Business of the House

John Hayes Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

You know, I must say to the Leader of the House, I always thought that the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) was very content in his existing role as Scottish National party shadow Leader of the House and as a magnificent practitioner on the keyboards in that illustrious parliamentary rock band, MP4, which it has been my great privilege to host in Speaker’s House and which has performed with panache and aplomb in the Buckingham parliamentary constituency, but obviously his ambitions extend further.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Like Members across this Chamber, I hold regular surgeries at which I try to give advice and assistance to constituents on any number of sensitive, emotionally charged, and for them, very often, vital, life-changing issues. So it is with GPs. For all of our lifetimes, we have gone to see doctors, sometimes in very harrowing circumstances, sometimes for minor conditions—but no longer, it seems. We are now being told that rather than that kind of personal and very private interface with a real person, we are going to have a virtual doctor. We are being told to ask Alexa—whoever it, she or he might be. This is a breach of the personal relationship that everyone deserves to have with their local doctor, and it has been described by one critic as a

“data protection disaster waiting to happen”.

Patients’ groups, doctors and privacy campaigners have said that this is a bad idea, and once the Secretary of State for Health thought so too—he said that we needed to preserve the “essential humanity” of that relationship. Now he says that we should embrace the technology of the information age. Well, T. S. Eliot said:

“Where is the wisdom...lost in information?”

He might say now, “Where is the wisdom lost in Government?”