Hospitals

Monica Harding Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran]

I have to say that that was quite a segue. We are focusing on the capital estate. We all know that there were problems with the Lansley reform. In fact, I welcome the fact that it is being unravelled, and I was pretty vocal about it at the time.

The savings the John Radcliffe could have realised might have been spent on hospital at home services and other ways to divert people away from coming into A&E in the first place.

Across the wider Oxford university hospitals NHS foundation trust, £100 million of backlog is deemed as high or significant risk. Pausing or delaying plans to rebuild hospitals is a false economy, and hospitals around the country, including the John Radcliffe, are overspending on maintenance as a result. That is not limited to our hospitals; we are also seeing it in GP practices, many of which date from well before 1948. I will declare an interest in that my own surgery—the Summertown health centre—is one of those practices. It is doing incredibly well, despite working out of a very old Victorian building. It is desperate for a new site, and it was deemed one of the top priorities for the ICB. I note that the Minister mentioned a figure of £102 million, but, frankly, that does not touch the sides.

As in the case of the John Radcliffe, the Summertown health centre is now going out to seek private finance, which it will find a way to pay back slowly over time. The Exchequer would not even have to lay out this money in advance, and even with inflation, the amount it would get back is less than what the health centre has to pay to do this with private finance. I ask the Government to think about this innovatively. It is not the same as the PFI. It is the Government using their own borrowing rules to allow investment in vital public services, and it makes no sense that they cannot do it.

When it comes to mental health services, we have the incredible Warneford hospital in Oxfordshire, and Warneford Park in Oxford will provide a new cutting-edge mental health hospital surrounded by a research and innovation hub. Groundbreaking research is planned on understanding brain health and discovering new drug therapies and new forms of treatment. This is a great vision, but it will cost £500 million. We do have private benefactors, including local businesses, willing to feed into it, but where is the funding pot for mental health trusts? They were excluded from the new hospital programme, and it is not at all clear where that kind of money may be found.

[Monica Harding (Esher and Walton) (LD)]

I would like to share a story from a constituent who called me last night. Her daughter had psychosis and was locked in a room at the local hospital, with a mattress on the floor and two security guards outside. She was there for a week waiting for mental health provision in a setting outside the hospital. I would like the Minister to tell me what mental health provision will be in place.

[Layla Moran]

I am so sorry to hear about the experience of my hon. Friend’s constituent. In Lord Darzi’s report, there are some stark pictures of him sitting in substandard accommodation for the very sickest in our society. The Health and Social Care Committee is currently undertaking an inquiry into severe mental ill health, because we know that mental health is so often forgotten in the NHS. It is good that the mental health investment standard has been continued, but it is sad that the overall spend as a proportion of NHS spend is going down this year for the first time in the last few years. We very much hope that this is not a trend, but a one-off, and that it will continue to rise from next year.

For the Warneford, we need to understand what new innovative funding pots we can put together. We understand that the Government are working across Departments, and this project would be as much of an advantage to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology as to the Department of Health and Social Care. Where are these pots of money, because they are important?

I will end simply by saying that I completely agree with the thrust of the motion—and, indeed, with what the Government have themselves said—which is that if we invest in capital expenditure, we need to take an invest to save approach. We know that this matters to our constituents, and we know that they cannot get the services they so desperately need. If we are to achieve the three shifts, we should not be pitting them against each other. Investing in capital will help the three shifts to succeed, and we do will the Government and the NHS to succeed.