Health and Social Care in England

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Rix, whose work for Mencap is widely admired throughout this country and beyond. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Patel, not only on securing this debate at such a propitious time—the 60th anniversary of the National Health Service and the date on which we have been given this extraordinary wake-up call about the £30 billion or more—but on the way in which he introduced the debate in his very wide-ranging and wise speech.

For many years, I have never talked to any person in the health service—clinician, administrator or anyone in a position of seniority—who has not agreed with my contention that we need a plurality of funding in the National Health Service. In the same period, I have never met a single Secretary of State or Minister who has been prepared—I am talking about both parties—to face up to the reality of the challenge. The National Health Service has been regarded for far too long by far too many as a sacred cow whose basic principle of free care at the point of need is never open to challenge, yet a number of speeches in this remarkable debate have shown that it should be challenged. No one did that with more feisty determination than my friend—I deliberately call her my friend—the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, in a quite remarkable and splendid speech. I would take it a little further than my noble friend Lady Boothroyd did: I believe that the time has come to recognise that, with enormous advances in medical science and with increased longevity, we cannot work to a formula that was devised more than 65 years ago. It is just unsustainable.

When I was first elected to another place, no one had had a heart transplant. This morning, we heard of a Member of your Lordships’ House who had a heart transplant 25 years ago. In 1970, I had no constituents who had artificial hips or knees. When I stepped down from the other place, I sometimes thought that every Conservative gathering that I attended was bionic because they all had them. One has to recognise that and in so doing one has to recognise that the money has to come from somewhere but not just from taxation. We have to look at things that we have not been prepared to look at before: proper charges for people who are in full-time work when they see the doctor, which could do something for absentee rates as well; and bed charges for hospitals, which might increase the dignity of a hospital stay.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I went to a hospital to visit a dying friend, a clergyman. He lay in his bed in rather a dingy ward, although it was not a bad hospital. There was a flimsy curtain around the bed and in ill written capitals above his head was his Christian name. I will not name the hospital or the man, of course, but to me that was indicative and symbolic of what we have to put up with sometimes. Do not forget that I represented a constituency in Staffordshire but I will not dilate on that.

We need a truly world-class service. In many respects we have that but countries such as France and Finland have a plurality of funding, which we do not have but which we must recognise that we need. I would like to support very strongly the plea made by my noble friend Lord McColl—I say to him that I am dieting—for some form of cross-party commission, committee or group. This House is uniquely placed to provide such a group as we have some of the most eminent medical people in the world here; we have people with long experience of administration and politics. If it cannot be an official committee of the House—although I should like it to be one—it could be a cross-party group that would look, without any fear, at the various possibilities for answering the problem that was so graphically underlined on the news this morning.