Christmas Adjournment

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Thursday 18th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is a great privilege to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), and I echo entirely what he said about identity—in Stafford and Staffordshire, during difficult periods over the past few years, we have experienced that same sense of identity.

Yesterday, we heard the welcome news that the number of people out of work claiming jobseeker’s allowance had fallen in Stafford by 452 in 12 months. Stafford’s strengths are many—in engineering, especially energy, and in information technology, health services, defence and consumer chemicals—and signs of investment are everywhere. There is the substantial expansion of the Ministry of Defence base, to welcome two new Signals regiments in 2015; two new business parks; major developments in the town centre; Northfield village, which brings together a new health centre, extra care housing, a first-class dementia care home and a community centre; and the opening of Pencric in Penkridge, which is a superb example of extra care housing, with a mixture of homes to buy and houses for social rent.

Stafford borough and especially Stafford have also been clear about the need to build more homes to meet current and future needs—more than 10,000 of them—but in a planned way. Several developers have tried to break open a plan on which so much time and effort have been spent. Fortunately, thus far, it has been to no avail, but I urge the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to make it clear that an agreed plan is an agreed plan and that efforts by developers immediately to throw it into the bin will not succeed.

After five and a half years, two Francis inquiries and a trust special administration, our hospital, now the county hospital, can finally focus on what my constituents and its excellent staff wish to do: deliver top-quality, safe care. I thank the Support Stafford Hospital group and many others for all they have done to get this far. The hospital is now part of the University Hospitals of North Midlands Trust. I believe that this coming together will bring both challenges and benefits. We will see benefits through increased investment in A and E, cancer and dialysis services, and refurbished wards and theatres, but the challenge will be to ensure that the trust makes best use of the county hospital for my constituents and others. The hospital is a tremendous asset, and our community campaign has managed to save its A and E and acute status and even to save it from closure, which some people feared might happen.

As we debated this morning, there is great pressure on A and E everywhere. In Stafford, we have a much improved A and E that is open 14 hours a day. Increasing that back up to 24 hours a day with paediatric cover will bring great benefits both to Stafford and the rest of the region, where hospitals are under pressure. The proposal for an overnight, doctor-led service at the county hospital from April is welcome and will help, but I will continue to argue for a return to 24/7 A and E until it happens, because it makes absolute sense and the cost is manageable.

[Mr Simon Burns]

My hon. Friend is being somewhat modest, because he omits to mention the tremendous work he has done for the hospital ever since he became a candidate. We should also mention the work of our hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash).

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend for his comments. He was a doughty supporter as a Minister in the Department of Health, which we appreciated greatly.

A 24/7 A and E department would guarantee 24/7 access for children to paediatric emergency doctors. In the meantime, I and my constituents need assurances that any transfer of services will not happen unless independent experts say that the arrangements are safe.

Next year will see the review into consultant-led maternity services. Let me be clear: this must be properly carried out, as the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary have said. There can be no pre-ordained outcome. I have still heard no convincing explanation why our major European neighbours can run much smaller consultant-led units but we cannot, especially when, as with our county hospital, a hospital is part of a large trust that could surely provide such services on a network basis.

Our part of Staffordshire is tendering for cancer and end-of-life services. I understand the reasoning—a desire to integrate the services better to improve care and outcomes—but, as I have said before, I believe that this form of tender is not the right way to go about things. If there is a need for an integrator to help better joint working, let us search for an organisation to work alongside the providers; there is no need for the integrator to be the commissioner as well. It will simply add another layer of management. I therefore urge the Department, NHS England, Macmillan, which is involved, and the clinical commissioning groups to reconsider my proposal for an integrator that helps providers to work better together but does not actually commission the services.

Our libraries are at the heart of many of our local communities. Staffordshire has had a consultation on their future, and I welcome the county’s desire to keep all its libraries open, but the initial proposals for my constituency are flawed. The main towns in the county should all have a library in the top category—“library extra”. I simply cannot understand how Stafford and Cannock were not placed in this category, but Newcastle-under-Lyme, Burton, Lichfield and Tamworth were. That needs correcting. Penkridge is also a large and thriving community with an excellent library. As stated in the petition I presented here last week, it needs professional staffing—assisted, of course, by the volunteers who are very willing to support it. The other libraries in my constituency in Rising Brook and Holmcroft also need the support of professional staff.

Let me turn to other matters concerning my constituents. Nuisance telephone calls and copycat websites that pretend to be official, but charge people money unnecessarily are the bane of many constituents’ lives. I urge the Government to mount an education campaign to alert people to the free services and to work with search engines to ensure that the free Government services are always top of the listing.

Respite care funding is another issue. This Government have introduced more of it, which I welcome, but there is increasing need for people to have respite care. The millions of carers around the country depend on it.

I welcome the steps that the Minister for Schools has taken to improve schools funding for the underfunded counties and authorities around the country. In Staffordshire, however, we have not gone far enough, and there is a problem with the formula under which special care funding is calculated. I welcome the fact that the Minister has now included the county of Staffordshire within the 10 authorities where that is being investigated. General practice and health funding need looking at, too. The weighting of funding for older people is not sufficient, which certainly affects my constituency and my county.

Constituents have raised a number of other matters, often relating to older people and their treatment by pension funds and their tax treatment. A widow who had been married to a policeman who died in the course of his service has found that, having married again, she is not able to collect her pension. There seems to be some confusion about whether that should be the case. I have been told that it should not be under new regulations, but her experience is that she is unable to receive her widow’s pension.

I discovered last week from a constituent whose husband died more than 50 years ago—and she has not remarried—that she is not entitled to the transferable inheritance tax allowance on her property, whereas someone whose spouse had died more recently would be entitled to that transferable allowance on the estate. The estate effectively claims on both spouses, the original and the current, making two allowances. I believe that this amounts to some sort of age discrimination, which the Treasury could look into.

I would like to bring to the attention of the Department of Health the matter of retrospective care refunds. There was a problem a few years ago when families were overcharged for care. A process of refunding is going on, but it is taking too long, with bureaucratic hurdles in the way. I ask the Department of Health to look into this and to work with CCGs to ensure that the refunds, many of them dating back as far as 2006 and 2007, are given to the people to whom they are owed.

Finally, I would like to thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for all the work you do and to wish you a very happy Christmas. I would like to thank all the staff and everybody in my constituency. I thank the voluntary organisations, and then there are local councillors, to whom we do not often give enough credit. This year, when the Staffordshire mayoralty is 400 years old, it is particularly important to remember local councillors and the work they do, alongside volunteers and everybody else who makes my constituency such a wonderful place in which to work and to live.