National Health Service

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Speeches of up to eight minutes would be helpful if we are to try to get everybody in—do not worry, you did very well, Paul.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Burnham]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I have always to correct the record when these statements are made. I apologise for delaying the House, but I am going to carry on doing it. I did not put it out to tender; it was a process I inherited, and in the middle of that process I changed the policy from “any willing provider” to “NHS preferred provider”. Contrary to what the Secretary of State said at the Dispatch Box, NHS Peterborough and Stamford was still in the race.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

You have certainly corrected that. It is a point of correction, rather than a point of order. It is all on the record now and everyone can continue. Let us see whether we can turn the heat down a bit.

[Sir Oliver Heald]

Further to that point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I just do not accept the point of order that the shadow Secretary of State has made. May I just—

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. No—I said straight away that it was not a point of order, but a point of correction. The point is that it is all on the record for people to read tomorrow, to continue a debate on who is right and who is wrong. Both parties, quite rightly, have stated what their belief is. Mr David T.C. Davies has not much time to go and I am very worried that he will not get to the end of his speech. He has only eight minutes in total.

[David T. C. Davies]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am grateful, because I want to talk about quite a few other things. We did not hear very much about waiting time comparisons, but of course the waiting times in England and Wales are very different. In Wales, people wait at least 26 weeks, with 14,745 having been waiting for more than nine months for treatment; in England, people wait about 18 weeks. One hundred and fifty people have died in Wales waiting for cardiac surgery.

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[Rehman Chishti]

I pay tribute to the work my hon. Friend does in his constituency. I often see it on Facebook and read about it on the internet. He is a tireless campaigner for the health service in his constituency. He mentioned the A and E in his constituency. A linked issue is that of resources. In my constituency, £13.4 million has just been invested in resources for the A and E department—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I do not want such long interventions. If the hon. Gentleman wishes to speak, we can always put him on the list. If he wants, he can save something for later.

[Stephen McPartland]

My hon. Friend makes a fantastic point, and he is a fantastic campaigner, too. I am sure that that money would not have arrived without a huge effort on his part.

The Leader of the Opposition was in my constituency last week, and we were grateful to him for his visit. He came and celebrated the £150 million investment that I had secured for my hospital. He can come as much as he likes, because I got more donations, supporters and volunteers from his visit. Perhaps he could come on a weekly basis. Incidentally, let me talk about the Lister treatment centre, which the right hon. Gentleman visited. It was privatised under the previous Government. I ran an 18-month campaign to have this private facility returned to the NHS, and I succeeded. I am probably the only Tory MP in history who has managed to renationalise a part of the NHS that had been privatised under a Labour Government. I worked very hard on that campaign, but it was lonely work. The local Labour council did not back me; the local Labour candidate did not back me; the Labour shadow Secretary of State did not back me; the Leader of the Opposition did not back me; but the GMB union did and for that I am very grateful.

Three people died in that facility and 8,500 patients’ records were lost. It was a complete and utter shambles. Clinicenta Carillion, the organisation that was responsible for running that facility, destroyed the lives of thousands of people in Hertfordshire; that must never be repeated. That is what we talk about when we talk about the NHS. Who did I stand up for? I stood up for the patients, for the staff and for their families. Where did I get my information from? From members of staff who were working in that facility daily, under huge pressure, suffering and working as hard as they could to provide the best service they could. They could not do it, because their hands were tied behind their back—the contract was so bad. The local hospital was not even allowed sight of the contract until it was signed, sealed and delivered by the previous Government. They did not even know what they were being signed up to, which is a disgrace. I am proud of my hospital and the staff who work in it, but we must always remember that, at the end of the day, these are human beings, who are working incredibly hard to deliver real improvements in services.

Fortunately, that facility is being handed back to my local hospital. The Secretary of State for Health worked with me. He allowed me to come and see him, and we had a variety of meetings. I argued with the Care Quality Commission. I was very lonely throughout that campaign, but at the end of the day the Secretary of State worked with me and he nationalised that private facility, which the previous Government—disgracefully—privatised. I am proud of the Secretary of State, and I am only sorry that he is not in his place, because I wanted him to come and open one of our wonderful new facilities in February. The Prime Minister can come in March.

The facility that I was discussing got so bad that GPs lost confidence and wrote to each other saying, “Do not refer patients to this facility or you will put them at risk.” The CQC started proceedings to revoke the licence. That facility was falling apart—a facility that was privatised by the previous Government. It was nationalised by the Conservatives.

So I am proud of the NHS and proud of the staff who work in it. I am proud of the £150 million development in my constituency, which is making my hospital one of the most modern facilities in the UK. I am disgusted that the Leader of the Opposition wants to weaponise our local NHS and never once backed my campaign to bring that shameful private contract back to the NHS. The Labour party should apologise to my local community for playing Russian roulette with our local health service and politics with my constituents and patient safety.

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[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

I am in no turmoil whatever. I will be walking through the Lobby with pride behind my hon. Friends. We cannot know exactly how much a mansion tax, if levied, would raise towards the national health service. What we do know is that the British people who want to save the national health service from the depredations of Government Members have to vote Labour. We have to vote for my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) to become Secretary of State for Health—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. We do not need a statement; we have got the message.

[Mr Burns]

In conclusion, it is sad that the hon. Lady has completely undermined the case and the costings of the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham). I have no doubt that when she has swallowed her pride and gone through the Lobby today, she will battle as hard as she is renowned for battling and will hit the leader of her party over the head to try to get him to see common sense and abandon this ridiculous policy that she also thinks is ridiculous.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. I have tried to work within the spirit of the previous announcement, but I think the time has come to introduce the eight-minute limit.

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[Angela Smith]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and I am really sorry to hear of the cases she raises. The situation really does need to be sorted out, because the Yorkshire ambulance trust goes on to say that

“the service was experiencing a high level of demand in the South Yorkshire area around the time of Mr Bailey’s incident. Overall, demand was 12% above predicted levels and the level of ‘Red’ call demand was 55% above predicted levels…Rising demand on all health care resources continues which requires changes to deliver improvements in urgent and emergency care.”

I shall say no more about Mr Bailey’s case because it will be referred elsewhere and it may well go to law—I have simply set out the facts of the case as they have been put to me—but the point is this: why are we experiencing these problems with response times in the ambulance service? Why are we hearing, week after week in Prime Minister’s questions and on the Floor of the House in other debates, that the ambulance service is letting people down—even in the most serious cases, when people are going into cardiac arrest or having a major stroke?

We need to establish the reasons, and I suggest that there are three obvious ones. There may be more—there may be problems with the management of ambulance services, and in many cases there clearly is a problem in the case of YAS—but I would suggest that there are three obvious problems. One problem is the increasing difficulty that people have in getting access to GPs’ surgeries. The evidence was laid before the people present for this debate earlier, by the shadow Secretary of State, so I will not go through it again.

Secondly, there has been the closure of NHS Direct and the establishment of NHS 111. There is no way that NHS 111 can be compared with NHS Direct; it is like comparing apples and pears. I have used NHS Direct in the past. It was a superb service that enabled me to decide which was the appropriate place to go to for my treatment and to get the right treatment at the right time. I can assure hon. Members that the one place I did not end up, having used NHS Direct, was A and E—that would have been the last place I had to go to.

Thirdly, social care cuts represent one of the most fundamental problems of our time. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) said, £1 in every £10 has already been cut from social care budgets. It is obvious, even to the most disinterested observers of the debate on health, that cutting social care budgets at local authority level will ultimately impact on the health service. I was in local government for 10 years, and I saw for myself the importance of the local authority and the local NHS working together to enable elderly people to stay in their own homes and to keep them out of the health system—the acute health system, in particular—as much as possible.

The shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), outlined what needs to be done in the very long term, strategically, to get the NHS in the right shape. He also outlined the more immediate actions that a Labour Government would have to take if they gained power in May: providing more clinically trained staff to handle NHS 111 calls; restoring the GP guarantee of an appointment within 48 hours; and ensuring that councils, the NHS and the local voluntary sector work together to identify older people at the highest risk of hospital admission and link them up with the right support. I cannot wait for 8 May to see that strategy for the short term being put in place.

Ambulance services are crucial to the trust that people have, and need to have, in their local health services. One can broadly measure the trust that people have in their local health service by how much they can rely on their ambulances. Everybody likes to think that if they need an ambulance they will get one, and get it quickly. I was disappointed this afternoon that the Prime Minister used my question to indulge in petty political point-scoring. These issues are too serious for that. He did not even express sympathy for the family affected and instead made a cheap point about NHS staff. That was disgraceful. It is not good enough, and it is not good enough—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order.