NHS Sustainability and Transformation Plans

Paul Farrelly Excerpts

Wednesday 14th September 2016 Commons Chamber

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

This so-called transformation process has been going on in fits and starts in Staffordshire since 2014. By 2020-21, the deficit will be £347 million, including social care, according to the draft STP presented behind closed doors in Whitehall in July. The Secretary of State has refused to publish that plan, of course, but what is important is that the menu being cooked up behind the scenes is already being dished out in practice, with no meaningful public consultation, playing fast and loose with NHS guidelines. It is being driven by cost-cutting, bullied through by NHS England, not rational planning for better integrated care in the future, even if that means that, in the short term, the pressure on patients is increased, particularly at our local Royal Stoke University hospital, where the wretched sight of trollies queuing up in A&E corridors is now commonplace.

Before the summer, the closure of ward 4 at the local Harplands hospital took away a safe place of discharge for patients with mental health problems. Cuts to the county’s better care fund threaten the viability of drug, alcohol and other services, as well as respite and rehab facilities such as those at Brighton House in Newcastle. Last month, we learned that both wards at Cheadle community hospital will close, further affecting discharges, while social services struggle to cope. Children’s A&E at Stafford has shut, and last week staff at Newcastle’s community hospital, Bradwell, learned that three of its wards are to close this winter or next spring. As a result of all that, the pressures on our local acute hospital will simply continue to multiply.

As a county, Staffordshire does not fit together as a healthcare whole. While the north and west look to Stoke, the south engages with Birmingham, Wolverhampton and even Worcester, and the east with Derby. Rather than plan integrated care along those pathways, I understand that a county-wide merger of everything is now on the cards. That monolith has been called, with no sense of irony, an accountable care organisation, yet the health and care transformation board has been anything but accountable so far, not least in relation to the pay that senior executives are raking off from this process.

The parachuted-in programme director, Penny Harris, is being paid a salary of £168,000 a year for a four-day week, and her deputy, Sarah Carter, is on £172,000 for a five-day week. The lead finance officer, Neil Chapman, is on £244,000 a year. Add in two other people on the Staffordshire board who are on £131,000 and the annual bill for just five of them comes to £846,000. Another £675,000 is going to KPMG, which means that more than £1.5 million is being paid by the local NHS. These people, quite simply, are devouring what is left in the pot for transformation.