NHS and Social Care Funding

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point about Wales. As a Member for Cardiff, he understands what is happening in the Welsh health service. I wish Conservative Members understood that better.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I will give way to the right hon. and learned Gentleman, but I will then make some progress.

[Mr Clarke]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that every winter, for as long as I can recall, we have had a winter crisis in the NHS? It usually happens after Christmas. In winter the demands on the service become unpredictable, infections spread and the NHS starts losing staff. There are bound to be parts of the system that come under very real strain, and no one is trying to minimise the fact that they do. Apart from just producing this year’s crop of stories of very unfortunate incidents in various places, does he have any policy proposal at all, apart from simply spending more money wherever the reports are coming from?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I am very grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman, who is a very experienced parliamentarian, for his intervention, but he will know that this is one of the worst winters for probably 20 years. He casually suggests that this happens every year, but I remember the years of a Labour Government when it did not happen. I remember the years of a Labour Government when we went further than the financial settlements he delivered as Chancellor of the Exchequer and were more than doubling the money going into the NHS—and tripling it in cash terms.

Junior Doctors: Industrial Action

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Monday 5th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

The shadow Health Secretary needs to recognise that working people, the people her party claims to represent, need a seven-day NHS. The vulnerable people that Labour claims to represent get admitted to hospital at the weekends, and in industrial disputes patients should always matter more than politics. The next time she meets a constituent who has suffered because of not having a seven-day service or because their operation has been cancelled because of a strike, she and her colleagues should hang their heads in shame.

The hon. Lady has used some very strong words. She used words such as “vilifying” and “demonising” in relation to the junior doctor workforce, and that is a very serious thing to say. I challenge her to find a single piece of evidence that has come from me or anyone in the Government, and if she cannot do so, she needs to withdraw those comments and apologise to the House. The fact is that the single most demoralising thing for the NHS workforce is strikes, because they entrench and harden positions, which results in people getting very angry, and it becomes much harder to find consensus.

The hon. Lady also talked about the use of statistics. She does not have to listen to what I say—and I understand, given the sparring that goes on between us, that she might not want to—but we have had eight academic studies in the past five years that describe increased mortality rates for people admitted to hospitals at weekends. Her response to this, in a phrase she used in another context, was that there was “zero empirical evidence” for a weekend effect. I would caution her on this, because taking that approach to hard data is exactly what happened at Mid Staffs, where hard evidence was swept under the carpet year after year because it was politically inconvenient. This Government will not make that mistake.

Finally, the hon. Lady said that my civil servants had apparently advised me that this policy would not work. Not at all. What happens with every Government policy, as you would expect, is that smart civil servants kick the tyres of every aspect of the policy to enable us to understand the risks involved. She did not mention the fact that the same document to which she referred actually says that we are on track to deliver the four clinical seven-day standards to 20% of the country by next April. I think that her constituents will welcome that, even if she does not. These strikes are going to harm patients, damage the NHS and make it harder, not easier, to resolve the challenges facing junior doctors. Labour has chosen political opportunity today, but we will do the right thing for patients.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that it has been an indefensible anomaly for many years that the national health service so reduces its services at weekends when the patients it serves are vulnerable to urgent or emergency conditions and need the highest standards of care for chronic conditions on a seven-day basis? Will he continue to make what he has described as careful progress? Will he also make it clear that the seven-day service will not simply do routine work and that it will be introduced as resources and staffing allow in line with civilised conditions? Further, on the strange politics of the dispute that keeps coming back to haunt him, does he agree that while the BMA has always been one of our most militant trade unions and while the Labour party has been very left wing in its leadership before—most notably in the 1980s—it is almost inconceivable that at any time in the past such extreme militant action that threatens patients would have been supported by the BMA or the Labour party? They are now opposing a contract that union leaders praised as a sensible settlement, given the improvements that it offered, only two or three months ago.

[Mr Hunt]

As ever, my right hon. and learned Friend speaks incredibly wisely. Actually, his last comment goes to the nub of why this is totally extraordinary, unprecedented and completely unacceptable. It is true that the junior doctors have rejected the agreement that was reached in May in a ballot, and we have to accept that. There are all sorts of reasons why that might have happened, but the choice to escalate the industrial action and to call the worst strike in NHS history was made not by those junior doctors but by the BMA leaders. They made that decision about a contract that they themselves had described as being good and safer for doctors and patients only in May. How can they justify that? Is there not perhaps a desire to pick a very big fight?

We were making good progress over the summer in a whole series of dialogues in different areas to try to resolve some of the non-contractual issues that the junior doctors are worried about, but this action makes it virtually impossible to continue that progress, although we will try very hard to do so. My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right to say that this is completely unacceptable and damaging for patients. I am afraid that I am having to go through some of the very same battles that he had to go through when he was Health Secretary.

Junior Doctors Contract

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I thank the hon. Lady for her constructive comments, which are born of her NHS experience. She is right: we are phasing in the contract carefully to make sure that we learn lessons. She is absolutely right to talk about rota gaps. Unfortunately, the problem of rota gaps cannot be solved at a stroke on signing a contract; it has to do with making sure that we have a big enough supply of doctors in the NHS to fill those rota gaps. We now have much greater transparency about the safety levels that are appropriate in different hospitals; that is one of the lessons that we learned post Mid Staffs. We are investing more in the NHS in this Parliament. We recruited an extra 9,300 doctors in the last Parliament and we are increasing our investment in the NHS in this Parliament, so that we can continue to boost the doctor workforce in the NHS. In the long run, that is how we will deal with the rota gap issue; but unfortunately, that cannot be done overnight.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

I congratulate the Secretary of State on taking the only responsible decision that he could take, in the interests of the service and patients, to bring this sad, extraordinarily long episode to an end. I also congratulate him on being conciliatory, because he made concessions in May to produce the final contract, and now he is phasing it in, in its negotiated form. I hope that we get back to a peaceful settlement. Does he agree that the surprising fact that so many dedicated junior doctors were prepared to take industrial action over rather ill-defined problems with the contract shows that there is a problem with morale in the service? Will he give an undertaking that the very welcome steps that he has announced today to try to address the wider issues will last not just a few months, until the dust settles on this dispute, but will be part of a continuous process to make sure that we restore to the service the morale and dedication on which we all know the NHS relies?

[Mr Hunt]

As ever, my right hon. and learned Friend speaks with great wisdom and experience. He is absolutely right to say that tackling the morale deficit in the NHS has to be a key priority. That is why we have to recognise that for doctors—particularly junior doctors starting out on their medical careers—the most depressing and dispiriting thing of all is when they cannot give the patients in front of them the care that they want to. That is why we are looking at a number of things to make it easier for doctors to improve the quality of care. One of the things that is particularly challenging and that we in this House have to think about and discuss a lot more is how difficult doctors and nurses find it to speak out if they see poor care, or if they or a colleague make a mistake, because they are frightened of litigation, a General Medical Council referral, or disciplinary action by their trust. The problem is that people then do not go through the learning processes necessary to prevent those mistakes from happening again. The key is creating a supportive environment, in which learning can really happen, in hospitals.

Defending Public Services

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

We will find out those figures when the full audit is complete. I just say to the hon. Gentleman that efficiency savings are never easy, but a party with the true interests of NHS patients at heart should support those efficiency savings, because every pound saved by avoiding waste is one we can spend improving patient care.

Let me therefore outline to the House what we are doing to deliver those efficiencies, as well as to support NHS trusts to return to financial balance. First, we are taking tough measures to reduce the cost of agency staff, including putting caps on total agency spend and limits on the rates paid to those working for agencies. So far, that has saved £290 million, with the market rate for agency nurses down 10% since October and with two thirds of trusts saying that they have benefited. Our plan is to reduce agency spend by £1.2 billion during this financial year. Secondly, we are introducing centralised procurement under the Carter reforms. Already 92 trusts are sharing, for the first time, information on the top 100 products they purchase in real time, and we expect savings of more than £700 million a year during this Parliament as a result. Thirdly, given that the pay bill is about two thirds of a typical hospital’s costs base, we are supporting trusts to improve on the gross inefficiency of the largely paper-based rostering systems used at present. This should also significantly increase flexibility and the work-life balance for staff, as we announced last week. Finally, and perhaps most critically, we will reduce demand for hospital services by a dramatic transformation of out-of-hospital care, as outlined in the five-year forward view. If we meet our ambitions, we will reduce demand by more than £4 billion a year through prevention, improved GP provision, mental health access and integrated health and social care.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

For as long as I can remember, unfortunately, discussions about the NHS have always been reduced to simplistic arguments about whether enough money is being spent on it, and whether efficiency is being improved enough. I think that the Government, in the present financial circumstances, have increased spending and pursued efficiency at least as effectively as any of their predecessors.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the real issues that we ought to be considering are the rapid rise in, and the changing nature of, demand on this important service? Will he have time to consider things such as moving to a seven-day service; ending the curious divisions between the hospital service, GPs, community care and local council social services; providing for an ageing population with chronic conditions; and, at the same time, giving extra emphasis to mental health and all the things that have been neglected in the past? All these exchanges such as, “You should be spending more,” and “You are cutting, and we would spend more” are the sterile nonsense pursued by every Opposition that I can recall when they cannot think of anything positive to say.

[Mr Hunt]

My right hon. and learned Friend speaks with great wisdom, as he did during the junior doctors’ strike. Perhaps that is based on his experience of featuring in a BMA poster, which was put up across the country, as someone who ignored medical advice, because he smoked his cigar.

My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right. The crucial issue for the future of the NHS is the simple statistic that by the end of this Parliament we will have 1 million more over-70s to look after in England, and their needs are very different from those of the population whom we had to look after 20, 30 or 40 years ago. In particular, their need to be looked after well at home, before they need expensive hospital treatment, is a transformation. That is why a core part of what we are doing is to transform the services offered in mental health and in general practice, which I will come on to a bit later.

--- Later in debate ---

[Heidi Alexander]

From memory, I seem to think the budget going to the NHS in Wales has been cut in Westminster.

Let us have a look at the figures. In March 2011—[Interruption.] The Health Secretary would do well to listen to these figures, because I am about to tell him the record of his term in office. In March 2011, 8,602 patients waited more than four hours on trolleys because no beds were available. Four years later, the figure was up sixfold, to 53,641. In March 2011, just one patient had to wait longer than 12 hours on a trolley. Four years later, 350 patients suffered that experience. The NHS waiting list now stands at almost 3.7 million people—the equivalent of one in every 15 people in England. Only 67% of ambulance call-outs to the most serious life-threatening cases are being responded to within eight minutes.

I could reel off more statistics, but I will instead read a letter that I received the other week:

“Dear Ms Alexander,

I recently had the misfortune of using the A&E at my local hospital in Margate. My wife feels that I was lucky to escape with my life.

My experience has convinced me that our health service has never been more under threat than since Mrs Thatcher.

The fact that I was sent home after 4 hours without seeing a doctor and returned by emergency ambulance with a now perforated appendix I blame mostly on the conflict between the Health Secretary and the Junior Doctors. Had this been resolved he would have been able to concentrate on the woeful lack of resources our NHS faces.”

Take the experience—[Interruption.] The Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Health Secretary says, “Show us the letter”. I have it here, and I got the permission of the individual who wrote to me before referring to it.

Let me refer to another example—the experience of Mr Steven Blanchard at the Swindon Great Western hospital last November. He said in an open letter to the Swindon Advertiser:

“We arrived at 6.40pm and were asked to sit with about 15 others in the unit. It became apparent this was a place of great suffering and misery…Firstly, there was a lady who was doubled up in pain who had been promised painkillers three hours before and I witnessed her mother go again and again to reception until she was begging for pain relief for her near hysterical daughter.”

Another old lady

“who had been left on her own by her son…was sat picking at a cannula in her arm trying to pull it out…A very frail and sick old man was sat in a wheelchair and he had been in the unit since 8am. He kept saying over and over ‘a cup of tea would be nice’…then I watched as urine trailed from him and fell on to the floor beneath the chair…At 10.30pm he was taken to a ward after 14 hours.”

Mr Blanchard said that he and his partner were finally seen at 1.20 am, and stated:

“Never before have I seen people crying out of desperation…I don’t know what is to blame or whether it’s lack of money or lack of staff but this place was what I can only describe as ‘hell on earth’.”

That is what is happening in our NHS in 2016, and such stories are becoming more common. Ministers may not like to hear it, but they need to start taking responsibility.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

There are always pressures in the giant national health service as demand grows and expectations rise, and there always will be. The hon. Lady could have made this speech as an Opposition spokesman 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago. After 20 minutes, she has not yet suggested a solitary policy proposal as an alternative to the Secretary of State’s, and she has not said whether she agrees with him about seven-day working and all the rest of it. She is describing sad incidents in which things have obviously not been ideal or as they should be, but does she have anything to suggest by way of policy that may contribute to helping the NHS in future?

[Heidi Alexander]

Having had these exchanges over the Dispatch Box for the past nine months, it strikes me that the reality of what people are experiencing in hospitals is sometimes missing from these debates, and that is why I thought it important to quote from those letters.

On workforce challenges, nothing sums up this Government’s failure on the NHS more than the way that they have treated NHS staff. We have had pay freezes, cuts to training places, and the first all-out doctors strike in 40 years—a strike that the Health Secretary did not even try to prevent; in fact he provoked it. He has spoken about seven-day services, but he said little about how he proposes to improve weekend care without the extra resources and staff that the NHS will need. We can only assume that his plan is to spread existing resources more thinly, asking staff to do even more and putting patients at risk during the week.

The Health Secretary also failed to say what experts think about his approach. For example, Professor Sir Bruce Keogh said that the NHS was making good progress towards improving weekend care, but that that became “derailed” when the Health Secretary started linking seven-day services to junior doctors. Fiona Godlee, editor of The British Medical Journal, said that, by picking a fight with doctors, the Health Secretary has set back NHS England’s established programme of work on improving services at weekends. Not only does he have no plan to deliver a seven-day NHS, but he has ripped up the plan that was already in place to improve weekend care. You couldn’t make it up, Mr Speaker.

The Health Secretary often reads out his usual list of stats on staff numbers, but to know what is really happening we must look beyond the spin. A recent survey of nurses by Unison found that almost two-thirds believe that staffing levels have got worse in the past year, and 63% said that they felt there were inadequate numbers of staff on the wards to ensure safe and dignified care—that figure was up from 45% the year before. Whether GPs, nurses or midwives, numbers of staff have not kept pace with demand.

Analysis by the House of Commons Library shows that, in the Labour Government’s last year in office, there were 70 GPs per 100,000 of the population, but that figure has now fallen to just 66. In Labour’s last year, there were 679 nurses per 100,000 of the population, but there are now just 665. No wonder that doctors and nurses feel pushed to breaking point. If we do not look after the workforce, patients will suffer. There was nothing in the Queen’s Speech to help the workforce—no U-turn on scrapping NHS bursaries, no plan to train the staff the NHS so desperately needs, and no plan to improve working conditions.

Junior Doctors Contracts

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Monday 18th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

Rather than try to fabricate some story about the Government changing their position, which the hon. Lady knows perfectly well they are not, she might think about the words that do need to be said in this Chamber this week—about whether or not it is appropriate for the BMA to be telling people to deny life-saving care to patients.

Some people in the NHS have shown great courage in speaking out, even against their own profession: Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, the NHS England medical director, Lord Darzi, the former Labour Minister, and Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer. But there is one person on the public stage who has not had the courage to condemn those emergency strikes, and that is the shadow Health Secretary. I hope that, for the sake of her constituents and the reputation of the Labour party, she will say at the earliest opportunity that withdrawing emergency care in pursuance of a pay dispute is wrong, disproportionate and inappropriate, and that the right thing to do now is to show courage to reform these contracts for the benefit of patients and a seven-day NHS.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

The BMA has always been a very militant trade union. It has had bitter political battles with just about every Secretary of State that the national health service has had since it started. It has, however, never previously contemplated strike action, withdrawing urgent services in pursuit of what is essentially a pay claim. I do not believe that before this year the Labour party would ever have supported the BMA if it had done so. Does my right hon. Friend agree that as the pressures on the NHS are obviously mounting, with the ageing population and the rising level of demand, it is urgent to move towards a fuller seven-day service, and that it would be totally wrong for him to delay that in the face industrial action or nit-picking legalisms from a shadow Secretary of State who has just discovered what the legal status of foundation hospitals actually is?

Junior Doctors Contracts

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

The hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) has made a number of incorrect statements with which I shall deal with later, but what the country will notice about her response is more straightforward. When we have a seven-day NHS, in a few years’ time, people will say that it was obviously necessary and the right thing to do. They will remember that it was not easy to get there, and they will also remember—sadly—the big call that she made today for short-term political advantage to be placed ahead of the long-term interests of patients.

Previous reforming Labour Governments might have done what we are doing today. Let me say to the hon. Lady that she has vulnerable constituents—we all have vulnerable constituents—who need a true seven-day NHS, and those are precisely the people that the NHS should be there for. Sorting this out should not be a party issue; it should be something that unites the whole House, and she will come to regret the line that she has taken today.

Let me address some of the hon. Lady’s particular points. She has said today and on other occasions that this has been badly handled. If she wants to know who has handled contract negotiations badly, it was the party that gave consultants the right to opt out from weekend work in 2003 and that gave GPs the right to opt out of out-of-hours care in 2004. Is it difficult to sort out those problems? Yes. Are we going to be lectured by the people who caused them? No, we are not.

The hon. Lady also questioned whether there was support for imposition. Let me just read her exactly what the letter that I got from Sir David Dalton says. He states that, on the basis of the stalemate,

“I therefore advise the government to do whatever it deems necessary to end uncertainty for the service and to make sure that a new contract is in place which is as close as possible to the final position put forward to the BMA yesterday.”

And what does Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, say?

“Under these highly regrettable and entirely avoidable circumstances, hospitals are rightly calling for an end to the uncertainty, and the implementation of the compromise package the Dalton team are recommending.”

The hon. Lady talked about the impact on morale. Perhaps she would like to look at the hospitals that have implemented seven-day care, including Salford Royal, Northumbria and one or two others. They have some of the highest morale in the NHS, because morale for doctors is higher when they are giving better care for patients. She also says that we should not impose the contract, but what she is actually saying is that if the BMA refuses point blank to negotiate on seven-day care, we should give up looking after and doing the right thing for vulnerable patients. What an extraordinary thing for a Labour shadow Health Secretary to say. She also said that we were conflating the junior doctors contract with seven-day working. Well, let us look at what the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges said in 2012. It said:

“The weekend effect is very likely attributable to deficiencies in care processes linked to the absence of skilled and empowered senior staff”.

Most medical royal colleges say that junior doctors with experience qualify as senior staff.

The NHS has made great strides in improving the quality of care. Since I have been Health Secretary, avoidable harm in hospitals has nearly halved, nearly 20% of acute hospitals have been put into a new special measures regime—and we are turning them round—and record numbers of members of the public say that their care is safe and that they are treated with dignity and respect. The seven-day NHS is not just a manifesto commitment; we are doing this because we are willing to fight to make the NHS the safest, highest quality healthcare system in the world. Today we have seen that the Labour party is not prepared to have that fight. Does not this prove to the country that it is the Conservatives who are now the true party of the NHS?

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on taking this clear and correct decision, because it is quite obvious that after three years, the BMA was prepared to let the whole thing drag on with talks and days of action until he either abandoned the seven-day service or gave the junior doctors an enormous pay settlement in order to buy their agreement to do it. In future discussions, will he keep concentrating, as he has, on the essential public interest, which is to meet the rising and remorseless demand on the service resulting from an ageing population and clinical advance? Will he also use the extra resources that the NHS is getting at the moment to deliver a better service to patients and not allow it to be taken away, as so often happened in the past—including a little more than 10 years ago in 2003—by very large pay claims by the various staff unions, as that would lessen his ability to give us the modern NHS that he is talking about?

[Mr Hunt]

My right hon. and learned Friend speaks with great wisdom and also great experience. Many Members will remember how, when he was Health Secretary, the BMA put posters of him up all over the country saying “What do you call a man who ignores medical advice?”, and there he was, smoking his cigar. I am sure that there have been Labour Health Secretaries who have had similar treatment. He makes an important point, however. Under the new Labour Administration of Tony Blair, huge amounts of extra resources were put into the NHS but, unfortunately, because of the impact of contract changes in 1999, 2003 and 2004, weekend care actually became less effective, not more effective. Now, thanks to the tough decisions we have taken on public spending and turning the economy around, we have been able to give the NHS a funding settlement next year that is the sixth biggest in its entire nearly 70-year history. We are absolutely determined that, if we are putting that extra money into the NHS, it should come with reform that leads to better care for patients. That is the Conservative way, and we will not be deflected from it.

Junior Doctors Contract

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his steady and patient pursuit of a seven-day service for patients in the face of the extraordinarily militant tactics of the BMA. As one of his predecessors, I can reassure him that the tendency to personalise any dispute against the Secretary of State is a long-standing tradition of this trade union that goes back to Lloyd George, when it resisted panel doctors. It was ferocious in its opposition to Nye Bevan and the establishment of the NHS and every Secretary of State of every party since that time has had exactly the same experience in a dispute. If my right hon. Friend succeeds in getting the negotiations under way on a time-limited basis, as he rightly said, will he approach the BMA—of course, in a reasonable way—and insist that it make it clear that it supports a seven-day service, which would be of benefit to the country, and will not turn this into a demand for large amounts of extra pay? I think the British medical profession is among the best paid in Europe, if not the best paid. Everyone should concentrate on how to raise standards of service to ordinary patients up and down the country and how to get rid of higher mortality rates at weekends?

[Mr Hunt]

I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for his robust support. I seem to remember that when he was Health Secretary posters were put up all over the country saying, “What do you call a man who ignores doctors’ advice”, with a picture of my right hon. and learned Friend. He knows exactly what this is all about. It is not just Conservative Health Secretaries: Nye Bevan and Alan Milburn went through this.

My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right: we will all be delighted if the strike is postponed. Incidentally, it begins at 8 o’clock tomorrow morning, not midnight—I must correct that. He is right: the Government’s focus is unremittingly on improving patient care. We have made it clear that any settlement has to be within the current pay envelope. The great sadness is that the vast majority of doctors are passionate about doing something about seven-day services. If only we had had the chance to negotiate from June, we could have avoided the situation we are in.

NHS: Financial Performance

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ben Gummer]

I will address the hon. Lady’s final point first, if I may. The previous coalition Government’s 2012 Act has saved considerable numbers—billions of pounds—which we would now have to make up if we had not made difficult decisions.

That allows me to address the hon. Lady’s first point. We have a choice: we can take the traditional view of politicians, which is to try to paper over the cracks and pour money into an unreformed system, or we can take the difficult decisions that will mean that we deliver patient care in the long term. That is what the Conservative party is willing to do: we are not only providing the commitment to funding, but taking the necessary, difficult decisions.

On the specific issue of agency nurses—one such example of difficult decisions—it is not so much the number of nurses available as the scandalous rates at which they were hired out to NHS trusts. We have taken action on that to ensure that NHS providers can procure agency staff when and how they need them at a reasonable rate.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend confirm that there have been no cuts in expenditure on the health service and that there have been no cuts in the total level of service? The problems at the moment are caused by the extraordinary pressures of an ageing population, clinical advances and rising public expectations. Will he continue to get the right balance between the needs of greater efficiency and responsible public financing, putting patient interests first and resisting short-term lobbying from trouble spots, which is a permanent feature of the politics of the NHS? In particular, will he resist any attempts by organisations such as the British Medical Association to turn controversy into yet another pay claim?

[Ben Gummer]

I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for his assurances on what needs to be done: he, more than anyone in the House, knows how to do it. Had the Government taken the Opposition’s advice and cut the money going into the NHS, we would not have achieved record numbers of doctors and nurses; we would not have halved MRSA and clostridium difficile rates; we would not have eliminated mixed-sex wards; and we would not have achieved record high cancer survival rates. All that has been made possible because of the funding commitments that the Government have made, to which the Opposition failed to commit at the election.

NHS Success Regime

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I must say that it is a pleasure to welcome back to the House the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), who when he celebrates 45 years in the House this month will I think be approaching the mid-point of his parliamentary career.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

At this crucial mid-point, thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for that unusual way of calling me.

Does my hon. Friend the Minister recall that the whole purpose of introducing the purchaser-provider divide many years ago, which was developed by the Labour party and is now known as local commissioning, was to concentrate on patient care, patient outcomes and local priorities? Will he therefore, with this welcome announcement, continue to stick by NHS England, allow it to do that, and resist the blandishments of the shadow Health Secretary, who seems to pine for the days of centralised bureaucracy and is still feebly trying to weaponise the NHS for party political purposes?

[Ben Gummer]

It gives me particular pleasure to respond to my right hon. and learned Friend. He was an exceptional Secretary of State for Health because he understood the centrality of local decisions by patients and their doctors and commissioners. I confirm that we will continue to allow local commissioners to make the decisions, rather than try to wrest power back from them to Whitehall, which is precisely what the shadow Secretary of State did when he was Secretary of State.