Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

Justin Madders Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

There has already been quite a lot of discussion about waiting lists, but I want to talk about another aspect of the situation. Waiting times for mental health services continue to be chronically oversubscribed, if people are actually deemed ill enough to be referred to them in the first place. If I may, I will give just one example of what that means for the person who is waiting.

I have a constituent who was advised in 2020 that she was displaying signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and emotionally unstable personality disorder. She was accepted on a dialectical behaviour therapy treatment course with a two-year waiting list. Of course, the wait has been exacerbated by covid. However, in the second year of waiting there has been no update whatever from the mental health trust, so my constituent is just left waiting and wondering how much longer it will be before she receives any treatment at all. Of course, as the MP’s office we have been chasing the trust as well, but we have not heard anything either. This is a really appalling way to treat some of the most vulnerable people in our communities.

I join my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) in what she said about dentistry. In my area, waiting lists are in their thousands, with one practice citing a waiting list of more than 3,000 people. One constituent contacted me because of the pain she was experiencing. She described her attempts to register at a practice as a fight, which I think sums up the situation perfectly. In the last six months of 2021, I was contacted by dozens of different constituents, all of whom were contacting me on behalf of their families as well as themselves. It is well documented how challenging the issues dentists face in relation to the unit of dental activity, which does not encourage dentists to take on new patients and accommodates only 50% of the population. That, in effect, means we start from a position where the Government know many people will be denied access to dental care but have consciously and deliberately accepted that their policy will leave many people either forced to carry on in pain or seek treatment from the private sector. The whole system is in desperate need of reform.

Of course, we cannot have a debate on the NHS at the moment without having regard to the impact of covid, but we should not just limit it to covid. People suffering from long covid remain a huge issue. Recent reports suggest that the number of people seeking help for long covid is in the region of 1.8 million—a huge number. It has been reported that some sufferers are waiting so long for help that they are taking advice on buying their own oxygen to help with their breathlessness, while others are seeking advice on accessing private healthcare because they cannot get anything from the NHS. That is the nub of the issue.

The pattern in just about every aspect of healthcare—surgical procedures, mental health support and dental treatment—is that people are finding the system they have paid into all their lives is no longer there for them. The founding principle of universal healthcare free at the point of use, which is supposed to be the bedrock of the NHS, is under threat. That will lead to privatisation by default and we will be all the poorer for that.

I want to say a little bit about the cost of living, because every indicator I see shows that things will get much worse before they get better: interest rates, inflation, energy bills and food bills. We are on the cusp of a tsunami that will send many people under. I will not even start to talk about the complete failure to support British agriculture and get crops planted in the ground, which will cause us problems next year. For many, the point of destitution has already arrived. I am sorry to say that the number of people I see in that situation, because they have already gone through all the emergency assistance agencies and have had their quota for the year, shows me that there is a real problem and that the state is not offering any solutions. Telling people to get a better paid job or work more hours is just patronising nonsense that just shows how out of touch this Government are.

In those circumstances, it is shocking that on the most pressing issue, which requires urgent action—that is, the cost of living—there is nothing in the Queen’s Speech. There is nothing to give families the security they need. I do not see the objection to a windfall tax on North sea oil and gas profits. The clue is in the name: windfall. The companies were not expecting that money, so it cannot be the restraint on investment that some would claim it to be. Such a tax would make a huge difference to my constituents. In my constituency alone, 12,500 families would see £400 off their bills as a result of a windfall tax. We should really continue to push for it.

In the end, we have a whole system where public services are being rowed back. Many constituents see their transport network decaying, public services decaying, local councils starved of resources and town centres closing down. There is so much more we need to address. I am afraid that, for me, the Humble Address fails to do that.