a large number of private interests through private finance initiatives, and by a large number of trusts with competing interests. We need a properly planned health service rather than the internal market and competition, which are at the heart of so many of our problems.

If the hon. Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) were still in his place, I could tell him something that would make him even more depressed about the future of Chase Farm hospital. As a former member of the late Enfield and Haringey area health authority in the 1970s, I recall debates on whether Chase Farm should be closed. There are agendas—colleagues will recognise such agendas all over the country—that live on beyond past directors, trusts and reconfigurations: somebody always has an aspiration to close something and centralise something else. If hon. Members think politics in the House of Commons is robust, they should try NHS politics, which is far more robust and nastier than anything we experience here.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) on opening and securing this debate, and on the campaign he is running on behalf of the people of his constituency. Many Members are involved in that campaign in west London and the one in south London. What is going on in London is outrageous. I ask the House to consider what my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) said. London has a fast growing population, great health inequalities and poverty, and a fast growing number of people in the daytime: the population of central London goes up phenomenally during the day because of people commuting to work, going to cultural or sporting events, or simply passing through the capital city. If we start closing A and E departments and saying that everything should go out into the community, and thus that hospitals can be reduced and closed, we are making the future very dangerous for our communities.

As the House is well aware, I represent Islington North. The Whittington hospital is in my constituency. Anything I say about the hospital is not a criticism of it or its wonderful staff—I absolutely support them and their work. Some three years ago, we discovered that the A and E department was due to be closed. As ever, there were denials all over the place. I tell the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (David Morris) to be ever so sceptical when told that an A and E department is not closing, because closure is probably in a plan somewhere.

We exposed the plan to close the Whittington A and E and eventually had the most bizarre general election rally ever in 2010, when the right hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr Lansley), the hon. Members for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) and for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone), my right hon. Friends the Members for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) and for Tottenham, and my hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) and I were on a platform pledging to save the A and E department, which was duly saved. However, time moves on. The hospital wants to become a trust and has begun putting together a financial package, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham referred. The package involves the sale of a quarter of the site—apparently, £17 million is to be made from that—the loss of 500 jobs and a reduction in the number of beds in the hospital to 177, which is about half what it was five years ago.

We asked whether an A and E department with a hospital of only 177 beds behind it was viable. Is that not a plan to remove the Whittington as an overall local district general hospital with an A and E department in future? The Camden New Journal and Islington Tribune reported on this with great alacrity last week. I congratulate Tom Foot and all those who put the story together, because I suspect the issue would not otherwise have reached the light of day. At a public meeting next Tuesday, friends, neighbouring MPs and many others from the local community will be questioning the chief executive and others from the hospital, and taking part in a big campaign to protect our hospital.

We all face issues of health care. I think there is a consensus that we all respect and value the principles of the national health service, but if we allow buildings to be sold off and A and E departments to close, we will end up with the health service becoming a service of last resort and with the promotion of private medicine at the expense of the NHS. We will end up with much poorer societies and much greater health inequalities, and that is in nobody’s interest. Let us get control of this in a democratic way, so that we can control what goes on in the health service in our name.