Access to Primary Healthcare

Munira Wilson Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

As well as needing more GPs, our GPs need decent premises from which to deliver high-quality care to patients. Park Road surgery in my constituency has been looking for new premises for more than a decade—it serves 13,000 patients out of an old Victorian house—but there simply is not the budget, and the processes are too complex. Will the Minister commit to both looking at the bureaucracy and pressing the Chancellor for more capital investment in primary care?

[Stephen Kinnock]

As the Darzi review shows, one of the most egregious examples of the neglect and incompetence of the past 14 years is the underspend on capital. We are clear that a number of premises across the country can be repurposed, and that the bureaucracy needs to be cleared out of its way. As the Prime Minister said earlier this week, we will have a mission about smart regulation and clearing the bureaucratic barriers to change.

We are also cutting red tape so that GPs spend less time pushing paper and more time face-to-face with the patients they serve. We are working to bring back the family doctors and to end the 8 am scramble. We have done more for primary care in the last 14 weeks than that lot did in the last 14 years.

On dentistry, we will introduce supervised tooth brushing for three to five-year-olds in deprived areas, ending the national scandal of tooth decay. And we are rebuilding the bridges that the Conservatives burned with the British Dental Association. I have already met the BDA, and we will deliver a rescue plan that gets NHS dentistry back on its feet, with 700,000 additional urgent appointments, starting as soon as possible, in those parts of our country that need them most.