Health and Social Care

Paul Farrelly Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

Let me make some more progress, and I shall give way later.

The Queen’s Speech also talked about a seven-day NHS as part of our determination to make the NHS the safest healthcare in the world. When the right hon. Member for Leigh was Health Secretary, things were different, and he knows that we had a culture of targets at any cost and a blind pursuit of foundation trust status, which led to many tragedies. I hope he will today accept that if we are to make the NHS the safest and most caring system in the world, we must support staff who speak out about poor care, and stop the bullying and intimidation of whistleblowers that happened all too often before.

Finally, I hope we can agree on something else today—namely, that with the election behind us, we all use more temperate language in our health debates. There are many pressures on the NHS from an ageing population, tight public finances and rising consumer expectations, but the one pressure people in the service can do without is constantly being told by politicians that their organisation will not exist in 24 hours, 48 hours, one week, one month or whatever. It is a toxic mix of scaremongering and weaponising that is totally demoralising for front-line staff.

[Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State has said that privatisation is not happening, but in Staffordshire the £1 billion end-of-life cancer care contract is up for tender, threatening the hospital finances at Royal Stoke even further. Before the election, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) gave a commitment to the Royal Stoke University Hospital that it would be the preferred provider for this contract. Will the Secretary of State give that commitment today?

[Mr Hunt]

As I said earlier, I do not think these decisions should be made by politicians; I think they should be made by GPs on the ground, on the basis of what is best for the hon. Gentleman’s constituents. That is a dividing line between me and the shadow Health Secretary, if not the shadow Health Minister, because I think there is a role for the independent sector when it can provide better or more cost-effective services to patients. It appears that the Labour party, under the leadership of the right hon. Member for Leigh, would rule that out in all circumstances.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Burnham]

I am grateful that the Secretary of State has intervened because yet again he has got his facts wrong. Am I not correct in saying that in the first two years of the last Parliament the Government cut staffing further from the levels I left by 6,000? [Interruption.] No, he and his predecessor cut nurse places by 6,000 in the first two years of the last Parliament. Separately, they cut nurse training places, leading to a shortfall in nurse recruitment of around 8,000 in the last Parliament. When the Francis report was published, the NHS had fewer staff than it had in 2010 and fewer nurses coming through training.

The Secretary of State likes to blame everybody else, but how about taking a bit of blame himself for once? He left the NHS in the grip of private staffing agencies, and since the Francis report a small fortune has had to be spent on private staffing agencies. The figures have gone through the roof on his watch and he has failed to do anything about it. That is why people will not believe that the NHS is safe in his hands.

[Paul Farrelly]

Would my right hon. Friend care to remind the Secretary of State of a privatisation that has increased the NHS deficit and not improved efficiency? After the proposed transfer of a scanning contract from the Royal Stoke university hospital there was rightly a public outcry. The scanner remains there, but none the less the private company, Alliance Medical, is staying in there, taking its cut and the cost to the taxpayer has increased.

[Andy Burnham]

I remember visiting with my hon. Friend. Let us put the facts on the record. The Secretary of State said a moment ago that privatisation was not happening, but it is happening. It is affecting my hon. Friend’s constituents, where cancer scanning has now been privatised. What happened? The contract was, I believe, given to Alliance at £87 million, whereas the NHS had bid £80 million. It was given to the private sector, however, which has now subcontracted the NHS at the same price of £80 million, creaming off £7 million. That is a scandalous waste of NHS resources when the NHS is facing a £2 billion deficit this year.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)]

I want to talk about what the Government call the distressed health economy of Staffordshire—north Staffordshire, in particular—and some worrying recent developments while we were preoccupied with May’s elections.

In February, I was leaked a copy of a report on Staffordshire’s so-called challenged local health economy prepared by accountants KPMG. It was completed last August and was one of 11 commissioned by the Secretary of State on areas of England with NHS deficits. As far as I am aware, though, following the leak, Staffordshire’s is the only one to see the full light of day. It painted a picture of a local health system “in perpetual crisis mode” which suffered from a “generally oppressive culture” and had no “clear long term strategy”. The report was also scathing about the effects of the Government’s top-down reorganisation of the NHS after 2010. There was conflict at the top of many of the bodies and a lack of collaboration between the new clinical commissioning groups. That led to waste, duplication, and, frankly, letting patients down, not least the frail elderly who turned up too often at A&E, were all too often readmitted, and spent too long in hospitals rather than at home. In conclusion, the report said that if nothing changed Staffordshire’s health economy would be £217 million in the red in barely four years’ time.

The KPMG report was full of questionable assumptions and glaring omissions. These included the impacts on our local Royal Stoke University hospital of taking over troubled Stafford hospital at a cost of an extra £250 million while itself struggling with a £30 million deficit and coping with a crisis in admissions and A&E. Profoundly, the report failed to estimate the investment needed in primary, home and social care to make the planned savings possible without patients in the NHS across the county suffering as a result.

The report’s prescriptions were clearly fundamental to the future of local healthcare and certainly deserve debate, but funnily enough, before the election the Government were not only keen to suppress all 11 reports but even to deny their existence. In early February I tabled written parliamentary questions asking the Government to publish the reports; they declined to do so. I then asked simply when each was started, when completed, and by which consultancy firm. These simple factual questions first gained a holding reply. Then, a fortnight later, in March, the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison), who is in her seat in the Chamber, gave this remarkably considered reply:

“Consultancy firms were not commissioned to produce reports on the local health economies, as described in the question”.

By that stage, I had the “non-existent” “Final Report for Staffordshire” in my hand, as I do now. The Government have therefore hardly been a paragon of truth and transparency in this regard. I hope that now they have conjured £8 billion of NHS investment out of the election air they will mend their ways in future—likewise the NHS itself, not least NHS England, which is, certainly in my view, the least accountable public body that I came across in the previous Parliament.

The conclusions of all that work on distressed health economies are now dribbling out in board papers of the hospitals and the patchwork of CCGs and NHS trusts created by the Government’s reforms. If Staffordshire is anything to go by, however, there is no joined-up information for the public, let alone consultation. Last week, following KPMG’s recommendations, the local CCGs in my area and the newly created Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Partnership NHS Trust announced, from this autumn, the closure of Longton community hospital in Stoke-on-Trent South, as well as cuts in my constituency of Newcastle-under-Lyme to Cheadle hospital, Leek Moorlands hospital and Bradwell hospital, which cared for both my father and my mother until they passed away—my mum, sadly, only before Christmas just gone. The two CCGs, to quote The Sentinel, a local newspaper, last week,

“say they have already done enough ‘pre-engagement’ on the plans to render further consultation redundant.”

Well, they certainly have not. In fact, there has been no engagement at all, neither pre nor post.

Recent NHS figures show that in January and February, 613 of the total of 912 cases of patients waiting on trolleys at A&E for a bed to be found for over 12 hours —two thirds of all cases—happened at our local Royal Stoke University hospital. Yet another of the KPMG proposals is the removal of 63 beds at the hospital to save £20 million. Currently we do not know where that recommendation stands, but the cumulative effect of the cuts could simply make the situation for patients and the NHS at our hospital far worse.

That is why today I have asked all the local NHS bodies to meet local MPs on a cross-party basis and to make plans to engage and consult properly with the public. I hope that the Secretary of State and Health Ministers will not only encourage that, but join in and explain how these cuts and changes fit into the NHS plan and how much of the £8 billion they have conjured up will go into helping the local health economies not only in Staffordshire, but in the 10 other areas around the country facing major challenges and cuts.