NHS (Charitable Trusts Etc.) Bill
Mary Robinson Excerpts(9 years ago)
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Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) on successfully securing this private Member’s Bill and bringing it to the Floor of the House. Her office is next door to mine, so I know for a fact how hard she and her staff have worked on the Bill. I am pleased to be here to support it.
Throughout the country, amazing people are working and volunteering in the charitable sector. In my constituency, local people recognise the invaluable work of our charities, such as St Ann’s Hospice, which has provided care for people with life-limiting illnesses for more than 40 years, and Millie’s Trust, a newer charity that has not only raised awareness of paediatric first aid, but campaigned to change legislation on first aid in children’s nurseries.
Our communities and, it is fair to say, our lives, would be poorer without the tremendous work of our charities. To carry on doing that work, they rely on the selfless efforts of volunteers and the tireless ingenuity of fundraisers, and bequests from caring people, whose legacies provide a lifeline. The bequests made over the years to Great Ormond Street hospital have undoubtedly enabled many children’s lives to be saved. Its groundbreaking research continues to give parents new hope in the treatment of their desperately ill children. We have heard today about a child whose cure from childhood leukaemia was described as a miracle. Wonderful work continues to be done. I should like to take the opportunity to pay tribute to the vital work of the staff, fundraisers and patrons, who do so much to ensure that Great Ormond Street and its associated charity continue to provide the very best care to children and young people.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills noted, Great Ormond Street and its charity are in the unique and fortunate position of having the rights to the royalties from performances or publications of the play “Peter Pan”, an extremely valuable benefit bestowed by the author, J. M. Barrie. The royalties that the charity receives and that, as my hon. Friend noted, Lord Callaghan successfully legislated in perpetuity, enable it to keep up its wonderful work and surely reflect the wishes of J. M. Barrie. I fully support the ambition to ensure that the charity continues to receive that generous settlement, and to give Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity the independence it needs to grow and better support its beneficiaries.
I am pleased that the Bill addresses a number of constraints that the charity has encountered, not least the duplication of governance arrangements that currently complicates the charity’s position. Historically, charitable involvement in the health service has always been welcomed. The Bill will not affect independent charities, but it is important to recognise their continued importance in the sector.
The Department of Health conducted a review of NHS charities in 2011. The response was the announcement of the intention to move towards greater independence and a commitment to a new model. That is what the debate is about. The rationale for the reform reflected concerns raised by the NHS charities and their representative bodies that the NHS legislative framework and its application limited their freedom to grow and raise charitable funds effectively. We must do everything we can to support the valuable work our charities do, and often that means removing red tape and bureaucracy and allowing them to choose their own legal frameworks.
That goes to the heart of the Bill. It is something that charities have asked for, and we should support them, but the complexities of the royalties arrangements for Great Ormond Street hospital require Parliament’s involvement to effect the transfers. I support these measures and the removal of the Secretary of State’s power to appoint trustees. Great Ormond Street hospital for children is well loved and well used by families from right across the country, as has been said, and it is surely in our interests to make it as easy as possible for the charity to operate effectively so that it can concentrate on providing care for children. The Bill does just that, by allowing the transfer of royalties while consolidating the new Great Ormond Street hospital charity as an independent charity, free from Government and ministerial involvement.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
The hon. Lady has twice mentioned the need for charities to be free from regulation and Government involvement. Will she study the recent history of Kids Company, which has been accused of many abuses, and certainly a great waste of public money, as a result of lax regulation and the permissive attitude of the Conservative party and the Prime Minister?
Mary Robinson
It is absolutely right that the governance arrangements for charities, and any other body responsible for donated moneys, be adequate and robust, and I know that that will be the case here.
Finally, I congratulate my hon. Friend on introducing the Bill, which I wish a swift and easy passage. I am confident that with so much support it will be driven into law and will not drift into Neverland.
NHS (Contracts and Conditions)
Mary Robinson Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Helen Jones
I am afraid that I do not agree with the hon. Lady. What has demoralised most of the nurses I see is the cuts they have to cope with day in, day out, as well as the shortage of sometimes even basic equipment and the—
Helen Jones
In a moment. I need to make a little progress, because other people want to speak.
There is also the fact that this Government, rather than valuing NHS staff, consistently appear to undervalue them. The Government are now introducing further ideas. They want seven-day working in the NHS. I will come in a moment to what that means for hospitals, but let me look first at what is happening with general practitioners. In principle, everyone agrees that more out-of-hours care is a good idea—not least NHS staff themselves. The question is how the Government will fund and staff the extra working hours. Currently, we are increasingly short of GPs. In Warrington—on the Government’s own figures, before the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) jumps up to read out her brief again—we have fewer GPs than we had—
Helen Jones
No. I need to make a little progress, because other people want to speak.
In Warrington, we have fewer GPs than we had in 2010—those are the Government’s own figures, not mine. Nationally, the number of unfilled GP posts quadrupled in the three years from 2010 to 2013. The Royal College of General Practitioners says there are severe shortages in some parts of the country and that in some areas—it quotes Kent, Yorkshire and the east midlands—we need at least 50% more GPs over the next five years just to cope with population increases. Now, when there are not enough GPs to ensure timely access to appointments on weekdays, it is difficult to see how the Government are going to extend GPs’ working hours without recruiting more staff.
Of course, the cost is also an issue. It is estimated that the costs of extending services beyond the current contract, with one in four surgeries opening late in the evening and at weekends, would be £749 million. That would rise to £1.2 billion if one in two practices were open longer. That is far in excess of the money currently in the GP challenge fund. If the Government intend to proceed without recruiting more staff, that will simply increase the pressures on the staff working already, leading to more burn-out, and it will be a downward spiral. We already know that many GPs are thinking of retiring early.
The Secretary of State has now turned his attention to not only GPs, but hospital doctors and consultants, who he says do not work weekends. Well, I have two consultants in my family, and that is news to me, because they certainly do work weekends. In fact, the Secretary of State so provoked hospital doctors that they took to Twitter under the #iminworkJeremy, posting pictures of themselves working at weekends, often after a 70-hour, five-day week.
Now, I reiterate that everybody accepts that out-of-hours care has to improve, but the Secretary of State needs to achieve that through consultation and by showing respect for the staff we already have. At the moment, he is guilty of muddled thinking; he has deliberately confused emergency care with elective care. Specialists in emergency care do work weekends; in fact, very few consultants opt out altogether—the figure is about 0.3%. Yet, the Government tell us that there are 6,000 extra deaths among people admitted at weekends. The Minister needs to publish the research on that and to go further, because correlation and causation are not the same thing.
Helen Whately
I want to make the important point that we in this House need to support the NHS in doing what it needs to do to make the substantial changes that it faces over the next five years. That means supporting managers, supporting doctors and supporting nurses. Let us not try to be divisive.
