Future of the NHS

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I agree with my hon. Friend that the shadow Health Secretary is a decent man, and at the turn of the year he quite decently expressed his support for the Bill’s principles and his understanding that it was consistent, coherent and comprehensive. It makes one wonder what happened to him in the interim. Did the trade unions—the paymasters of the Labour party—get to him and tell him that they did not like the idea that patients should be able to get the care they need or the idea that we should get resources into the front line rather than into the vested interests of the NHS?

What we are going to do is put patient care at the heart of our reforms. We are not going to let hospital productivity continue to decline as it did over the last decade. Under Labour, we saw a 15% decline in productivity, yet we heard nothing from the shadow Health Secretary about that. It is this Government who are taking action to improve hospital performance by changing the way hospitals are paid to reward excellence—for example, by not paying for unnecessary readmissions of patients who are discharged too soon.

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

Hereford hospital is labouring under a very expensive private finance initiative contract. Does my right hon. Friend not think it a tragedy that the last Government cast good sense and good economics away, forcing so many hospitals into PFI?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend makes an important point—that it was under the Labour Government that many of these projects were undertaken, and they are leaving an enormous bill in the NHS for future taxpayers and future NHS organisations to meet. A contract is a contract, as the right hon. Gentleman and the House will understand, and we inherited contracts from the Labour Government, many of which were very bad contracts, such as the ones on IT that we have had to renegotiate. Frankly, it is due to my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Treasury and ourselves at the Department of Health that people have been put into the Queen’s hospital in Romford to look at how we can resolve some of these PFI problems and reduce those costs. We need to increase productivity in the NHS and cut out much of the waste in it.

It is us who will usher a new era of transparency into the NHS, shedding light on those areas that the previous Administration sought to cover up. Before the election, how often were patients having to go into mixed-sex accommodation when the rules on single-sex accommodation were breached? We did not know, because when Labour Members were in government they would not tell us. Since we started publishing the data in December, the number of patients put into mixed-sex accommodation without justification has halved.