Building an NHS Fit for the Future

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

My constituents in Nottingham South are deeply disappointed by the thin offering of Bills promised by the Prime Minister for the last year of this Parliament before he finally lets them have a vote on his unelected Government’s dismal record. The legislative affairs team at Downing Street should be applauded for inserting the Automated Vehicles Bill—a Bill about driverless cars—into the speech. Perhaps there is a telling allusion to the absence of leadership behind the great wheel of state at 10 Downing Street.

This Mr Micawber-esque King’s Speech offers precious little change from the past 13 years of the Tories’ mismanaged decline of our country. The only hope emanating from it is the desperate hope coming from the Prime Minister that something might turn up to save his sinking premiership, but, then again, perhaps he has already given up. After all, he seems more interested in interviewing big tech billionaires with a view to a new job in 2025 than rolling up his sleeves and addressing the many challenges facing our country.

When the Prime Minister replaced his short-lived predecessor, he promised to get Britain back to its salad days. Instead, the state of our country now more resembles that of last year’s ill-fated lettuce. This dereliction of public duty is most evident in the stark decline of our national health service, which is already under immense pressure as we enter yet another difficult winter season. My local hospital was forced to declare a critical incident in October. How much worse will things be come January?

Just as the electorate and the Opposition are eagerly waiting for the Prime Minister to call an election, an unprecedented number of people are waiting to be seen by our NHS because of this Conservative Government’s neglect. When the Prime Minister entered 10 Downing Street last year, he pledged to cut NHS waiting lists, yet just last month, and despite the incredible efforts of hard-pressed staff, they rose to a record high of 7.75 million. One in seven people in England are waiting for treatment.

In Nottinghamshire there are still around 60 patients who have been waiting more than 18 months for a procedure, and 1,200 patients who have been waiting for more than 15 months—waiting with their lives on hold, worried and often in pain and discomfort. For some it is worse, because for too many that waiting will have a profound effect on the outcome. The Public Accounts Committee’s finding that waiting times for patients suffering from cancer are at their worst recorded level is hugely concerning.

Many Members of this House will, like me, have received often heartrending testimony from constituents whose families have spent hours waiting for an overwhelmed ambulance crew to arrive to help them in their time of need, waiting in an ambulance outside an overwhelmed emergency department, waiting in overstretched emergency departments in pain and distress, waiting on a trolley in a corridor to be admitted to a ward, waiting for a social care package to be in place so they can leave hospital, or waiting weeks for an appointment just to see their family GP. We have all been waiting 13 long years for the Tories to sort out the growing NHS staff shortage, which is at the heart of many of the issues afflicting our health service.

As a result of the Tories’ inaction, our NHS is now short of 125,000 much-needed staff. That is the population of a small city, and those chronic shortages are leading to all-too-predictable delays in diagnosis and treatment, despite the fact that working people are paying the highest levels of taxation since the end of world war two. We are all paying more and getting less. In many other walks of life that would be deemed a breach of contract. It is therefore no surprise that public satisfaction with the NHS has fallen to its lowest level since 1997. The public, and NHS staff, deserve so much better than this Government.

We have also been waiting for a reformed mental health Act. I have been contacted in recent days by constituents shocked that despite promising to do so in their 2019 election manifesto and, as I mentioned, also promising to do so in their 2017 manifesto, the Conservatives have now refused to introduce a replacement Bill before the next general election. I know that health professionals and the public are rightly concerned that the Mental Health Act 1983 is outdated and that reform is required so that our NHS can treat people with greater effectiveness and dignity, while also giving them greater control over their treatment.

During his failed Tory leadership bid last summer, the Prime Minister also promised a plan to restore NHS dentistry and a review of dentists’ contractual arrangements and incentives. The sad reality is that I am surely not the only Member in this House to receive a depressingly regular number of letters from constituents who are angry that they have been waiting for years to register with an NHS dentist, let alone see one. Research has found that an estimated 4 million people cannot access NHS dental care and cannot afford to go private either. We have heard about DIY dentistry, tooth decay putting children in hospital and increasing levels of oral cancer.

Again, that is a crisis of the Tories’ making. What did they expect when they cut funding for dental services in England by 8% in real terms since 2010? I know the Prime Minister wants everyone to learn maths until the age of 18, but they did not need to be Pythagoras to work out that that would lead to droves of dentists quitting and many remaining NHS practices not taking on new patients, creating so-called dental deserts. After waiting a year for the Prime Minister to implement his plan to save NHS dentistry, the British Dental Association stated that there are still

“no new dentists, no new contract and no new money.”

All this waiting would have tested even the patience of Vladimir and Estragon to breaking point. This King’s Speech has shown that the Conservatives have no plan to keep staff working in the NHS, no plan to cut waiting lists and no plan to reform our health service. The Government are more focused on in-fighting and waiting in the vain hope of something better turning up.

Only the Labour party has the ideas and the ambition to save our NHS, restore the vital services it provides us all, and reform it so that it is ready to face future challenges. We are the party with a mission and a 10-year plan to change and modernise our NHS by training more doctors, nurses and health visitors, to lower waiting times, and to raise standards for patients. We will provide 2 million more appointments by paying staff extra to work evenings and weekends, paid for by abolishing the non-dom tax status. We will take the hard decisions to tackle finally the problems with the NHS dental contract so that it properly delivers for patients and staff. And it is Labour that will introduce a new NHS standard that guarantees everyone in England the right to treatment for their mental health within a month, and will back up that commitment by recruiting more than 8,500 mental health professionals to provide support in every school and set up mental health hubs in every community.

The public are rightly fed up of waiting for a change, and the Labour party wholeheartedly agrees with them, not just on health, but on all my constituents’ priorities: help with the cost of living, help creating good jobs, tackling crime and antisocial behaviour, reducing homelessness, ending child poverty and giving every child the opportunities they need to thrive, cutting energy bills, and reaching net zero. We, the Labour party, will give the public the change that they want and cut the waiting.