Mental Health and NHS Performance

Debate between Jeremy Hunt and Liz Kendall

Monday 9th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

My right hon. Friend will of course know that from his distinguished time as a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions. He is right. The central problem we are trying to address is that if someone, for example, stops going to work and is signed off work because of severe depression, that is bad for the individual and also bad for the business. Too often, what happens at the moment is that it then becomes entirely the NHS’s responsibility to get that person back to work; the business says, “Well, it’s not our responsibility anymore because they’re not turning up.” With a little bit of help from the business, we could get the person back to work much more quickly, meaning that they recovered more quickly and the business would not lose someone important. That is what Dennis Stevenson and Paul Farmer will be looking into.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

We will never solve the challenges facing the NHS and social care until there is a long-term settlement for funding both. Does the Secretary of State understand that the social care precept is completely inadequate to fill the gap and will increase inequality, because the areas that most need publicly funded care will be least able to raise that money? Will he speak to the Chancellor and the Communities and Local Government Secretary to look again at this issue and get the funding that social care desperately needs?

[Mr Hunt]

I agree with the hon. Lady that there are serious funding pressures in social care. We need a long-term solution to this, and we are doing important work on that. The precept is part of the solution. The local government settlement has been adjusted to take account of the different spending powers, or revenue-raising powers, of wealthier counties and wealthier local authority areas compared with other areas. We have to take into account the equality issue, and she is absolutely right to do that. However, if she is saying, “Have we solved the whole problem?”, the answer is no—there is more work to do.

Social Care

Debate between Jeremy Hunt and Liz Kendall

Wednesday 16th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

With great respect to the hon. Gentleman, I was coming on to talk about funding. I just wanted to make the point that the issue is not just about funding.

I respectfully disagree with some of the suggestions made by the shadow Health Minister in her comments earlier that this is essentially about party political choices, for the simple reason that at the last election, Labour promised less for social care and would have spent less than we are spending. I gently remind Opposition Members that Ed Balls as shadow Chancellor was absolutely explicit in 2015. He said that he would not reverse funding cuts to local government—indeed, he would have made further cuts. Under this Government, those cuts have started to be reversed. Spending on adult social care increased—[Interruption.] These are the facts. Spending on adult social care increased by around £600 million in the first year of the Parliament and is set to increase further because of the spending review, which will mean that up to an additional £3.5 billion can be spent during this Parliament.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

I am afraid the Secretary of State is living in cloud cuckoo land. My council has to make £55 million of cuts on top of the £100 million it has already made. There is a funding crisis, and we will not solve it unless he admits there is a crisis. He cannot continue to be in denial, and we cannot have a Prime Minister who constantly says that the NHS and social care have the funding they need. We need cross-party agreement on this long-term issue, but, first, he has to acknowledge that there is a problem.

[Mr Hunt]

I have great respect for the hon. Lady, but Leicester Council actually increased its adult social care budget by 7%. Overall, there was an increase in the adult social care budget last year, and that was made possible by the new social care precept, which is being used by 144 out of 152 councils. That will raise £382 million this year and up to £2 billion a year by 2019-20.

[Liz Kendall]

My council has had to cut other vital local services to fulfil its statutory obligations. The social care precept will not even pay for the increase in the minimum wage—the council is going to have to move money from elsewhere. The Secretary of State is living in denial. You cannot solve a problem unless you admit there is one. People are willing to work across the House to deliver a long-term solution, but he has to admit that there is a problem.

[Mr Hunt]

With the greatest respect, I do not know whether the hon. Lady heard what I said just a few moments ago, but I answered very directly what the shadow Health Minister said. Do I recognise the scale and seriousness of the issues? Yes, I do, and I am coming on to explain what I think the solutions are. The point I am making is, yes, the budget—the amount spent on social care—was cut in the last Parliament, as a result of the very difficult economic situation we faced after the financial crisis in 2008, but it is starting to go up again in this Parliament. We need to look at what we can do to try to turn that into a sustainable improvement in the care received by all our constituents.

A crucial point was missing from the shadow Health Minister’s opening speech. There was a suggestion that the issues in social care are essentially caused entirely by decisions made by central Government. We need to salute the efforts made by councils of all colours to deal with the pressures in social care, because those are very tough. Middlesbrough Council, for example, increased its social care budget by 11%—it is the most improved council in England. My own council, Surrey, which is an affluent area, but has a large number of elderly people to look after, has battled enormous odds to expand provision.

However, the fact is that there is enormous variation in the way local authorities have responded to these challenges. If we look at the impact on the NHS, and at the delayed transfers of care that are attributable to social care, we can see that the best councils, such as Peterborough, Rutland, Newcastle and Torbay, have virtually no delays in hospital discharges attributable to social care. That can be compared with Birmingham, Manchester, Reading and Southampton where there are between 14 and 21 days of delayed transfers attributable to social care per 10,000 of population every working day. That is a difference of 20 times between the best and the worst councils, and we cannot say that there is a 20-times difference in funding between the best and the worst councils.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jeremy Hunt and Liz Kendall

Tuesday 7th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I am very happy to look into that. The general direction of travel my hon. Friend is talking about is right. We need to empower patients. We need patients to become expert patients, so that they take responsibility for their own healthcare. That means giving them much more information to help them to make the right decisions.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State is trying to avoid the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood). It was a key recommendation of the Francis review into Mid Staffs that safe staffing guidelines should be drawn up independently from Government and NHS managers to make sure people are confident that they are based on what is best for patients, not budgets. Why has he gone against Francis? What was wrong with what NICE was doing? He has published no new criteria for NHS England and no process or timetable for action. Will he now commit to doing that, so that patients, staff and Members of this House can be confident that this is not just a cover for cuts?

[Mr Hunt]

We will not take any lessons from the Labour party about what needs to be learned from Mid Staffs. Labour Members should be ashamed of the state of hospital care they left behind. There are 8,000 more nurses in our hospitals as a result of the changes that this Government have made. They should welcome that, not criticise it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Jeremy Hunt and Liz Kendall

Tuesday 2nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

This is one of the main reasons why the Chancellor allocated £1 billion to modernise primary care facilities in the autumn statement. We recognise that many GP premises are simply not fit for purpose. If we are going to transform out-of-hospital care, we need to find ways to help GPs move to better premises, to link up with other GP practices, and that will be a major priority for this Parliament.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

The 2010 Conservative manifesto promised every patient seven-day GP access from 8 am to 8 pm, but access has got worse and almost half of all patients now say they cannot see a GP in the evenings or at weekends. Five years on, the Conservatives made the exact same promise. Can the Secretary of State tell us why he has failed?

[Mr Hunt]

I welcome the hon. Lady back to her place, although I know she hopes it will be for only a brief time, and say to her that we have not failed. We made very good progress delivering seven-day access to GP surgeries for nearly 10 million people during the last Parliament, and we have committed to extending that to everyone during this Parliament. I think the hon. Lady said that what is right is what works, and what works is having a strong economy so we can put funding into the NHS that will mean more GPs.