Health and Social Care Levy

Mike Penning Excerpts

1st reading
Wednesday 8th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)]

This is a massively important debate on a subject that comes into our constituency surgeries every week—it has done since the day I came into this House, and did when I was working for Sir Teddy Taylor all those years ago. This is not new. What is new is a Government attempting to address it. I sat on the Opposition Front Bench for four and a half years as a shadow Health Minister. Previous Governments have looked at this issue and tried, but at the end of the day, to be really honest, Conservative and Labour Governments have kicked the can down the road. So for once, we are trying. Is it perfect? No, it is not going to be perfect. I will come in a moment to a couple of points that I agree with my colleagues on.

What we cannot do is keep borrowing. Markets are low; we can keep borrowing. We could go to that wonderful private finance initiative market that previous Labour Administrations went to and that we are still paying for now. Lord Darzi came up with a fantastic plan for how to deal with elective surgery in the market without having over-capacity in the NHS. The only problem was that contracts were issued that meant that these companies were being paid even though they were not doing the operations. So nothing is perfect and everybody wants to try.

It is very easy to be in opposition and throw the can across—that is what Oppositions do—but when the crunch comes, these are the hard decisions. I am a fiscal Conservative and a working-class Tory, so I love all this class rubbish that keeps being thrown across the Chamber. It is absolute, complete and utter tosh. At the end of the day, our constituents look to us for guidance and to try to solve their problems. They do not really care where we come from in life and what we end up doing; at the end of the day, that is what they want us to do.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Sir Mike Penning]

No, I am not doing to give way, because lots of other colleagues want to speak and every time I give way, I get an extra minute—and I have just lost half a minute by saying that.

We can say to ourselves, “Is this perfect?” No, it is not. Is this going to help? Yes, it is. Are more people going to pay more in taxation? Have we broken a manifesto commitment? Yes—and Governments in previous Administrations have done that for years, and that happens when the public expect us to act on something that has come literally out of the blue. What has come out of the blue? Covid. We have had to borrow unbelievable amounts of money to keep people’s, jobs, incomes and livelihoods going. We cannot keep doing that, so we have to turn around and say, “Is there a way?”

We heard from the Chair of the Treasury Committee that there are myriad other ways to deal with this issue. We have also heard the minutiae of how national insurance contributions come into it, but at the end of the day it seems that national insurance is probably the way to do it. I have one criticism. In my constituency, we still have more than 12,000 council properties. Many of those residents want to buy their property on right to buy. They cannot do so because the maximum discount means that the mortgage is still too large. Having just over an £80,000 cap is not fair nationally. It is really difficult if someone has a property below that level. In parts of the country, £86,000 will buy such a property, but in my constituency, that money would buy a quarter of a one-bedroom flat. That has to be wrong, so we need to look at how we address the issues that were raised by colleagues earlier.

I have one further thing to say. Frankly, anybody watching this debate, especially the earlier engagements, would have been disgusted by what they saw—partisanship, chips on the shoulder, class war, this war, that war. People do not give a monkey’s about that. They want us to come here and do a job, which is to help them and their loved ones. It is about time Opposition Members got off their butts and did it.

Health and Social Care Levy Bill

Mike Penning Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 14th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow many colleagues who have talked from the heart about the great concerns that their constituents and we as family members have about the health and social care framework.

I will be supporting the Bill tonight because, as I said last week, kicking the can down the road, as several Governments have for years and years, is not the answer, but I have a couple of questions that I would like the Treasury Minister to address. I completely agree with the Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) that if we just throw this money into the NHS and social care, it will not even touch the sides. It will just disappear. Previous Governments have done it up to now, so we have to be really careful about how the money is hypothecated and where it goes.

I am particularly worried that the top management, who earn so much, will not actually address the issues that we are talking about today. Naturally, I pay tribute to all the frontline workers in social care, all of our emergency workers and those in the NHS, but I worry about the decisions that are made and the salaries that some chief executives of trusts are on. Frankly, they are not only miles above what the Prime Minister gets, but miles above what even those in the City get. It is absolutely mind-boggling, so we have to be really careful about that and about the trusts doing what Parliament tells them to do. I know that will be addressed in the Health and Care Bill. We cannot have a situation again like the one I mentioned last week, where the Prime Minister came into my part of the world and said, “You are going to get a new hospital.” That was fantastic news; I put out press releases galore. We have been campaigning for that for years, but what we are going to get is a refurbished Victorian hospital in the middle of Watford. That is not the answer. The trusts need to do what they are told.

I will touch on one other area—dementia—which is the elephant in the room, and which my hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Ruth Edwards) mentioned. There is a lottery for our constituents and our loved ones when we are trying to sort out the difference between personal care and healthcare when it comes to dementia and Alzheimer’s. What goes on is immoral: one silo, the Department of Health and Social Care, fights against another, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, about who might pay for that care. We have seen it in my family, in my constituency and in my surgeries. We have been fighting to appeal. People seem to be encouraged to appeal, so people appeal, but by the time the situation is dealt with, many of our loved ones and many of those in care have passed away. Only then do people win, so something is seriously wrong.

As we look at the extra money that is going in, we must break down the silos and the really immoral way—postcode lotteries are going on around the country today—that we judge who is entitled to healthcare and who is entitled to personal care. Dementia and Alzheimer’s—I always mix up the two—are illnesses, not something that people want or have brought on themselves, yet many people are having to fight to show that they have a condition so that the Department of Health and Social Care might pay for care. I hope that as we look forward we can try to address that. These are difficult conundrums, but we cannot put our constituents with Alzheimer’s or dementia—our loved ones, in my case and that of other hon. Members—in a position where they have to beg because their care relates to a different condition.