Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Joan Ryan and Ben Gummer(7 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Ben Gummer
The Government Digital Service has a specific programme to ensure that there is full access to Government digital services for all groups. Of course, by ensuring that we have good broadband connections in constituencies such as my hon. Friend’s we will enable people to access those services online in rural areas.
Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)
The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Ben Gummer)
The Cabinet Office is the centre of Government. The Department is responsible for delivering a democracy that works for everyone, supporting the design and delivery of Government policy and driving efficiencies and reforms to make government work better.
Joan Ryan
Will the Minister provide an update on any progress in the Prime Minister’s audit to tackle racial disparities? As so much is already known about the devastating consequences of these disparities, should not the Government be getting on with doing a great deal more about them now rather than waiting for an audit?
Ben Gummer
I find the right hon. Lady’s comments surprising. It was this Government and this Prime Minister who commissioned the racial disparity audit. When the right hon. Lady was in power, her party had 13 years to do that, but did not. I am proud of what the Prime Minister has done. We have committed to publishing the audit in the next few months, and the right hon. Lady will be excited by the possibilities it presents to make things better for everyone in the country.
North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust
Debate between Joan Ryan and Ben Gummer(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Ben Gummer
Ideally, if things are going wrong and that has been noted within the hospital, the hospital chief executive or commissioners should inform local people, but in the past—and over the two and a half to three years since we instituted the special measures regime—it has taken a Care Quality Commission investigation to highlight poor standards of care so inadequate that the hospital needs to be placed under special measures. At that point, before the public are informed, Members of Parliament are informed by the CQC and what was Monitor and the Trust Development Authority, but is now NHS Improvement.
Ben Gummer
Before I take the right hon. Lady’s intervention, I will explain why Members were not informed, and it is by no means an excuse. The core problem around emergency medicine and paediatrics was to do with the training places and the relationship between the General Medical Council, which looks at and regulates the quality of training, Health Education England and NHS Improvement. Because this case did not go through the traditional special measures route, which is governed by the CQC and NHS Improvement, things did not happen at the pace I would have expected and nor were Members talked to when they should have been.
The first thing I want to ensure, once we have receipt of the review I asked for this morning, is that we have a similar standard approach, were this to happen again. We have to assume that it might, because things in a large system do go wrong. We need to learn from this scenario over the past year, where Members have been let down, and ensure that it does not happen again. We can move with greater celerity and ensure that Members are informed at the earliest possible opportunity.