Oral Answers to Questions

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department of Health (Paul Burstow)]

I will certainly ensure that the CQC understands that that is a matter of concern. When it discharges home owners and deregisters them, after receiving an application for a fresh registration, it conducts a thorough appraisal and assessment of their fitness to provide the service. The new owner of a home may well have done a great deal of work in improving the quality of training given to staff, but I agree that it ought to be possible for people to look at the CQC’s website and see reports on the quality of the previous provider so that they can assess that as well.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

T5. A year ago, writing in The Sun, the Prime Minister made a firm and passionate pledge to increase the number of midwives by 3,000. Last week, the chief executive of the NHS told the Public Accounts Committee that the NHS is now short by 4,500 midwives. Will the Secretary of State tell the House when he intends to implement plans to honour the Prime Minister’s pledge—or can we take it that it is just another Conservative broken promise on the NHS?

[Mr Lansley]

Well, I do not wish to embarrass the chief executive of the NHS, but actually, he told me he made an error—he was referring to health visitors, not midwives, when he was talking to the Public Accounts Committee. We are short of health visitors precisely because, through the life of the last Government, the number was continuously going down, and we are going to recruit more. Actually, we share the last Labour Government’s commitment to increase the number of midwives, not least because of the increase in the number of births, and to do so in pace with that. As a consequence, in conversations that the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Anne Milton), and I have had with the Royal College of Midwives, we have made it clear that we will do all we possibly can. We already have more midwives in training than at any other time in our history.