Health and Social Care Bill

Jim Dowd Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jim Dowd (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds). Although I do not agree with much of what he said—I certainly do not agree with his rationale for supporting the Bill—he made a few genuine points that, in the calmer atmosphere of a Committee, could be looked at in detail.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the difference between the two Front Benches could hardly be starker. This is about the view of what the national health service should be. I am not disappointed for one moment that the view of the Labour party is different from that of the Conservative party and its followers from the Liberal camp. Much has been made of that great event on 5 July 1948, when the national health service came into being. Of course, at the time, it was ferociously opposed by the Conservative party. At the beginning, it was also opposed by large parts, although not all, of the medical profession.

[Nadine Dorries]

rose—

[Jim Dowd]

I will not give way, for one good reason: I might get injury time for it, but others would lose out.

The medical profession has changed its view, as has the Conservative party. The Conservative party has changed its view largely because the NHS and the principles that underpin it resound so clearly with the British people. This has been a difficulty for the Conservative party over the years.

I have seen a few Conservative party reorganisations of the health service. Thirty-five years ago, I was appointed to the Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham area health authority, which included such hospitals as our local one over the river, St Thomas’s, Guy’s, King’s College and Lewisham. The AHAs were set up as a consequence of the Heath Government’s reforms in the early ’70s. They were abolished, but not before Lord Jenkin suspended the Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham AHA for refusing to accept the cuts in the budgets that the then Government were trying to inflict.

The Tories reorganised the health service again and brought in district health authorities. I served on Lewisham and North Southwark district health authority for some time, until in 1990 I was thrown off for having the temerity to be a local councillor. I am sure that there are others around the Chamber who suffered similarly. Who engineered that amazing transformation? It was none other than the current Secretary of State for Justice. I think that he just sacked anybody who was not on his Christmas card list, quite frankly, because nothing in that reform of the health service did anything to improve its accountability or performance. It did hand over the health service, more than ever, to central control and direction, which, we are asked to believe, the Conservative party today decries so readily.

The Conservative party, of course, contains members who believe—and who go on foreign broadcasting stations to announce—that the national health service is a 60-year-old mistake. That is what was said by an MEP who was advising Republicans in the United States to oppose the Obama reforms. He was slapped down quite quickly, unsurprisingly. It is the great embarrassment of the Conservative party that it cannot reconcile its atavistic feelings towards the health service and belief in the free market with the feelings of the vast majority of the British people.

In recent years, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) pointed out, waiting times for most specialisms have come down almost to the point where they are no longer a consideration. I will tell the House briefly about the experience I had towards the end of 2009. I suffered chest pains of various kinds. I went to A and E at Lewisham hospital on 28 July. I was referred to the chest pain clinic at the same hospital the following week. I went for an angiogram at King’s College hospital two weeks after that, where the consultant advised me that I needed bypass surgery. I asked how long it would take—I did not mean the operation, obviously, but the wait. He said, “When can you come in?” I could not make the first date that I was offered, so I had to put it back. My experience was repeated millions of times across this country when the Labour party had stewardship of the NHS. It is that relationship that is so critically under attack.

The NHS is about patients—of course it is. Everybody knows that patients come first and that it must be patient-centred. Those things are meaningless clichés. Patient care and patient choice matter, but what matters more is patient trust. Patients must trust that any therapy, drug or treatment that is suggested by their clinicians and medical advisers is what is best for them—not what is cheapest or what has been contracted for. It is that critical, basic relationship in the national health service that is most under threat from this Bill and that Government.