NHS (Contracts and Conditions)

Debate between Michael Tomlinson and Helen Jones

Monday 14th September 2015 Westminster Hall

[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the e-petition relating to contracts and conditions in the NHS.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz, and, in particular, to be debating the first petition to reach the debate stage under the new system for dealing with e-petitions. The original petition on the joint Government and Parliament website called for a vote of no confidence in the Secretary of State for Health. Fortunately for him—or unfortunately, depending on how people want to look at it—the Petitions Committee does not have the power to initiate a vote of no confidence, and so we decided that the debate should be on the issue underlying the petition, which was the contracts and conditions of NHS staff.

I might be joking about motions of no confidence in the Secretary of State, but the morale of NHS staff is not a joke. It is a long time since I last saw dedicated doctors, nurses and ancillary staff so demoralised and, sometimes, despairing. If we look at the current state of the NHS we can see why. A&E departments are in crisis and missed waiting time targets for the whole of last winter. GP services are struggling to cope, and patients find it harder and harder to get appointments. Last year, the deficit across trusts was nearly £1 billion; this year, that is predicted to double.

Yet despite all that, NHS staff work miracles every day. Who could not be proud of some of the achievements of our surgeons? Who could sit in an A&E department, as I unfortunately had to during the election, seeing the endless patience of NHS staff, and not be grateful to them? Who could watch paramedics dealing with an accident or reassuring a frail and confused elderly patient and not be ever grateful for the NHS? After the Olympic opening ceremony, I remember one American reporter said, “Oh, it’s just like praising UnitedHealthcare.” No, it is not. The NHS is not like UnitedHealthcare, thankfully, and that is why we value it.

NHS staff have been badly treated by this Government. Since 2010 pay increases have been deliberately kept low and last year we saw some staff being told that they could not have even a 1% increase if they were due to get an increment as well. The Government often talk about public services as if they were a drain on the economy, but they are not. Services such as the NHS are a huge contributor to our economy. It is completely wrong that, under this Government, tax is cut for millionaires but dedicated NHS staff are not even entitled to a decent pay rise.

Indeed, in the previous Parliament the NHS was told to make £20 billion of what the Government call efficiency savings but the rest of us call cuts. That is due to rise to £30 billion by the end of this Parliament. The NHS is struggling to cope with fewer and fewer resources but more and more patients. Many of the difficulties being encountered are of the Government’s own making. Ministers criticise spending on agency staff, but the Government’s first act on coming into office in 2010 was to cut nurse training places by over 3,000 a year.

[Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)]

I of course recognise the great work that NHS staff do, not least in Dorset, but is the official policy of the official Opposition now to lift pay restraint in the NHS?

[Helen Jones]

We made our policy quite clear in the last Parliament. In particular, we opposed the Government’s decision to curb 1% pay increases for NHS staff who were gaining increments. The hon. Gentleman really has to think about this: if there are fewer and fewer nurses in our hospitals—in particular, employment in the most senior grades is down by 3%—and we are spending millions on agency staff, something is going badly wrong. Hospitals are being forced to recruit nurses from abroad or spend on agency staff when we have thousands of people in this country who want to train as nurses but simply cannot get the training places that are available.