Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Neil O'Brien and Ian Byrne

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien]

Absolutely. We are conscious of the additional needs of people who have equipment like that. By the end of June, the Government had covered nearly half of a typical household’s energy bill through the support schemes we put in place, but we are always looking at what more we can do to help vulnerable households.

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

11. What assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of primary care service closures on public health.

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

Each integrated care board is required to ensure access to GP services for all. Overall, more people are being seen in general practice than ever before—about 10% more than before the pandemic—but where some practices close, the local ICB has to ensure that patients are transferred smoothly to other practices.

[Ian Byrne]

Park View medical centre in West Derby, one of the most deprived areas of my city, is facing imminent closure, and there has been a lack of transparency and accountability throughout the process when dealing with the ICB to get the decision reversed. In the Minister’s reply to my letter, he said it was essential that, if a GP surgery closes, it does not lead to a reduction in the quality of care for patients in the locality. Park View patients have been clear that dispersal to other surgeries would be catastrophic, especially when all GPs are already facing huge pressures. Will the Minister urgently intervene to halt the closure due to the legal insufficiency of the consultation process and meet me and patients?

[Neil O’Brien]

I have looked carefully at that case, on which the hon. Gentleman has been campaigning. The incumbent provider chose not to bid for the future contract for Park View medical centre, and NHS Cheshire and Merseyside decided that the best thing was to help patients to transfer to neighbouring practices. Patients will only be transferred to practices rated as good, and there are 10 other practices rated as good within a 1-mile radius of Park View. Since 2019, there has been an increase in the number of patient-facing staff of about 50% in the constituency. That means there are more people in his GP surgeries. We are working hard to ensure high-quality GP services in his constituency.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Neil O'Brien and Ian Byrne

Tuesday 7th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Ian Byrne (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab)]

T10. Some 30% of disabled people, including many of my constituents, are having to cut back on using essential medical equipment at home due to rising energy bills. Some 70,000 people have signed the charity Sense’s petition calling for long-term ongoing support for disabled people and their families. Will the Secretary of State deliver that support as a matter of urgency?

[Neil O’Brien]

That is exactly why we are spending £55 billion this winter to help households and businesses with their energy bills. That is one of the largest support packages in Europe.

Levelling Up: Local Councils

Debate between Neil O'Brien and Ian Byrne

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Westminster Hall

[Neil O'Brien]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention. We are being run by a west London mafia.

As a lifelong advocate for ending the kinds of regional disparities that run through the country, I want to reiterate the importance that I, and the Government, feel about restoring a sense of local pride right across the country. I will start by stating a very obvious point, which is that local councils are an absolutely central part of our levelling-up agenda. They have to be. They have long been huge parts of the democratic fabric of this country and I firmly believe that our huge ambitions for levelling up will not be realised unless local leaders and communities are properly empowered to deliver for their local areas.

Levelling up must now go beyond the first stage of devolution. It must be a mission that gives local leaders and communities the tools they really need, as the right hon. Gentleman said, to take control of their own destiny, boost people’s living standards and spread opportunity. It will not be an exercise in levelling down London or the south-east in order to lift up other areas; it will be one with a clear-eyed focus on using local leadership to spread opportunities to parts of the country that have long felt that Governments in successive decades have not been interested in their city or their region.

The levelling-up agenda will recognise that disparities are not just between everyone who lives north of Watford Gap on the one hand and everyone else. Cookie-cutter policies are not going to bridge the divides that exist between Leeds and Bradford, between Blackpool and Manchester, and between different boroughs in London. We recognise that there are some of the same issues in Darlington and in Hayes and Harlington. We also recognise that levelling up—I agree with the right hon. Gentleman—is a major challenge that will take some time, but work is well under way.

Nobody understands the needs of a local area as well as the people elected to serve as the leadership of that local area in local councils. We are taking forward several programmes that will press ahead with meaningful devolution, including the new county deals that the right hon. Gentleman talked about, to spread devolution across the whole of England beyond the larger cities, and new funding streams to give people the financial firepower to make the changes they want to see in their communities. For example, we have agreements with 101 towns across England that have seen £2.4 billion allocated to local projects through the towns fund and the efforts we are making to resurrect our high streets as we continue to respond to the economic headwinds of the pandemic, with £100 million of combined investment from our welcome back fund and the reopening high streets safely fund.

Those investments are just the start. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor and the Treasury have shown that they are foursquare behind the levelling-up agenda with the recent spending review. As part of that review, we committed £1.7 billion in the first round of our flagship £4.8 billion levelling-up fund, backing 105 different initiatives across the country, from the South Derby growth zone to an upgrade to the ferries to the Isles of Scilly. Both received nearly £50 million from the fund. Other successful bids that we have been funding through the levelling-up fund include the Bolton College of Medical Sciences, the reopening of the world’s oldest suspension bridge in County Durham, and the redevelopment of Leicester train station quite near to me. Those are examples of how the fund is flexible in backing the ambitions of different local places, whatever they may be. The funding builds on the foundations laid in the March Budget this year, with plans to bring regeneration, new prosperity and restored pride to 10 different places through the new freeports, which are levelling up in action. In fact, only three weeks ago Teesside became the first of those amazing freeports to open its doors for business and future investment from top-end employers.

In the time remaining, I would like to turn to local government finance. The right hon. Gentleman talked about the need to move on from the debates we had for a long time at the start of the 2010s. I think that is right. There is no point in re-rehearsing those arguments. We will not convince each other of our positions at this point. He talked about a rising tide of funding. We now have a rising tide of funding. For the last couple of years, our core spending power in local government has started to go up. At the spending review, the Treasury backed councils with an average annual increase in the core spending power of local government of 3% in real-terms per year.

[Ian Byrne]

The issue when talking about levelling up and moving on from 2010 is that in 2022 the budget cuts affecting my city once again will mean that, potentially, four community libraries will be shut down in some of the poorest wards in the country. Does that equate to levelling up? Last week, a study by Feeding Liverpool found that a third of my city are experiencing food insecurity. Again, how that does chime with levelling up and moving on from 2010, if in 2022 we will still be facing savage austerity? Austerity kills, and austerity enables poverty.

[Neil O'Brien]

As I said, the core spending power of local government will be going up in real terms each year by 3%, on top of all the other things we are doing through the future high streets fund, the levelling-up fund and the forthcoming UK shared prosperity fund, to invest heavily in areas such as Liverpool and the wider Merseyside area. All those things are, at their heart, about investing in locally delivered early help for families of the exact kind that the hon. Gentleman would like.