Healthier Together Programme (Greater Manchester)

Debate between Mike Kane and Julie Hilling

Tuesday 22nd July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mike Kane]

I agree. It would be odd not only for my constituency, but for constituencies to the south in the Cheshire belt and the Cheshire plain that those hospitals serve.

Wythenshawe hospital is very much looking to the future and its long-term sustainability. It is developing the Manchester MediPark in partnership with Manchester city council and private sector developers. MediPark will exploit the huge strengths of Greater Manchester and the north-west in health and life science services. Research and development forms a key part of the new Manchester airport city enterprise zone, which I had the opportunity of updating Members on only last week during my Adjournment debate on regional airports.

UHSM is recognised as a centre of excellence for research and development, and is a founding member of Manchester Academic Health Science Centre. The partners of the science centre share the common goal of providing patients and clinicians with rapid access to the latest discoveries and improving the quality and effectiveness of patient care. It is clear that the hospital is going from strength to strength, but I fear that the planned Greater Manchester Healthier Together proposals, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton referred, could fundamentally destabilise the trust and lead to a loss of its major emergency service, many of its specialised services, its trauma service and even its teaching status.

The additional reorganisation is set against the backdrop of the Government’s £3 billion reorganisation of the NHS, which has siphoned off money from the front line to pay for back-office restructuring. In the first three years of this Government, attendances at A and E have increased by 633,000, yet Trafford general, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston referred and which serves many of my constituents, has seen a downgrading of its A and E department. It has got harder to get a GP appointment since the Government scrapped the previous Government’s guarantee of an appointment within 48 hours, and cut funding for extended opening hours. That is a key cause of Wythenshawe’s A and E problems.

[Julie Hilling]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the major vision that seems to be emerging is simply one of pitching hospital against hospital—fighting about whether to have a hospital in Wigan or Bolton, or four or five specialist hospitals, when, as has been said, we all want a good local service? Should not the concentration be first and foremost on getting primary care services correctly in place? That should be sorted out, and afterwards we can look at what hospital care we need.

[Mike Kane]

I agree; the most important thing is to get primary care in place first. Starting a consultation nine months from a general election that will pit MP against MP is not a good idea.

A quarter of walk-in centres, including Wythenshawe, have closed, and NHS Direct has been dismantled. On top of all that, the new Healthier Together proposals mean there is potential for a downgrade at Wythenshawe hospital. That would, as has been pointed out, be a broken promise for people in Wythenshawe and south-west Manchester, who following the downgrading of the A and E at Trafford general were assured that University Hospital of South Manchester would not be affected.

The aim of Healthier Together, to give patients across the region the same excellent standard of service wherever they live, is the right one. The challenge is huge. Manchester has the highest premature death rate of any local authority in the country. There can be no doubt that health care services in Greater Manchester need to change. Almost £2 billion has been taken out of the budget for adult social care. We need to do things differently to meet the challenges of the time and better integrating local authority services with the NHS will be a key part of that change. However, the current process is flawed and is moving too fast. The proposals fail to recognise that Wythenshawe is already a major specialist site that provides many vital services to the people of Greater Manchester.

The public are not being provided with enough detail to enable them fully to understand the implications of the proposed changes. The consultation meetings have been criticised—as they have today—for being jargon-ridden and held at inaccessible times. No financial models have been provided in the information for the public and UHSM believes that the current proposals could destabilise the finances of the trust.

Wythenshawe is a level 1 major trauma centre, and is currently the only site capable of developing a single level 1 trauma site for adults for the whole of Greater Manchester. As my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton pointed out, it covers Manchester airport, and if an accident were to happen such a nearby centre would be vital. The current proposals could leave the southern sector of Greater Manchester and north Cheshire with no specialist major emergency hospital. The proposal does not reflect the view of providers and local commissioners in the southern sector that Wythenshawe should remain and be developed further as the sole specialist site in the southern sector.

The failure of the proposals to acknowledge Wythenshawe as one of the fixed sites threatens the future clinical, operational and financial sustainability of the trust. For changes at such a level to have the desired impact on services across Greater Manchester, all the partners must be firmly on board. I urge Healthier Together to look again and ensure that the baby is not being thrown out with the bath water, because of a rushed consultation and flawed proposals.

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Debate between Mike Kane and Julie Hilling

Monday 12th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Julie Hilling]

I wish to talk specifically to amendments 8 and 9 that are in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane). There is something very strange happening with driving penalties. The law says that a driver should be banned if they receive 12 points on their licence, unless they would face exceptional hardship. It also says that the same plea for exceptional hardship should be used only once. I would not be surprised if there were a few people driving legally with 15 points, but I would not expect there to be 8,000 people frequently driving with many more points. I would not expect a person in Liverpool to be driving with 47 points on their licence, or a woman in Bolton to be driving with 27 points on her licence. I wonder how many pleas of exceptional hardship they have made. I am not sure I could even think up that many pleas to put before the courts.

Exceptional hardship is not about losing one’s job, but it could be about losing one’s home or about other people losing their job. The terms of exceptional hardship are very narrow, so why did the Squeeze singer Chris Difford escape a driving ban after pleading that it would cause exceptional hardship as he would no longer be able to travel the country playing gigs? The 47-year-old earns up to £100,000 a year performing around the country and was caught doing 88 mph on a 70 mph road.

The son of Tony Christie, famous for his song “Is this the way to Amarillo” claimed exceptional hardship because he would not be able to drive his dad to gigs after he totted up 25 points. The jockey Kieren Fallon escaped a driving ban after he claimed that it would cause exceptional hardship because the state of the racing industry was such that he could not afford a full-time driver. Premiership footballer Zak Whitbread, who admitted speeding at 97 mph with 17 points already on his licence, escaped a ban after saying that he would not be able to find another football job if he could not drive.

There are many other cases of people who have escaped bans. Not all of those 8,000 people are famous, but often they are rich enough to pay a good barrister to get them off. Alex Williams, the Tory candidate for Stretford and Urmston at the last general election, got off because he said that he would not be able to afford to pay his £2,000 a month mortgage if he could not drive. I do not understand why those people could not pay somebody to drive them around. They could have taken a taxi, train or bus like the rest of us.

As I have already said, drivers cannot use the same exceptional hardship plea each time they are taken to court, but there is no central record of which plea has been used. There is also no record of whether these drivers are involved in later accidents. If a driver can clock up 47, 27 or even just 15 points, they must have a disregard for the law and therefore pose a risk to other road users.

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on her campaign in her constituency. When the points system was established, it was never intended that so many people would get away with so many sob stories, and that we would have so many thousands of people driving on our roads. Magistrates do not know, because the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency has not informed them, that sob stories are repeated and used time and again.

[Julie Hilling]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. I remember the days of endorsements. We introduced the points system to give us more flexibility, but 12 points was regarded as the threshold for losing one’s licence. If more people are driving around with more than 12 points on their licence, it lessens the effect of the deterrent. It may lead people to think, “Perhaps I can get away with driving around with more than 12 points on my licence.” The whole threat of people losing their licence after 12 points, so therefore driving within the law, has been weakened.

Of course we need to tackle the sentencing of people convicted of causing death or serious injury by dangerous driving or driving while banned, but the whole issue of driving offences—and the way that cars can be used as weapons—needs to be addressed. We need drivers to realise, at every level of offence, that bad behaviour will be punished in order to make our roads safer. The Bolton News, my local daily paper, has been campaigning on this issue for some time. It ran a survey a while ago in which 83% of people agreed that 12 points should mean that drivers are banned. There is real support for that proposition.

We know that young people aged 15 to 24 are more likely to die in road accidents than as a result of any other single cause and, sadly, the number of deaths is increasing. Of course we need justice for those who have lost loved ones, but we also need deterrence. We have to take road safety and driver behaviour seriously, and do everything we can across the spectrum, from the point at which people start offending behaviour in a car to the final catastrophic effect of a terrible accident.

I have been trying to raise the issue of 12 points in various ways for several years, often with the support of Brake. Transport Ministers told me to speak to Justice Ministers, who told me to talk to the Sentencing Council, which told me to go back and speak to Transport Ministers. I am therefore relieved to have a place in which to raise this issue, although I accept—given what the Minister said—that the issue will not be solved in its entirety. I have spoken to magistrates and the Institute of Advanced Motorists about this very issue, and they are very concerned about it. The magistrates raised the issue of the difficulty of getting accurate information from the DVLA about the number of points that a driver has. Secondly, magistrates are concerned that there is no record of the pleas used. Although a driver cannot officially use the same plea of exceptional hardship, the magistrates have no way of knowing whether it has been used before. Thirdly, the magistrates worry about a lack of consistency. Different magistrates accept different pleas of exceptional hardship, so some drivers are allowed to keep their licence in some courts whereas others in other courts are not.