Michael Connarty
Main Page: Michael Connarty (Labour - Linlithgow and East Falkirk)Department Debates - View all Michael Connarty's debates with the HM Treasury
(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Redwood
No, I was just wondering whether my hon. Friends had that in mind, knowing how much they treasure the coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and knowing that such bold statements were made in the Orange Book by no less than a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who presumably knew the price of everything and the value of some things, and who would want to ensure value for money.
I hope that my hon. Friends on the Front Bench consider the wider issue that was rightly raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley. How do we get extra resources and money spent on health in a friendly and sensible way, on top of the very great and important NHS, which my hon. Friends the Members for Mole Valley, for Christchurch and for North East Hertfordshire rightly back? If not by their route, what route? May we please have some numbers? The proposal could be a good-value buy, but that depends very much on how much cost would be taken out of the NHS.
Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)
I have one or two things to say about this debate, and I was stirred into standing up by the previous speech, because either woolly-headed logic was being used by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood), or he was making a deliberate statement to try to cover—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
That is not a matter for me. I have just come into the Chair myself, as I am sure you observed, Mr Heald, so I am the last one to criticise anyone for just coming in and talking.
Michael Connarty
You know, Mr Deputy Speaker, there is amazing technology in this place. Members can sit in their offices and, if they wish, not watch the tennis but follow the debate in detail, and come down to the Chamber when they think it might be useful to add something. I recommend it to Members: turn off the tennis, turn on the Chamber.
The point I was making is that the logic used by the right hon. Member for Wokingham was possibly deliberately to convince the public that the proposal is an effort to add extra resources to the health services by encouraging people to put money into private health insurance. The logic, of course, is that such private health insurance is available to some people when they are in employment, but is denied them when they retire. If that is the kind of employer that people have, it is a shame that they are deluded into thinking that insurance is a substitute for taxation-based health services.
The right hon. Gentleman stated that resources are not finite, and that somehow this money would bring new resources rushing into the health service. Everyone who has studied the health service over the time I have been in elected politics, which is since 1977, knows what happens. The consultant and the surgeon choose whether to work in the private sector or in the public sector. Sometimes they choose to work in a mixture of those. I commend those who decide to work entirely in the public sector, because they give the best value to our constituents, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) said when, in an intervention, he cited the number of operations for cataracts.
However, the reality is that only a limited number of people get to the top of the elitist profession that is the medical profession, particularly to consultant level, because we do not train enough people to do the work that is required in the health service.
Mr Redwood
Does the hon. Gentleman not understand that in countries that have a bigger private sector on top of a large public sector, there are more doctors and nurses in relation to the population, because there is more money?
Michael Connarty
The right hon. Gentleman leads me to my next point. He recommended that we look at the EU system. I am glad that in reply to an intervention from one of my hon. Friends he said that he objects to the idea of a comprehensive, insurance-based health service in this country. I, too, have looked at that on the continent and in EU countries, and I have seen that it does not work.
In fact, other EU countries do have a larger number of doctors—there are more doctors per head of population in most of them than in this country—but that is because of the elitist structure of the medical profession in this country. That structure keeps the numbers down and pays huge bonuses to people once they get to the higher gradings. Many of those people are the very same ones who moonlight in the private sector for additional personal financial gain.
Mr Kevan Jones
Insurance-based health systems such as that in the United States may have large numbers of doctors, but those doctors are not accessible to the large proportion of the population who do not have private health care.
Michael Connarty
I hear my right hon. Friend say that 40 million people in the United States of America exist without adequate health care insurance or provision. A friend of mine tried to set up a dental care service in New England based on Medicare, and found that the money was not available. Many people in New England are denied any form of dental care when they end up in private nursing homes in their old age. Something is seriously wrong with that. I commend President Obama’s attempts to at least moderate that.
Let me return to the debate. People should not be deluded into thinking that the proposal will encourage more resources into the health service. It will encourage more companies to demand the services of the limited number of available surgeons to carry out operations for their private patients, instead of allowing the surgeons to do the job they should be doing. I would commend a scheme of private health care payments that provided the NHS with new equipment, doctors and other staff on top of those already trained in this country to work in the NHS.
Those who say that this proposal could do that should look at what happened with a hospital built for the private sector on the west coast of Scotland. The idea was to build a huge hospital with private money and to have people come from around the world to use it, but eventually it had to be sold to the Scottish Government when Jack McConnell was First Minister. We bought the hospital at a knock-down price because, in reality, the private sector could not generate new and fresh talent and equipment. That is not going to happen. It will just suck out resources needed by my constituents, who believe that the NHS should be paid for through taxes.
Andrew Gwynne
Does my hon. Friend agree that this is not about restricting choice, but about prioritising finite resources and ensuring that any available money goes into front-line NHS services, rather than into a tax giveaway to a small number of people who are already accessing private health care?
Michael Connarty
I could not have put it better myself—I commend my hon. Friend for helping me with his analysis.
The Labour Government were right to encourage people to provide resources that the NHS could access using taxpayers’ money where it would be more efficient. That was an excellent scheme that enabled people in my constituency to go to hospitals where beds were available over Christmas for operations that were not being done and could not be fitted into the schedules of hospitals that were short of resources. That was a good initiative, but this proposal is not; it is the opposite. It would be a damaging initiative if it encouraged people to take out private health insurance and so divert resources from the NHS, where they are needed.
John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)
I have found it odd recently that some private health insurers will pay those whom they insure to use the NHS. If that is the habit of private health insurance, where does the hon. Gentleman think the saving to the taxpayer is in allowing this tax relief?
Michael Connarty
I did not want to cite that example, although it is a good example of what happens when people use private health care and take resources away from the NHS. I find it appalling that through private health care people can actually buy organs donated to the NHS by paying for the hotel care and all the rest of it. They are not allowed to buy the organs any longer; instead they buy the ancillary health care and then use resources that people might have donated thinking they would go to NHS patients, but which end up being used for private care. But that is an aside from this debate.
The new clause would encourage more private money to suck out resources and money needed in the NHS. The right hon. Member for Wokingham kept talking about cash increases. We should not pretend that this is not the same Member who reminded us all of the real effect of cash increases when inflation is running higher than the increase. He was—how can I put this?—dodging the issue unnecessarily and treating us as though we were stupid. Cash increases will not keep the resources at the level they are at, and the new clause will in fact take out resources that the NHS does not have to give.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
I can scarcely believe that the hon. Gentleman is making that case, given that the previous Labour Government paid consultants and general practitioners respectively 27% and 44% more for doing less work, hid billions of pounds off balance sheets with dodgy private finance initiative schemes, which have reduced taxpayers to penury, and foisted independent sector training on primary care trusts, meaning that they could not plan for patient numbers or the money needed to run those centres.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Order. Interventions must be brief; otherwise we might find ourselves sitting until the early hours of the morning.
Michael Connarty
If the hon. Gentleman proposed a motion suggesting that all those things should not have happened, I would vote for it. I am a socialist. I did not like the Labour Government overpaying people and changing their hours in such a way that my constituents got less of a service. It seems that even some Conservatives realise that paying people huge amounts of money and asking them to work fewer hours in this elitist organisation—I am very critical of the consultancy-led health service in our country—is something we should be looking at seriously. Our constituents need value for money, which many of the schemes the hon. Gentleman mentioned did not provide. However, it is interesting that this Government have done nothing to change the tax laws, despite 23% of PFIs now being owned by foreign companies that are still getting the tax breaks in this country. Part of the idea of PFIs was that they would bring in tax money, yet 23% of the companies are abroad and put nothing into this country’s economy.
Kerry McCarthy
I can confirm that the Opposition oppose new clause 1. The Prime Minister spent the years in the run-up to the general election and the year since trying to convince us that he valued the NHS, that it was “safe in his hands”. Sadly, however, given the current shambles over the health Bill, which has yet again returned to Committee, it is safe to say that he and his Health Secretary have spectacularly failed. On current evidence, it seems that the Prime Minister did not even attempt to persuade his Back Benchers—it seems that they now want to reinstate a policy introduced by Baroness Thatcher’s Government.
As we have heard, new clauses 1 to 4 would introduce a tax relief on medical insurance for over-65s. The hon. Members who tabled the new clauses stood on a manifesto that proclaimed we “believe in the NHS”. It turns out that they believe so much in the state that they think even private sector provision should receive state funding.
Fiona Bruce
The transferable allowance would help to reduce those costs, and would therefore be an investment very well made. The £550 million cost of the partially transferable allowance proposed by the Conservatives prior to the general election represents just 1.3% of the direct costs of family breakdown, as calculated by the Relationships Foundation—[Interruption.] And just 2.16% of the direct costs of family breakdown, as calculated by the same organisation—
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. I ask the hon. Gentleman to resume his seat. Fiona Bruce has made it absolutely clear that she has no intention of giving way at this stage. I am sure that she will make it clear if she changes her mind.
Jim Shannon
I do not believe that there is an inconsistency in relation to this matter, although, with respect, I would disagree with certain other proposals relating to the benefit system.
Michael Connarty
I am grateful to my hon. Friend—I regard him as such—for giving way. I share his warmth about marriage, having spent the past 41 years married, although I am not sure that my wife would be quite so enthusiastic. He has, however, strayed beyond his own guidelines. He said that the provision was not about people marrying for a payment, yet he is now arguing that that is what he supports. Surely this should be about the responsibilities that people take on as a couple, especially when they have children, because that is the most burdensome time when they need the most help from the tax system. This is not about whether they decide to have one kind of a relationship or another. Whether they are married or unmarried, if they decide to be together and have children, they will be burdened with other costs.
Jim Shannon
I can tell the House that when I married, I married for love. I am one of those old-fashioned boys; that is just the way I am.
Michael Connarty
In the contributions that I have heard via the live feed and in the Chamber, sadly there seem to have been moral overtones that echo speeches in a Victorian Parliament. If moral judgments are behind those arguments and people think that they this is a moral vote, I am quite sad about that. It might be a political strategy, however. Many political strategies were put forward by the Conservative leadership at the election, but hopefully they will not be reflected in the legislation put though this House. I hope that the contribution from the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) is more reflective of the coalition, which means that the Government will not do what the new clause proposes.
It is very important that people listening to this debate realise what the proposals are. After the advances that this country has made, in the recognition of civil partnerships, for example, this proposal is about spouses and spouses alone, not civil partners. It is attacking the progress that has been made, which is now being copied across Europe. It does not relate to people of the same gender in firm and committed relationships, which shows that it is not a forward movement at all. It is an attempt to throw out and make a moral judgment on the things that have been done by the joint agreement of this House to advance society’s value of firm and committed partnerships. That is what is important.
Michael Connarty
Not yet.
It is not just a matter of putting a marriage partnership or a firm partnership ahead of any other. My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) spoke strongly and has worked hard on single parenthood, but I happen to believe, in most cases but not all, that a partnership provides a much stronger place for children to grow up in than that provided by any single person—male or female—who has to go it alone. Therefore, our society has a lot of value when we can encourage partnerships.
We still have the oddest situation in Europe—and among many other countries outside Europe—because we do not recognise de facto partnerships. De facto partnerships are not civil marriages but agreements by people without either a civil or Church marriage to remain in a relationship and to commit to themselves and to any offspring.
My son lives in Australia, and he shared a de facto partnership for a number of years, recognising that if he or his partner had died their pension would have transferred to the other. In this country I have friends who, like me and my spouse, have been together for 41 years. They have had to get married because they might be coming to the end of their lives—not for a long time, I hope—and their pensions would have died with them.
That was a moral judgment which the previous Labour Government made, and it was shameful, because we should have had civil partnerships for all who wished to have them, and we should have recognised de facto partnerships as much as same-gender partnerships. That is how we should have looked at things, but we should not give cash incentives, as the new clause seeks. Indeed, that was the contradiction in the contribution from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), because he said that he was not about incentivising partnerships through finances and then spoke on behalf of the new clause—which would incentivise partnerships.
Michael Connarty
I have a call from my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) first.
That is what is wrong with the new clause. It is about spouses, it is backward looking and moralistic and it will not help children at all. It is sad that one in five marriages breaks down and that civil partnerships break down, so we must encourage people through the way we finance them and help them to keep their relationships together, because finances as much as personal fall-outs break down relationships.
Andrew Gwynne
I agree wholeheartedly that families come in different shapes and sizes, and we need to respect and reflect that in public policy. Is not that why the previous Labour Government were absolutely right to target limited resources on tackling child poverty, irrespective of the child’s family background?
Michael Connarty
My hon. Friend has made that point before, and he puts it better than I could.
My mother, who now has sadly passed away, was soured by the Labour Government very early on when we took away the additional money for single parents. From then on, every time I went to her house on a Sunday, she would start by saying, “Welcome,” and then she would say, “You and your Tony Blair,” and for the rest of my visit berate me for what we had not got right. She was a great touchstone, however, because she saw that the defence of children and the future of children were important, not the rest.
The new clause is a backwards step, but I am hopeful that the Minister will not support it and that such legislation will never get through. It states that only marriage—not any other relationship—is good enough or as good as we would wish.
Mr Burrowes
The hon. Gentleman is experienced in European affairs, given his chairmanship of the European Scrutiny Committee and his general interest in European matters, so I have a question. Why do France, Germany and Italy all recognise marriage in the taxation system? Indeed, let us widen that question. Why do only 24% of OECD citizens live in countries that do not recognise marriage in the taxation system? Has he ever asked why our European neighbours recognise marriage but we do not?
Michael Connarty
People must ask those Governments, but many recognise de facto partnerships as well, and their recognition is based on not just the marriage to which the new clause refers with “spouses”. That is the point. This is about one small group that we in this country used to see as a backward thing. We have moved beyond that now, and it is time we put it behind us. Perhaps others will catch up with us soon enough when they realise that it is partnerships that matter, not specifically spouses in a formal marriage.
Mr Chope
My final point is that there is a read-across between the new clause and the conundrum that the Government face in the debate about the withdrawal of child benefit from families that comprise at least one higher rate taxpayer. That issue is causing a lot of angst among our constituents, particularly for parents in single income households in which one parent stays at home to look after the children. As I have said in correspondence with the Minister, in some cases one parent stays at home to look after a disabled child. If there is one parent who is the breadwinner and he is a higher rate taxpayer on an income of about £45,000 or £50,000, he will be above the threshold and will be deprived of his child benefit.
Mr Chope
I will give way in a minute.
In comparison, a household with two people earning between £35,000 and £40,000 each, which has a much higher income, will keep its child benefit. That is not fair. In response to correspondence, the Minister has said that there has to be a bit of rough justice and that to introduce a system of transferability of allowances and entitlements would be very complicated. However, that is exactly what was proposed by the Prime Minister with the transferability of tax allowances, and that is what is proposed in the new clause. That is of significance, because there is a read-across from this other thorny policy issue that faces the Government.
I hope that we will have a positive response from the Minister, and that he will spell out in detail when and how the Prime Minister’s pledges to the country will be implemented.