National Health Service Funding

Michael Gove Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I will give way in a moment.

The maintenance situation has got so bad that the NHS faces a backlog of £5 billion in repairs.

[Michael Gove (Surrey Heath) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I will give way in a moment. The former Education Secretary needs to calm down, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Public health budgets, which fund projects to tackle teenage pregnancy, excessive alcohol consumption, sexually transmitted infections and substance misuse and to provide anti-smoking interventions, will have been cut by 9.7% by the end of this Parliament. That is a completely false economy leading to greater demands on the acute sector. As my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) so brilliantly outlined last week, the adult social care budget has been slashed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Ashworth]

My right hon. Friend is right and she is a brilliant campaigner for the health service in Enfield. The points that she makes about the staffing crisis in the NHS are well made. I hope that the Secretary of State will respond to her.

Things are so bad for the Health Secretary that even the NHS chief executive told the Health Committee that

“2018-19 will be the most pressurised year for us…will have negative per-person NHS funding growth.”

Those were the chief executive’s words. Will the Health Secretary sit up and listen, and respond to the chief executive, or will we get what we saw in the Sunday newspapers—briefing against him? We heard that the Government are “gunning for” Mr Stevens and are going to “fix” him. I hope the Secretary of State will repudiate that briefing when he responds to the debate and distance himself from it.

The only people who do not appear to accept the need for more money for the NHS are the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State. We anticipate what the Secretary of State will tell us from the Dispatch Box. The right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Sir Simon Burns) alluded to it and I will now answer his question. The Secretary of State will not only tell us that we have a generous, munificent Conservative Government who have given the NHS the money it asked for, but persist with the fiction that the NHS is receiving an extra £10 billion. However, we all know—and I suspect that the Secretary of State knows, because he now distances himself from the figure when he does interviews—thanks to the Health Committee and others that this £10 billion claim is bogus. It is a claim universally derided and discredited, apart from in the drawing room of 10 Downing Street.

[Michael Gove]

rose—

[Jonathan Ashworth]

It will be a pleasure to give way to the former Education Secretary.

[Michael Gove]

The chief executive of the NHS, whom the hon. Gentleman has just mentioned, welcomed that additional £10 billion and said that it gives the NHS the extra headroom we need. Will the hon. Gentleman repudiate his criticism now and make it clear that he associates himself with the chief executive of the NHS in welcoming that £10 billion of extra funding?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

The chief executive’s comments to the Select Committee speak for themselves. Talking of repudiation, when are we going to get £350 million a week, or were the Tories typically saying one thing before the people voted and something completely different after they had had their say? That is what the ex-Education Secretary should be telling us.

Let me remind the House what the Health Committee said. I see the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) in her place, and she said:

“The continued use of the figure of £10 billion for the additional health spending up to 2020-21 is not only incorrect but risks giving a false impression that the NHS is awash with cash.”

She is sitting only a little further down from the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove). Perhaps he can have a word with her if he disagrees.

The Secretary of State hopes we do not notice that he is stretching the timeframe over which he presents this funding allocation. He hopes we do not notice that NHS spending has been redefined by the most recent spending review. He hopes we do not spot that he is cutting billions from public health budgets and other Department of Health funding streams—a £3 billion cut. But we have noticed.

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[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend is extremely knowledgeable about the health service and has been campaigning vigorously on the STPs. She is completely right. We will see hospitals merged in the Merseyside area and in London, hospitals lost in Durham, and efficiencies found by changing staffing levels. In fact, the STP for Cheshire and Merseyside, the area that she represents, talks enticingly of

“Exploration of a Factory Model”.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

With cuts to services and rock-bottom staff morale, we have the Sports Direct approach to the NHS, with the Secretary of State playing the part of Mike Ashley. The public deserve better than this bargain basement approach. Scaling back the acute sector while not investing in the community sector simply does not work. The Prime Minister might have ruled out extra funding—

[Michael Gove]

I have listened with great interest to the hon. Gentleman. He has spoken eloquently of his concerns about the NHS, but has not, in the course of 18 minutes, put forward a single positive policy or explained where a single penny of additional funding would come from. He has secured the time for this debate, so would he at least put forward a positive policy for the NHS, or a suggestion as to where the money should come from?

[Jonathan Ashworth]

The right hon. Gentleman really does have a brass neck. We still do not know when we are going to get the £350 million from him, but next time he intervenes perhaps he will tell us.

[Michael Gove]

Answer the question.

[Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) (Lab)]

rose—

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[Jonathan Ashworth]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will now make a bit of progress because I know that other Members are anxious to speak.

The Chancellor should respond tomorrow to the growing body of evidence that the NHS has not been given the money that it needs. Tomorrow, we need an end to the scandal of crumbling hospitals. Tomorrow, the Chancellor must put right the Government’s greatest betrayal on adult social care. Tomorrow, the Government must deliver the long-overdue investment that our NHS needs.

[Michael Gove]

Where is the money coming from?

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[Mr Hunt]

My right hon. Friend is right. I congratulate him, because he was part of the shadow Health team that persuaded the then shadow Chancellor and Leader of the Opposition that we needed to make that investment, thanks to which the NHS is doing 5,000 more operations every single day.

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend has been very gracious in taking interventions from all sides, and also in citing independent voices. Has not the independent King’s Fund also pointed out that the sustainability and transformation plans that he is overseeing are the “best hope” of securing long-term improvement for both health and care in this country? Does he agree that the Opposition should pay rather more attention to those independent experts, rather than repeating their own press releases?

[Mr Hunt]

My right hon. Friend is right that just occasionally we should listen to experts—but only very occasionally. In the spirit of listening to experts, and as the Leader of the Opposition is here, I will tell my right hon. Friend something else the King’s Fund has said that he will agree with, which is that

“claims of mass privatisation were and are exaggerated.”

Let us not go chasing down rabbit holes.

The result of this Government’s commitment to the NHS is that real-terms spending per head has gone up by 4.6%, which is double the rate in Scotland and three times the rate in Wales. The hon. Member for Leicester South also mentioned the National Audit Office. He did not mention that the numbers quoted in the NAO report are last year’s figures. He chose not to mention this year’s numbers, which were published last week. They show that 40 fewer trusts are in deficit. Yes, a year ago, half of trusts were missing their financial plans, but now 86% are hitting those plans.

The latest figures, from Friday, show that the deficit will fall 73% from last year, and even lower than the year before. Why is that? It is because of a sustained effort by the NHS to tackle the problem. [Interruption.] The Opposition do not want to hear this, but the truth is that the NHS is gripping the very problem the shadow Health Secretary called a debate on. Agency spend, one of the biggest challenges, is on track to go down from £3.7 billion to less than £3 billion. The rates paid for agency nurses are down 18% on a year ago, and for locum doctors they are down 13%. Our procurement changes are on track to save half a billion pounds. The money we raise from international visitors is up three times, from £84 million to £289 million.