National Health Service

Nick Raynsford Excerpts

Monday 16th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

This debate comes less than a week after the Secretary of State’s announcement that he is putting South London Healthcare NHS trust into administration. He will therefore not be surprised, and nor will the House, that I intend to focus on that issue.

Not surprisingly, this announcement has caused massive alarm and concern across south-east London. Staff working for the NHS in all three affected boroughs—Greenwich, Bromley and Bexley—are all worried about whether they will continue to have a job. Patients and their relatives are worried that the NHS services on which they have depended for years may no longer be available, as rumours abound about potential cuts and closures affecting hospital services. What is most regrettable is that all this is utterly unnecessary. Indeed, there is a strong suspicion that the whole process of putting South London Healthcare into administration is driven by politics—by the Government’s wish to send a message about being tough with trusts in deficit rather than by a rational assessment of what is most likely to help the trust to improve its clinical and financial performance.

Let us look at the facts. At the time when the Secretary of State made his announcement, briefings appeared in the media about South London Healthcare being a failing trust with poor standards of clinical care. On the contrary, the trust has shown significant improvement in clinical performance. It is one of the top five trusts in the UK in terms of low mortality, hospital infection rates are three times lower than the national average, and the four-hour target for A and E patients has been met month on month since February. For those of us who have been working with South London Healthcare to raise its performance, it is particularly galling to see the Secretary of State dismissing those achievements and incorrectly claiming, as he did on 28 June in a communication to MPs, that patients at the trust

“experience some of the longest waits for treatment”.

That is simply not true of South London Healthcare today. It may have been true a year ago, but, as I said, there has been improvement, and the Secretary of State has ignored that. Indeed, he himself appears to realise that his criticisms were wide of the mark, as just one week after he made that statement I received a letter from him, as did many other London MPs, starting with the following memorable words:

“Dear Colleague,

I wanted to write to you with a summary of the excellent performance of the NHS in your area”.

You couldn’t make it up; talk about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

What about the deficit? Yes, there is a deficit—about £70 million last year—but South London Healthcare has been implementing a series of service changes designed to reduce it over the next four years while at the same time improving the standards of health care. Ironically, its task has been made much more difficult by the Secretary of State, who knows only too well that two years ago, in summer 2010, he intervened to halt the implementation of a clinically led plan to reconfigure services in south-east London entitled “A picture of health”, which, after six months’ delay and a review that he imposed, was judged to meet all four of the necessary tests. His intervention merely delayed a reconfiguration process that was going to improve services and save money. Now, after a wholly unnecessary and costly delay, the plan is proceeding, with the consolidation of A and E services on two, rather than three, sites and similar moves to concentrate specialisms: stroke at Bromley; elective surgery at Queen Mary’s, Sidcup; and maternity at Queen Elizabeth, Woolwich. All those changes have helped to improve performance and have made savings. Ironically, the same Secretary of State who delayed the implementation of these improvements is now blaming the trust for the deficit without acknowledging his own part in the process.

South London Healthcare has been in existence for just three years. It came into being as a merger of three trusts, all of which faced deficits and needed support and help to get out of their problems. As the trust’s ex-acting chair, who was removed from office today, said in his letter to the Secretary of State on 9 July,

“We have been prepared to take strong action—we are the only Trust in London to successfully close an A and E department and move maternity services…What we have not been prepared to do is to promise more than is within our capacity to deliver; nor to mask structural issues that need to be addressed.”

It is a tragedy that, rather than supporting the trust in its really good work in improving patient care and reducing the deficit, the Secretary of State has acted in an arbitrary and unfair way and is trying to blame the trust for a problem for which he has a large measure of responsibility.