Health and Care Bill

Jon Trickett Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 14th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

The Government’s health strategy is clear: while health demand rises, the amount of resources being provided to the NHS is declining, which leaves well-heeled patients with nowhere else to go to avoid ill health except into the so-called independent sector. For example, a constituent told me that his opticians had said that he could wait six years for cataract operations, by which time he would be nearly blind, or he could pay for a cataract operation now in the private sector.

Even before covid, the Government had cut the health budget and spending. In Britain we were spending £2,000 per head of population less than was being spent in Germany. There were cuts to the numbers of staff and to their pay, 100,000 vacancies, 17,000 fewer hospital beds and over 100 fewer A&E facilities, with hospital waiting lists therefore doubling—even before covid arose—since the end of a Labour Government. The Bill continues all that process, as we would expect. It will make the NHS more remote because it is top-down, and it is a Trojan horse for elements of privatisation.

Newly remote administrators will have little sensitivity to local health requirements. Members should think of the differences in the health needs of former coalfield communities such as those I represent in West Yorkshire, the inner city of Bradford and the relative affluence of Harrogate, yet all that is to be covered by a single new board, and the centralisation of clinical services makes them less accessible. Some 20,000 people are living in my constituency with no car to their households’ name and with poor public transport, many of them with chronic health needs. How on earth will they be expected to travel to centralised services in Leeds or elsewhere under those circumstances?

There are two competing views of health provision facing each other. Either health is about an ethos of care or it is about making money. This Bill leads in one direction. The Government do not want to fund the NHS properly, so they are trying to entice more private money into health, often from sources, we note, from the Tory party. Privatisation puts one person’s wealth in front of another person’s health. We should look at the pages of the American health service providers today salivating at the prospect of growing NHS waiting lists, and now, so-called independent providers are to be invited to sit on boards that actually manage the NHS budgets. The idea of profiteering from someone else’s ill health is repulsive to most British people, yet it is intrinsic to this Bill. We can call it only one thing: parasitic capitalism. Along with the Royal College of Nursing, the British Medical Association and many other practitioners, we must resist the creeping destruction of our NHS.