Income Tax (Charge)

Lisa Smart Excerpts

Monday 4th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

My constituents will have been listening to the Chancellor last week and hoping for some specifics on new money for our hospital. Stepping Hill remains the No. 1 concern raised with me in my inbox and on the doorstep. It has a reported repairs backlog of more than £130 million, which is a sad legacy of the last failed Government. We have seen buildings having to be knocked down because they were no longer safe. We have video footage of medics having to wade through flooded corridors because of burst pipes, and within the past fortnight a couple have shared photos with me of a light fitting that fell from the ceiling in the delivery suite during active labour, only minutes before the baby arrived. We were disappointed to get a letter from the Minister for Secondary Care, the hon. Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth), in the past couple of weeks to say that the Government were unable to commit the funding needed to fix the problem. We have had some encouraging indications from the Chancellor about funding, but there is a lack of clarity on what this Budget means for Stepping Hill.

Our health and social care system is in crisis. We need to ensure that everyone can see a GP within seven days and that we support our hospices and fund dental services, and we should not subject GPs, hospices and dentists to a substantial tax rise, as the Budget has done. We need to prevent people from needing to go into hospital in the first place and enable them to leave when they are medically fit to do so, rather than have them waiting on a ward for far too long for a social care placement to be sorted for them. Real action on social care is essential, because without it, the NHS crisis will not end. I encourage the Government to urgently start cross-party talks to make social care sustainable.

As the Lib Dem home affairs spokesperson, I was hoping to hear more about proper community and neighbourhood policing. If I had had another couple of minutes, I would have made an incisive point about bus fares.