NHS Funding Bill

Debate between Jonathan Ashworth and Seema Malhotra

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

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, we are short of 44,000 nurses across the whole national health service. One of the most damaging policy decisions that George Osborne made—probably another of the Secretary of State’s ideas—was to cut nurse training places in 2011 and get rid of the training bursary. The Government say that they will bring back a grant, but they are not going to go the whole hog, are they? They are not going to get rid of tuition fees. They still expect people to train to be nurses and build up huge debts, because the nature of the training that they have to go through means that they will not be able to take a job on the side. I do not believe that is the way we should recruit nurses for the future; we should bring back the whole bursary for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making an important speech and has just made reference to the cuts to capital budgets. Does he agree that it is staggering that since 2014 we have seen five consecutive switches from capital budgets to revenue budgets, totalling about £4.29 billion? The consequences are now being felt by all our constituents throughout the country.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Because of the austerity that the Government have imposed on the NHS, its leaders—trust bosses and clinical commissioning group bosses—have had to raid capital budgets repeatedly and transfer from capital to revenue, as my hon. Friend said. These sorts of smash-and-grab raids, which have happened five times, have taken around £5 billion out of the capital budgets, which is why so many of our hospitals now have this huge £6.6 billion-worth of repair backlog, with sewage pipes bursting and roofs falling in.

It is all very well for the Secretary of State to stand there and talk about 40 new hospitals, even though he has not outlined a multi-year capital settlement at all. He just went around the country telling Tory candidates, who have now become MPs—congratulations to them—that he will build a hospital here and they will have a new hospital there. I lost count of the number of times that he committed to new A&E departments and new hospitals that were not on any list that he has published in the House of Commons. We do not actually have a multi-year capital plan to deal with the more than £6.5 billion backlog that faces our hospitals. This is not a serious way to make policy for the national health service. Our trusts’ chief executives need certainty on capital, which is why we need to see the multibillion-pound capital plan. We do not even know whether we are going to get one in the Budget. We do not know when it is coming: the Secretary of State has given us no detail or clarity on that whatsoever.

Whether it is waiting for pre-planned surgery, for cancer treatment, for test results, in A&E or on trolleys, thousands of our constituents wait longer and longer in pain, agony and distress, thanks to years of austerity that the Secretary of State designed. As George Osborne’s right-hand man and chief bag carrier, he designed the years of austerity and is now asking the House to endorse the continued underfunding of the NHS.