NHS Funding Bill

Jo Gideon Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 27th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jo Gideon (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Con)]

I am delighted to contribute to this important debate.

I made several key commitments to the people of Stoke-on-Trent Central, not the least being that we would get Brexit done in order to get our money out of Brussels and into our NHS. We will meet the first part of that commitment on Friday, when, finally, we will honour the referendum result and leave the EU. The second part of the commitment requires us to pass this Bill.

Only a year has passed since the publication of the NHS long-term plan, and I am delighted that we are close to enshrining in law its commitment to ensuring financial sustainability. The plan sets out how the NHS will be taken forward in the coming decade, and it includes a hugely welcome commitment to more integrated care and a greater focus on prevention. Our NHS can be trusted to care and cure to the best of its ability, but if we can help people to avoid being hospitalised and to avoid falling ill, it will be a win-win all round. Particularly important for Stoke-on-Trent is the promise to target a higher share of funding towards geographies with high health inequalities, and to increase investment in primary medical and community health services as a share of the total NHS revenue spend.

One thing that I particularly want to highlight in the long-term plan is the commitment to ensuring that adult social care funding does not impose any additional pressure on the NHS, and that the NHS funding settlement that we are debating tonight takes that pledge into account. We really need, across the House, to work constructively to find future solutions to the pressing needs for adult social care, needs that are increasing as we live longer. We must welcome the fact that we now live longer, and meet that challenge.

I do not think that I will be alone in pushing the Treasury to reassert itself as an active partner by proving more generous than any of us has so far been led to expect; and, of course, I will still be keen to see the necessary capital resources available for improved and relevant health provision in Stoke-on-Trent. For instance, there is a need for building work at Royal Stoke University Hospital to improve the patient experience and the efficiency of care. The current hospital, in part, dates back to 1842, and has developed over that time as a pretty disparate set of buildings scattered across the site. To optimise the provision of acute beds, investment is needed in rationalising the campus.

I was grateful for the Prime Minister’s announcement of capital funding for three new wards and scores of beds last August, but there is still more to be done. The Secretary of State was recently a welcome visitor to the Royal Stoke, and he will know that it is a wonderful hospital with superb, hard-working staff, but he will also know that it operates under a cloud of financial problems stemming from the PFI deal it was lumbered with by the Labour party. The financial consequences have forced the trust into special measures, with sanctions being applied that it cannot afford. I say to those on the Front Bench that a review of the sanctions placed on trusts that are clearly working to exit financial special measures would be welcome. I certainly applaud the Department for working with the trust to eliminate the deficit in this financial year, but I would be grateful if my hon. Friend the Minister confirmed that the Department is actively looking at the genesis of this story—the sorry situation at the Royal Stoke as a result of Labour’s shoddy PFI deal—so that it might finally be resolved.

In conclusion, this is a Government who get things done and who get things done for a purpose. After years of uncertainty for our public services and businesses, we are getting Brexit done and moving on to the long-term planning needed to meet the challenges of the 2020s. We are showing that, yes, we are getting our money out of Brussels into our NHS. The Bill is a hugely significant step in restoring public faith in our politics, and I shall be proud to support it tonight.