Building an NHS Fit for the Future

Justin Madders Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2023 Commons Chamber

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

The lack of a comprehensive Government programme was borne out by our experiences over the previous Session, in which business finished before the end of the sitting day on 100 occasions, or 47% of the time. That amounted to 134 hours of parliamentary time left unused. Even now in the debate on the Humble Address, the Government have run out of speakers on their side of the Chamber yet again. That has happened every day so far. They also seem to be running out of people on the Government Benches to put in their own Cabinet.

It is hard to escape the feeling that this is a Government who have run out of steam. Indeed, what kind of shambles of a Government decide to conduct a full reshuffle in the middle of the debate on the King’s Speech? Presumably, Departments have been working for some time on plans for the legislative programme. To change the political leadership in those Departments just six days after that programme was announced smacks of a rudderless ship lurching from one crisis to the next. It is like a football team sacking its manager on the morning of the FA cup final. We really can do better than this.

Nothing sums up the failure more than the fact that the biggest omission from the Humble Address is the lack of anything to deal with the cost of living. Inflation may be coming down but it is still far too high and the long tail of its impact will be felt for possibly years to come through higher mortgage payments and rental costs. Food inflation has been running at 15% for much of the year, and every item of household expenditure has gone up this year. Maybe we will see something in the autumn statement next week—whoever is in charge of the Treasury at that point.

We need to see something. The Trussell Trust has given out some 1.5 million food parcels in the past six months. I can just about remember a time when food banks were the exception; now they appear to be the norm. Far too many families have to rely on some form of support on a permanent basis and the growth of food banks continues unabated. Although I commend and thank the volunteers for all their help, when are we going to get down to tackling the serious issue of why food banks exist in the first place?

In the past week or so, I have been visiting schools in my constituency as part of Parliament Week. One thing that I discuss with the children is what issues they want to see us dealing with in here, and one of the issues they raised was the cost of living. It is normally litter, animals or play areas that come up, but not this time. With wages going only as far as they did 16 years ago, and at a time when inflation has been so consistently high, it is no wonder that everything has become unsustainable. The Office for Budget Responsibility found that wages are not set to recover to the same real level until 2026, and estimates that the average worker in 2022 would have been £233 a week better off had wages continued to grow at pre-2008 levels. Those statistics bear out what the children have been telling me. It is about time that the Government acted and listened.

The NHS’s founding principle that everyone is entitled to care, free at the point of use and on the basis of need, is one of our proudest achievements. It provides assurance that everyone can access some of the best healthcare in the world, but that principle is now at risk. Look what we are witnessing at the moment: a record high waiting list of 7.7 million; 391,000 patients waiting more than a year for treatment; and cancer targets being consistently missed. The number of patients waiting for more than 12 hours from a decision to admission stood at more than 44,000 last month; that is 64 times higher than it was in October 2019, which is an incredible deterioration in just four years. But it is even worse compared with when Labour was last in office, when the number of people waiting for more than 12 hours was non-existent.

It is clear to everyone that the NHS is in the midst of the biggest crisis in its history, but unfortunately the issues were completely bypassed in the King’s Speech. What is worse, my local NHS is being asked to find 5% cuts from its services. Goodness knows where it will find that from—and we have not even talked about the crisis in social care—yet we hear about trusts having to ask volunteers for redundancies. Why is that happening when we have more than 100,000 vacancies in the NHS?

The Government’s record on homes is no better. The amount of people we see in our constituency offices who have nowhere to call home is growing to an unprecedented number. The lack of progress on building new homes, especially genuinely affordable housing, along with the crippling rise in interest rates, the failure to tackle the private housing sector and the continuing giveaways of right to buy, all combine to leave us with the worst housing crisis in memory and an inevitable increase in rough sleeping.

In the first six months of 2023, my local council had 6,000 housing applications, compared with 7,000 for the whole of the previous year. Part of this is down to section 21 notices, which still have not been ended, but it is also about the affordability of private rents, with the local housing allowance rates being frozen year after year. It is a shame that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has just left the Chamber because I really wanted him to hear about that.

It seemed that someone in the Government had noticed an increase in rough sleeping, because before the King’s Speech a proposal was trailed to end the plight of homelessness. Instead, though, it would have criminalised those who want to help people with tents and other forms of shelter. Thankfully those measures did not appear in the final speech, but those comments have had an impact. I am hearing stories of people having their tents stolen, and it reminds us that comments from people in important positions have an impact. We have all seen the consequences of that over this past weekend.

On a positive note, the leasehold and freehold Bill is a good start, but it does not go far enough. In particular, the suggestion that the new rules will not apply to flats is a disappointment. On the proposal to cap ground rents at peppercorn, I had the opportunity last week to ask the former Housing Minister, the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), whether she agreed that ground rents had no place in a modern world. While she did agree, it worries me that there will be a consultation on ground rents before any legislation is introduced, and that will give the freehold industry another opportunity to keep its lucrative income stream going. I have already seen comments from those protecting vested interests, or their lawyers, saying that capping ground rents at peppercorn cannot possibly happen as it was a fairly agreed contract, and surely the leaseholders knew what they were signing up to. Well, we have spent many hours in this place debunking that theory, and I am sure that the Competition and Markets Authority would also have something to say about that. Of course, we have another new Housing Minister, so we will see whether we do see that reform.

In conclusion, this is a pathetic offering from a Prime Minister insisting that he is the voice of change, even though he is now bringing in the cheerleader of austerity from the previous decade. It is one last desperate roll of the dice from a Government who have run out of ideas and just about run out of road. Every aspect of life has got worse during these past 13 years. With this Government, it feels like decline is inevitable. It does not have to be this way, which is why we should have a general election straightaway.