NHS

John Glen Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I will put forward a solution that the hon. Gentleman might support. I think he supported the campaign to oppose the Government’s Health and Social Care Bill, and I pay credit to him for that as we worked across party lines on that issue. It is my job to hold the Government to account where there are problems in the national health service, and if the Minister is saying to me that there are no problems in the health service right now, I am afraid I do not agree with him. Emergency services are under intense pressure. If he looks back to our time in government, as he invited me to do, he will see that the winter crisis was a regular feature at the turn of the millennium and the early years of the last decade, although it got progressively better and better and we did not see the annual winter crisis. Now it is back with a vengeance, although it is different. The winter/spring crisis has become a summer/autumn crisis too. The pressure is relentless and it needs a proper, lasting solution.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

Would the right hon. Gentleman care to reflect on the fact that we now have 350 more A and E consultants in the NHS? Given his commitment to cut the NHS at the last election, if he is going to offer a sensible improvement, where will the money come from? How will he pay for it? That is what the people out there want to understand.

[Andy Burnham]

First, I would be grateful if the hon. Gentleman did not continue to misrepresent what I said on the NHS. I have never said, “Cut the NHS”. I stood at the last election on a commitment to protect the NHS budget in real terms. He stood on a manifesto promising real-terms increases for the NHS. I said that if there were to be increases for the NHS, they should be given to social care instead, and that would have relieved some of the pressures on A and E. Let us have the facts straight.

Secondly, the hon. Gentleman boasts about having enough A and E doctors. Perhaps he should speak to people from the College of Emergency Medicine and hear what they have to say on that subject. They talk of warning the Government of a recruitment crisis in A and E about two or three years ago. They said that they could not get through to Ministers who were obsessed with structural reorganisation. They were left feeling like John the Baptist crying in the wilderness—their words. Perhaps before the hon. Gentleman shouts the odds in the House, he should speak to the people who know about these things and who warned his Government —who failed to act.

One of the major problems with the pressure on A and E is the number of older people trapped in hospital. This is a product of demographic pressure and the ageing society. Nursing staff talk of how, when they first qualified, it was rare to see someone in their 90s on the ward. Now they are there in great numbers and that makes the task of meeting their needs much more complex. When people reach an advanced age it is simply not possible to separate out their physical, social and mental needs. Need becomes a blur of all three. Our hospitals are not geared up to provide the additional mental and social support that very frail elderly people often need.