Healthcare Services: Carshalton and Wallington

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Neil O'Brien)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn) for securing this important debate, and I pay tribute to him for his incredible campaigning work over the years. He has been relentless, like an unstoppable force. I hope that we will reach an announcement in the near future, so that all the Ministers’ phones can recover and all my hon. Friend’s hard work in campaigning for the hospital he was born in will pay off. I know how important the issue is to him on many different levels.

Today’s debate is well timed in one sense, and badly timed in another, in so far as we are hopefully coming towards a decision and an announcement in the very near future. It might be slightly frustrating for my hon. Friend that I cannot say more today, but I will set the scene on where we are with the new hospital programme. As he knows, we are working closely with the Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust on its plans for a new specialist emergency care hospital in Sutton. Acute services are to remain at the current Epsom and St Helier Hospitals, which is a key point that my hon. Friend has called for.

The plan is part of our wider programme to build 40 new hospitals. All the schemes within that programme are being grouped into cohorts, based on their readiness to progress and the extent to which they can realise the benefits of the national programme approach. The Epsom and St Helier scheme is a cohort 3 pathfinder scheme, which means it will be one of the very first of the larger and more complex schemes to be taken forward in line with the national programme approach.

The programme has developed an integrated systems approach known as Hospital 2.0, which spans the whole hospital lifecycle from business case and design through to construction, commission and handover. The use of Hospital 2.0 is the vehicle through which the national programme approach can ensure that we get the maximum value for taxpayers’ money and deliver more efficient and effective designs for hospitals. Our Hospital 2.0 process will drive efficiencies of about 25% when compared with traditional means of delivering infrastructure. The trust is at the outline business case stage, and we are working very closely with it to incorporate that national, standardised approach.

To date, the trust has received £20.5 million in public dividend capital to progress its scheme. That includes fees for design works and a contribution towards the costs of a new electronic patient record system. Further allocations for the scheme, including the total individual allocation, will be decided through the proper business case process. That will ensure that it is deliverable, is aligned with the national programme and delivers value for money for taxpayers in my hon. Friend’s constituency.

We are planning a range of events and communication about the decisions that we will make on this matter in the near future. I am sure that my hon. Friend will be the first to engage with us on those. It is perhaps frustrating that I cannot say more today, but I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s incredible work in making the case and, in fairness, helping his local NHS to make the case for the investment that he is calling for.

My hon. Friend touched on general practice, and I absolutely recognise the pressures that on general practice during and after the pandemic. That is why, on 9 May, we launched our primary care recovery plan. It is designed to tackle, as my hon. Friend said, the “8 am rush” for appointments, which is not good enough. Just this week, we delivered, ahead of schedule, on our manifesto commitment to put 26,000 additional staff into general practice. We said that we would get 26,000 by next March; in fact, we have now delivered 29,000—well ahead of schedule. Of course, as well as those extra clinicians, such as physiotherapists, pharmacists and paramedics—all those extra people in the wider team that we now have in general practice—we are taking action to retain our invaluable experienced GPs. That is why we have made significant reforms to GPs’ pensions, lifting 8,900 GPs out of annual tax charges and helping to retain invaluable GPs.

As part of the primary care recovery plan, and as my hon. Friend noted, we are investing £240 million in new technologies for general practice—both up-to-date phones, so that no one ever calls and gets an engaged tone, and good, high-quality online systems, so that people, particularly those who are older or who find it more difficult to use the internet, can always navigate their way through it simply. What we find when the systems have been deployed well is that a very large number of people start to use them—they are very convenient and well designed—and that takes the pressure off the phones so that it is much easier, for those who do want to use the phone, to get through. That is another significant investment.

Of course, on top of that, we are investing £645 million over the next two years in the new NHS service, Pharmacy First, which will also take pressure off GPs, because it will enable people to go to their community pharmacy—often, in a very convenient place on the high street or in people’s neighbourhoods—to get treatment for a range of common conditions. For the first time, a pharmacist will be able to supply a range of antibiotics and directly take pressure off GPs by enabling people to get the treatment that they need in a convenient way.

My hon. Friend also touched on dentistry, where we have started to take action but we know we have to do more. Our dentistry plan will follow, I hope, hot on the heels of the primary care recovery plan. We have already started to reform the problematic 2006 contract that the last Labour Government put in. We have allowed dentists to go to 110% of their normal delivery, so that those who want to do more NHS work can. We have started to make NHS work more attractive by better matching the payments that dentists get to the costs of the work that they are doing. We have brought in minimum UDA rates, minimum rates of payment to support dentists where their rates, historically set, have been very low. That is starting to have an effect. In the year to March, dentists saw about a fifth more NHS patients than they had in the year before, but we know that we have to go further—it is not good enough at the moment—and we will produce a radical dentistry plan in the very near future.

I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington for bringing all these issues to my attention and to the attention of every other Minister in the DHSC. I hope that he will feel that his hard work over a very long period on behalf of his local NHS and the hospital that he was born in will be rewarded, and I hope that we will be able to say more about that very shortly.

Question put and agreed to.