Dental Healthcare: East Anglia
Pam Cox Excerpts(1 week ago)
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Jerome Mayhew
That is the kind of intervention that I find constructive and helpful, and I am very grateful to the hon. Member for making it. She is, of course, quite right. We disagree on many things, as I do with the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone), but there are some things that bring us together, and the need for a dental training school at the University of East Anglia is one of them.
Pam Cox (Colchester) (Lab)
Down the road from Norwich is the University of Essex, which is based in Colchester and already offers degrees in oral science. I think a collaboration between the two universities is really important, and I would be very happy to facilitate it. The University of Essex degree is not a dentistry degree, but an oral health degree. The university also has a community dentistry clinic that is already operating in Colchester, which could provide some very interesting examples of good practice. I invite the Minister and his team to come and visit both the university and the clinic.
Jerome Mayhew
The hon. Member is absolutely right. This is not about one organisation over another; there has to be a collaborative approach. We have plenty of dental need to go round, I am sorry to say, in Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk. The more we can collaborate and provide a synthesis of offers—some in dental health qualifications, some in straightforward dentistry and others in dental hygiene, another key part of this jigsaw that we have to put together—the better.
Income Tax (Charge)
Pam Cox Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Pam Cox (Colchester) (Lab)
I am proud to speak in this debate on a Budget that marks a turning point for our country and my constituency of Colchester. It is a Budget that fixes the country’s foundations and a Budget that works to repair and reform our NHS.
Our health service means a huge amount to those we represent and their families. Our health and social care staff do an amazing job, day in, day out. They and those for whom they care have long deserved better. Members of my own family have spent decades working in the NHS: my mother as a midwife, health visitor and then public health champion; and my sisters as nurses, one now a diabetes specialist, one supporting a parish nursing community programme. I have heard from them at first hand about the challenges they face. Those challenges are immense and will take a long time to address.
The Budget recognises that. It walks towards those difficulties, rather than kicking the can yet further down the road. The Chancellor faced a stark choice and she rightly chose the hard road. As a Government, we could have continued with the failed policies of the past 14 years, with the low growth and austerity that have left our public services on their knees. Instead, we opted for change and to invest in those services, in the workforce who make them possible, and in the technologies that must transform them.
I particularly welcome the extra £25 billion for the NHS across resource and capital budgets to cut waiting lists and invest in new equipment. That, combined with increases in the minimum wage, will help the frontline workers who struggle to make ends meet. That includes workers at Colchester hospital in my constituency who are fighting plans to outsource their jobs to the lowest bidder. On that matter, I am backing those staff who, like our wider workforce, deserve fair pay and conditions.
As the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care said in his opening speech, new investment for the NHS must be combined with innovation and take full advantage of the potential of life sciences and new technology. Colchester is home to the Institute of Public Health and Wellbeing at the University of Essex, which is leading the charge. Together with local and global partners, it is developing new digital health, health informatics and health analytics that will help us to meet the challenges of the future. It is also working with our integrated care board to improve existing community and preventive services—something which my mother would have cheered to the rafters. She was rather old-school on that. She believed that we needed the high-tech stuff, but we also needed the low-tech stuff—basic things—to support people to live healthier lives through access to good food, green spaces, good housing and early years support. A Labour Government will bring all those things, and I am proud to support that and this Budget.