NHS Future Forum

Owen Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I say three things to my hon. Friend. First, let us be clear that there is £11.5 billion of additional cash available to the NHS over the course of this Parliament—but we have to use it better and deliver greater quality and effectiveness. The job of the commissioners and Monitor together is to deliver that—partly through tariff development in ensuring that they get those efficiencies by the price that they set, based on benchmark-to-best practice prices, but also through using their commissioning strength to design services. We all know that if we simply said every year to the NHS, “You must save money by cutting the price of what is paid to you”, its response would be to cut services, cut staffing or cut quality. In fact, achieving greater quality and effectiveness is about the redesign of clinical services—the transfer of services into the community and keeping people well at home rather than through emergency admissions to hospital. It is about clinical leadership and clinical redesign, and that is what these proposals will bring to the forefront.

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

Given the Secretary of State’s manifest interest in Wales, I invite him to come to Wales to meet some Welsh patients with me to find out at first hand which party they trust to safeguard the heritage of the NHS—Labour or the Tories. I suspect that the answer would be revealing for him. How much Welsh taxpayers’ money has been wasted on this needless reorganisation of the NHS?

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Gentleman must know that the money available to the NHS in Wales is available to the NHS in Wales, and that it is separate from England. The Labour Welsh Assembly Government have made their own decisions about the priority that they attach to the national health service in Wales, and the result is, as the King’s Fund says, that they plan to reduce its budget by 8.3% in real terms. We are going to increase the NHS budget in real terms. The result can be seen in waiting times, which we were talking about. In England, the proportion of patients admitted to hospital who are seen within 18 weeks, according to the latest data, is 89.6%. He might like to reflect on the fact that the figure for Wales is 64.5%.