NHS Workforce Expansion

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I would like to begin by placing on record my solidarity with the junior doctors who are set to stage three days of strike action over pay later this month, as well as with members of the ambulance service whose dispute is still ongoing.

The Royal College of Nursing has now suspended its planned strike action to allow for the commencement of pay negotiations with the Government. There can be no doubt that our nurses deserve a fair pay rise that truly reflects the extraordinary work they do, but I must warn the Health Secretary that the cost of living crisis is being felt in every profession in the NHS at the moment, and I hope he will give serious consideration to the warnings issued by other health unions regarding the dangers of entering into unilateral talks with a single union. He must understand that any deal he reaches with the RCN will have broader implications for the entire “Agenda for Change” pay band system and risks prolonging disputes with other parties even further. I urge him to act in the best interests of patients, health workers and the NHS itself by inviting all unions that are in dispute around the table and by working to find a resolution on an NHS-wide basis.

I have been proud to stand with striking health workers on their picket lines over the last few months and to learn more about what has driven them to take strike action, some for the first time in their lives. In every instance, pay has been the immediate catalyst for a dispute. Far too many people working in our NHS are struggling to make ends meet, and the scourge of low pay is deterring far too many bright and determined young people from seeking a career in the health service in the first place.

However, while the cost of living crisis was an issue for everyone I spoke to, most people seemed more concerned with the state of the NHS itself than with their own personal circumstances. They had got used to real-terms pay cuts under the past 13 years of Conservative misgovernment, but none had seen the NHS in such a state as it is today, crippled by gaping staff shortages, crumbling facilities and the highest backlog in its history.

Those discussions led me to reflect on how much has changed in the 13 years that the Conservative party has been in charge of our health service. Conservative Members may not want to admit it, but when Labour left power, our national health service was world leading by any metric. In fact, a 2010 Commonwealth Fund report singled out the NHS for its efficiency and shorter waiting times. That is a far cry from today when 7.2 million patients are being prevented from moving on with their lives because they are waiting for treatment, and delays in emergency care cause hundreds of deaths every week.

In 1997, it fell to the Labour party to save a health service that had been driven to its knees by the mismanagement, arrogance and carelessness of the Conservative party—and so it proves again today. The plan that has been put to the House by my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), the shadow Health and Social Care Secretary, will help to lay the solid foundations for the recovery and revival of the NHS. I hope that when the Chancellor comes before this House to deliver the Budget, he looks as favourably on it as he did when it was first announced, when he called for it to be adopted

“on the basis that smart governments always nick the best ideas of their opponents.”

In recent years, he has made great political capital out of his support for the NHS, even if that has often been at odds with his deeply questionable record as Health Secretary. On 15 March, he has the opportunity to show that he cares more for nurses than for the super-rich by backing Labour’s plans to end non-dom status.

It seems increasingly likely that soon enough, Labour will be responsible for the stewardship of our health service, so I urge my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North not to let his ambitions falter. These plans are undoubtedly a step in the right direction, but it is also crucial to engage meaningfully with those on the NHS frontline about what more needs to be done to support the NHS workforce in the immediate term.

In that vein, I ask my hon. Friend and the Secretary of State to listen to the EveryDoctor campaign group about its practitioner-led plan to revive the NHS, which includes steps to strengthen mental health support for NHS staff; to remove the locum fee caps that restrict our ability to maintain safe staffing levels during periods of extreme crisis; and to cut red tape in the Home Office so that people can start the job that they came to this country to do. I also ask my hon. Friend to guarantee that confronting the immediate pressures facing the NHS workforce will not prevent our party in government from making the bold, structural reforms that we promised in our last manifesto, including ending privatisation in the NHS.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Elective Treatment

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I am always pleased to talk with my right hon. Friend about his ideas and suggestions, and I am happy to meet him to discuss this further, but I am sure he agrees with me on the importance of making sure that we invest in the NHS and the workforce so that they can deal with as many people as possible.

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

Across the country, millions of people are waiting for potentially life-changing procedures, and it is absolutely right that every effort be made to bring this backlog down, but the Secretary of State should be aware of just how big an ask he is making of frontline staff. This will be a herculean effort, especially for all those who have spent the last two years on the frontline of the fight against covid-19. When he considers the enormous sacrifices that NHS workers have made over the course of this pandemic and everything that they will be asked to do in the very difficult months ahead, will the Secretary of State concede that last year's 3% pay rise was pitiful and commit to giving our healthcare heroes the substantial pay rise they truly deserve?

[Sajid Javid]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that all those working in health, and social care for that matter, have been the heroes of this pandemic. Everything that they have delivered and gone through over the last two years is something that the whole nation will respect. He is right to also point out that the expectation over the next few years for delivering on the plan is very high, and the workforce of course deserve maximum support. When it comes to pay, it is right that the Government listen to the independent pay review bodies, which will take into account a number of factors, and that is exactly what we did last year.

Future of the NHS

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Monday 31st January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray, and to follow the powerful contributions of my hon. Friends. I draw hon. Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests for my ongoing links with Unite the Union, which has played such a central role in the fight against privatisation of our health service.

I am enormously grateful to the hundreds of people in my constituency who put their names to the petition, and to the countless others who got in touch to ask me to speak in this incredibly important debate. They know what the Government so clearly do not know: the reforms are totally wrong and come at the worst time. Our NHS is in the midst of the darkest day of its long history. Exactly two years since the first covid patient was admitted to a UK hospital, morale is collapsing, staff are past the point of exhaustion, and many frontline services are at breaking point. For all the Government’s talk of life after covid, the virus continues to stalk hospital wards across the country—85 patients have died of covid in the last day alone.

Instead of doing anything in their power to tackle a catastrophic staffing shortage and a record-breaking backlog, Ministers instead seem intent on forging ahead with reforms that threaten to open the doors of our precious health service to ravenous multinationals that are interested only in making a quick buck, not in addressing the country’s health needs.

We should not be surprised that the Government have so cynically sought to exploit the crisis to advance an agenda of privatisation and fragmentation. After all, that is the logical next step of a project that has been consistently pushed forward by successive Prime Ministers and Health Secretaries since 2010. When the last Labour Government left office, they entrusted to the Conservatives the care of a health service that was world-beating by every conceivable metric. Despite the best efforts made by our healthcare heroes, the NHS entered the pandemic woefully unprepared and under-resourced, having had its resources and resilience sapped away since the passage of the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

I fear that the Government’s latest reforms, which include the introduction of integrated care systems and American-style healthcare management systems, will leave our NHS in a far worse state for confronting the public health challenges of the coming decades. I urge the Minister not only to listen to what has been said today, but to take heed of the public anger surrounding this issue. The British people are not in the least convinced by the claims that the Government have the NHS’s best interests at heart, and they look anxiously towards America as a sign of what might yet come to pass. They want an NHS that lives up to its founding principles—a public service that is free and accessible to all—which is why Ministers must return to the drawing board.

Covid-19 Update

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

This week, the TUC published research showing that more than 600,000 workers in hospitality, retail and entertainment do not qualify for statutory sick pay. That workforce is especially at risk over the busy Christmas period and the lack of support available to those workers means that they risk going without income at Christmas if they are infected with covid-19. Does the Secretary of State agree that it is a scandal that so many people go without such basic protection in the workplace? Will the Government commit to ensuring that every worker in the UK is entitled to sick pay that at least matches the national minimum wage?

[Sajid Javid]

That is another important issue. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will welcome the fact that sick pay begins from day one and that there is a hardship fund to help with the most difficult situations.

Covid-19 Update

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

The risk to children from covid in general is, thankfully, much less than the risk to adults, but we do not know enough about the new variant to talk specifically about its potential impact on children. There are no plans of which I am aware that would require us to close schools early, and I think that that would be very detrimental to children’s education. As for the rules on masks, my right hon. Friend will know that the rules set out today by the Department for Education are guidance for schools in relation to communal areas, and the DOE will be able to give him more evidence and information.

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

If we are to win the fight against the omicron variant, it is essential that people comply with public health guidance, but with the UK’s statutory sick pay ranking among the lowest in Europe, far too many people in this country simply cannot afford to self-isolate. Will the Secretary of State commit himself to working with colleagues in the Cabinet to raise the rate of sick pay to at least the equivalent of a week’s living wage, so that no one is forced to choose between doing the right thing and heating their home this Christmas?

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Gentleman will know that we have kept rules in place that will allow people to claim sick pay from day one. As for the question of whether further support is needed, we keep that under review and provide further support if it is necessary.

Covid-19

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Tuesday 25th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I will certainly take my right hon. Friend’s constituents’ details and look into that. We urge all hospitals to make sure that when the frail elderly need social contact, they are able to get it.

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab) [V]]

No one is safe from covid-19 until we all are, but the UK continues to stubbornly resist calls for a waiver of covid-19 vaccine patents. Given that people in many of the world’s poorest countries cannot expect to be vaccinated until 2023, and given the failure of the COVAX initiative to distribute vaccines at the volume and speed that is needed, will the Government now follow the lead of the Biden Administration and reverse their position on a patent waiver?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

That is a really important question. Let me share with the hon. Member a little about the operational challenges around vaccine manufacture. We will of course look at any text that our US colleagues put forward on the intellectual property issue, but in reality if the exam question is to get more jabs in the arms of those who live in low and middle-income countries, the bottleneck is not the IP but the transfer of technology to manufacturers around the world. What Oxford-AstraZeneca has done incredibly well is to transfer that technology to 20 sites that can manufacture at scale. We have already delivered 450 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. The hon. Gentleman might recall that Pfizer did the same thing; it actually paused its manufacturing in Europe and expanded it, to go from 1.2 billion doses a year for 2021 to almost 3 billion doses. If the exam question is to get more jabs in arms, we need that technology transfer. It is not easy, as we saw in Halix in Europe, which had great difficulty operationalising the manufacturing, as did Catalent in the US. That is the real effort that needs to go in—as well, of course, as helping other countries with deployment. It is only one part of the jigsaw to get the vaccine into warehouses in those countries; those countries have to be able to get it out and into people’s arms.

NHS Pay

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Liverpool, Wavertree (Paula Barker) and for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) for their hard work in securing the debate. I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I want to begin by paying tribute to the healthcare heroes who continue to fight on the frontline of the pandemic. In recent weeks I had the great honour of meeting local members of the Royal College of Nursing. Despite the terrible toll that the fight against the disease took on every one of them, their professionalism and commitment to their patients never faltered. While many of us eagerly await a return to normal, they will continue to grapple with the deadly after-effects of covid for years to come, as the NHS struggles to address a backlog of nearly 4 million people.

What has been their reward for their unceasing efforts and tireless self-sacrifice? It is a miserable 1% pay rise that amounts to a real-terms cut and that will barely cover regulators’ registration fees or parking charges. Over the past year, Ministers who have built careers gutting the NHS have spouted warm words for our national health service, and Tory MPs have indulged in shameless photo ops, applauding on their doorsteps, but when the time came to crunch the numbers, they refused utterly to give healthcare workers the pay rise they deserve. They should hang their heads in shame.

At the very moment when the Government should be shoring up the foundations of the NHS, they risk blowing them up entirely by driving thousands of people out of the profession with this insulting real-terms pay cut. Already, too many NHS workers are struggling to make ends meet. Some 39% of nurses have been forced to skip meals to feed their families. Those who make up the bedrock of our health service—the healthcare assistants, cleaners and porters, to name but a few—are some of the most financially precarious workers in the country, all too often surviving on poverty pay and turning to rip-off payday loans just to get by.

Meanwhile, the NHS is facing a staffing crisis that risks seriously jeopardising patient safety. There are already more than 5,000 nursing vacancies in the north-west alone, a figure that is likely to soar in just a few short years, and that is not taking into account the 30% of nurses who will be driven out of the profession by this shameful pay deal.

Our healthcare workers deserve so much better. They know it, the Opposition know it and the British public know it. What we need now is a substantial, well-earned pay rise for health workers that, at long last, recognises all they do for our country and that sets our NHS on a confident footing to face the great challenges of the difficult years ahead.

Health and Social Care Update

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Before I call Mick Whitley, I just say that we have 22 Members to get through and something like 26 minutes to do that, so we need to be brisk.

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab) [V]]

Care home workers have made enormous sacrifices over the past year to keep their residents safe, and they continue to work on the frontlines of the pandemic. Will the Secretary of State inform the House of what he is doing to increase uptake of the covid vaccine among care home staff and whether high-risk care home staff who have come forward for vaccination in April will be able to get their first dose?

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, absolutely. The hon. Gentleman is quite right and I totally agree with him. Anybody who works in an elderly care home should come forward now for a vaccine if they have not had it. We are working incredibly hard to try to make those vaccines as accessible as possible.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

What recent assessment he has made of the effect of the covid-19 outbreak on cancer care and treatment.

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

What recent assessment he has made of the effect of the covid-19 outbreak on cancer care and treatment.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Jo Churchill)]

The tremendous efforts of our NHS cancer workforce are helping to ensure that those who need treatment can continue to access it without delay. The NHS has been clear, as have Ministers, since the beginning of the pandemic that continuation of urgent cancer care must be a priority. The NHS has established covid-secure cancer hubs, consolidated surgery, centralised triage to prioritise patients based on clinical need, and utilised the independent sector for capacity.

[Jo Churchill]

I am concerned, like the hon. Gentleman, about those who have not come forward and those who are not currently accessing treatment. I reassure him that once people do come forward, there is a speedy path to treatment. The numbers of those who are entering treatment, both on two weeks and on 31 days, is ahead of what it was at this time last year, and we are seeing enormous efforts from the cancer workforce. I am meeting this afternoon with the all-party parliamentary groups on radiotherapy and on cancer, and we will be discussing the recovery plan, which he is right goes to March. However, every single trust has been given a target to produce a plan for ongoing assessment of how it is addressing the backlog going forward.

[Mick Whitley [V]]

Macmillan Cancer Support estimates that more than 40,000 people are missing a cancer diagnosis across England, including around 60 people in my constituency of Birkenhead. Behind each statistic is a family member and loved one whose prognosis and survival chances are being severely affected by the disruption caused by the pandemic. Can the Minister tell me what additional funding will be made available to ensure that missed cancer diagnoses are caught as soon as possible?

Covid-19

Mick Whitley Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab) [V]]

As the Prime Minister unveils his road map for the end of lockdown measures, we have reached a critical juncture in our long fight with covid-19. What the public need most now is a cast-iron guarantee that no one will be left behind as the lockdown is eased, but as British businesses read in the papers that they will not be able to reopen for many months, they still have little idea of what financial support will be available to them after April. Many simply cannot wait until the Budget is delivered in March; they need clarity and certainty now. Last year countless jobs were needlessly lost because of the Chancellor’s unnecessary delay in extending the furlough scheme. He must not make the same mistake again. That is why I urge him to heed the Labour party’s call for an immediate extension to furlough, the business rates holiday and the reduction in VAT. It is also high time that the nearly 3 million British taxpayers excluded from accessing financial support get the help they need.

I implore the Education Secretary to engage constructively with the education sector over plans to reopen schools. One of the many great privileges of serving as a Member in this House is getting to meet educators and support staff working in colleges, schools and nurseries across my constituency. Their professionalism and commitment to the wellbeing of their students is beyond doubt, and they know better than any of us how important it is to have children back in their classrooms. But instead of working alongside the teaching profession, Ministers too often dismiss the legitimate concerns of the teaching unions and attack educators for undermining the welfare of the very pupils they have dedicated their professional lives to—and they do so while failing to ensure that every student has access to broadband and an appropriate digital device at home.

Time is fast running out for the Government to put in place a credible plan for school reopening. The Education Secretary must sit down with the teaching unions and ensure that the appropriate measures are in place to ensure a safe return to classrooms, including by ensuring that all school staff are vaccinated and that school buildings have effective filtration and ventilation programmes in place.

The Government should do everything in their power to speed up the roll-out of the vaccine. The announcement that every adult will get the jab by August is undoubtedly welcome, and I am sure that I will be joined by Members from across the House in applauding the hard work and determination of the NHS staff and volunteers who have made the vaccine roll-out such a success so far, but last week the chief executive officer of the NHS said that we could double the rate of vaccinations if only we had sufficient supply. We need to make that happen. We also need to ensure that vaccination is easily accessible to everyone by having vaccination centres in every local community and in places of worship, and by making use of mobile vaccinations and community pharmacists.

The Government’s shambolic handling of the pandemic has left the UK facing one of the highest death tolls and the deepest recession of any advanced economy. We desperately need the Prime Minister to learn from his many mistakes and to ensure that our nation is not plunged into a fourth national lockdown.