NHS and Social Care Funding

Margaret Greenwood Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I would just like to make another point about Wales while we have the privilege of having someone here who aspired to lead the Labour party, as the current leader of the Labour party is no longer in his place.

Something that Wales and England have in common is the need to ensure that, if we want alternatives to A&E, people are able to see their GPs. I have said many times that people wait too long to see their GPs. In all honesty, I think that the GP contract changes in 2004 were a disaster. The result was that 90% of GPs opted out of out-of-hours care. But we have been putting that right. Now 17 million people in England—about 30% of the population—have access to weekend and evening GP appointments. More than that, we have committed to a 14% real-terms increase in the GP budget by the end of this Parliament. That is an extra £2.4 billion and we expect that to mean an extra 5,000 doctors working in general practice.

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

I can see Wales from my constituency, to continue the theme. I received an email this morning from a very distressed senior NHS manager, who says:

“I truly despair that there will not be an NHS this time next year”—[Interruption.]

You need to listen on the Government Benches, and understand what your Secretary of State is doing to the health service. I will give a precis of what my constituent is talking about.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

Order. The hon. Lady will resume her seat. First, when she says “you”, she is addressing the Chair. Secondly, she is making an intervention. There are 33 Members who wish to speak in this very important debate. If she can keep her intervention very brief, I will let her continue.

[Margaret Greenwood]

Apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker. I should not have used the word “you.”

My constituent has written to me saying:

“The NHS is in crisis, the government knows this, CCGs have failed, foundation trusts are failing. GPs are on their knees. So they’re”—

the Government—

“handing it back to local areas and saying, ‘you fix it, and by the way there’s no money.’ It’s a whole system reorganisation”,

and there is no money.

[Mr Hunt]

All I would say is that I hope that people in the NHS do not listen too much to what the Labour party says about the state of the NHS and that they listen to what the Government are saying, which gives a much more accurate picture, as I will go on to explain.

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[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

The fact that an organisation as highly respected as the Red Cross should describe our NHS as facing a “humanitarian crisis” is absolutely shocking. It goes to the heart of this Government’s failure to provide a reliable, properly resourced national health service free at the point of need. That should be a source of shame for the Government. Reports last week that two patients died on trolleys in corridors—one having waited 35 hours to be seen—are truly shocking. Can this really be the face of the NHS in England in 2017? Under the Tories, it seems that it is. The Health Secretary responded by suggesting that the four-hour target should apply only to the most urgent cases and that it was estimated that 30% of patients in A&E did not really need to be there. In other words, he blamed patients and suggested a downgrade of A&E services. He should hang his head in shame.

It is this Tory Government who have decided to cut funding to the health service, asking it to make savings of £22 billion. In Cheshire and Merseyside, the NHS has to find savings of £l billion. Wirral clinical commissioning group calculates that it will have a £12 million deficit for the year 2015-16, nearly a third higher than the original £9 million forecast, but NHS England has asked it to maintain the forecast at £9 million. I would be interested to hear why this curious request has been made. Patients in Wirral West are concerned about the impact that these savings—or cuts—will have at Arrowe Park hospital and in general practice, and they are right to be concerned. The biggest financial squeeze in the history of the NHS is putting services at risk.

Let us be clear: there is nothing inevitable about these Tory cuts. This is a political decision and it is being used to drive through changes including the introduction of accountable care organisations, borrowing a model from America where such organisations are used to deliver private insurance-based healthcare. An NHS manager from my constituency has written to me saying:

“The STPs and national policy are currently pushing for a redesign of services—primary care at scale and a move to make system-wide organisations. The real punch line is there is no funding to make these changes. Locally there is talk about an Accountable Care Organisation for Wirral—meetings of senior managers across health and social care are being held on almost a weekly basis to create a roadmap for this to happen. With no money with which to do it. Having fragmented services and finally recognised the failure and destruction caused by the faux ‘internal market’ in the NHS, they are now making services use what pitiful resources they have to try and put it all back together. I truly despair that there will not be an NHS this time next year.”

That is a stark warning and a damning indictment of the Government’s failure. The Secretary of State should be addressing the crisis by giving the NHS and social care the funding they need, to make up for this crisis of the Government’s own making around access to GP appointments, a failure to train enough nursing staff, a failure to fund social care, and cuts to community pharmacies when communities need them most.

I have long been aware of the Tories’ agenda for the national health service. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 opened it up to the private sector, so that profit-hungry companies can cherry-pick the work that they want to deliver and allowed NHS hospitals to give half their beds to private patients. I believe that this Government and previous Tory Governments are seeking to move us to a two-tier system in which those who can afford to do so have private health insurance and the rest are left with a bargain-basement NHS. The arc of NHS history during the Tories’ time in office since the Thatcher period shows this, and we now appear to be reaching the end game.

The Government are cutting the supply of healthcare in the public sector to create demand in the private sector. The Secretary of State may believe in an ideological drive to introduce a system in which the individual pays their own way through individual private insurance—he is of course entitled to that view—but that is an entirely different concept from a national health service, of which Labour Members are so proud. He must be honest about that. In the process of trying to transfer us to a two-tier, insurance-based model, did he not pause to think about the human suffering he would unleash in the process? Patients wait for hours on trolleys while anxious relatives watch on helplessly, and dedicated staff are stressed out day after day.

Now is the time for a decision. It is not too late for the Government to review their approach. They can face the facts and admit to themselves that English people want a state-managed, state-funded national health service that is free at the point of use and paid for through direct taxation—just like the one created after the second world war by a Labour Government with such vision and which became the envy of the world. The Government should swallow their ideological pride and say, “Okay, we get it. We will fund the national health service.” Anything less will be a betrayal of all that the NHS stands for.

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That this House commends NHS staff for their hard work in ensuring record numbers of patients are being seen in A&E; supports and endorses the target for 95 per cent of patients using A&E to be seen and discharged or admitted within four hours; welcomes the Government’s support for the Five Year Forward View, the NHS’s own plan to reduce pressure on hospitals by expanding community provision; notes that improvements to 111 and ensuring evening and weekend access to GPs, already covering 17 million people, will further help to relieve that pressure; and believes that funding for the NHS and social care is underpinned by the maintenance of a strong economy, which under this administration is now the fastest growing in the G7.

[Margaret Greenwood]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker—[Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. If Members wish to have conversations, they should go somewhere else. The hon. Lady is making a point of order.

[Margaret Greenwood]

The Minister told the House that there were no Labour Back Benchers in this morning’s debate on community pharmacies. In fact, he has inadvertently misled the House in that regard, because I was in Westminster Hall and I spoke in the debate, as was my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson), who also spoke in the debate. I just wanted to put the record straight.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I understand the hon. Lady’s point of order. It is not a matter for the Chair, but I understand why she wished to make the point.