NHS Backlog

Lewis Atkinson Excerpts

Monday 6th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Gregory Stafford (Farnham and Bordon) (Con)]

I welcome this debate, although we have had a number of health debates over the past few sitting days that have crystallised the real problem that we see in the NHS. It is stark that none of the Government Members have mentioned covid thus far and its massive impact. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Carlisle (Ms Minns) is pointing at herself; she might have mentioned it, but she did not set out the absolute devastation that covid wreaked on our services.

Before I came to the House, I worked for the Getting It Right First Time programme, an NHS England programme that was initially funded by my right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash (Jeremy Hunt) when he was Health Secretary, and again when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. The programme made a significant difference in getting rid of “unwarranted variation” within the NHS, because while there is some amazing service, treatment and patient care in the NHS, we have to admit that there is also some poor and inefficient patient care.

The Getting It Right First Time programme tried to improve patient care and ensure that the worst-performing trusts were brought up to the level of the best-performing trusts; I hope that the programme will continue to try to achieve that under the current Government. Areas for improvement include high-volume, low-complexity work, such as cataract, hip and knee operations. There are massive backlogs of such procedures in the NHS that could be cleared if some failing trusts reached the level not of the top-performing trusts, but of the top quartile, or the top 10%.

[Lewis Atkinson (Sunderland Central) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman worked in the NHS before covid, as did I. He mentions the impact of covid, but does he not recall that in December 2019, before covid hit, standards had already fallen, and only 84% of patients were being treated within the 18 week target? Why was that allowed to happen under the previous Government?

[Gregory Stafford]

I accept that the pressure on the NHS went way beyond covid, as the hon. Gentleman will remember, but to use the Secretary of State’s term, covid was the point at which the NHS was “broken”, and it is taking a long time to recover.

The Government are right to push for more localised services, and to bring services closer to the patient. Access to GPs is a fundamental part of that, but we know that GPs are overstretched. The previous Government really pushed Pharmacy First, which was a superb programme. This Government want to go further with it, but there are disincentives for general practitioners to embrace Pharmacy First. What will Ministers do to ensure that there is no financial disincentive to work with pharmacies? If we are to deal with the backlog, there has to be a financial incentive.

What was concerning about today’s statement from the Secretary of State was the lack of genuine reform. There was a lot of rehashing of previous policies, perhaps eking them out a tad further than the previous Conservative Government did, but I think the Secretary of State himself said that if anyone is able to reform the NHS, it is a Labour Government. While I was quite interested in what he was saying as shadow Secretary of State, I have been deeply disappointed by what he has said since. It appears to me that unfortunately the union paymasters and the inertia in the NHS have captured him and his Front Bench. I hope that I am wrong, and that the Minister will tell me differently this evening, but that is what I have seen.

Locally, the reality is that there is a problem with being able to bring services closer to home. My hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) mentioned the problem of accountability for ICBs. I have the fortune, or misfortune, depending on how one looks at it, of having three ICBs in my constituency. To use a previously mentioned term, there is a lot of unwarranted variation in how they deal with my constituents, and with me as a Member of Parliament. A big issue in Bordon is that we want a brand new surgery in the area, but there has been no conversation with the ICB about how that might go ahead. Likewise, we are really keen for Haslemere hospital to move from being a district hospital to having an urgent treatment centre. It is vital that we get that moving. The community hospital in Farnham could also be somewhere treatment is done closer to home. I urge the Government not to sit back, but to use their majority and reform the NHS for the benefit of all our constituents.