Summer Adjournment

Paul Scully Excerpts

Thursday 20th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully (Sutton and Cheam) (Con)]

We have had some excellent speeches, including a great maiden speech from the hon. Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda). I was at university in Reading, and I spent a lot of time drinking pints in The Nob, going to the kebab shop and eating Champ’s burgers. I studied chemistry and food science, and I think I took the food part a bit too literally. We have also heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), who raised the issue of BBC salaries. Earlier today, my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) talked about Derek Thompson’s salary. Doctor Who is now a woman. It is only in the world of the BBC that a nurse gets paid more than a doctor. But I am not going to talk about the fictional hospital in “Holby City”. I want to talk about a real hospital: my local hospital, St Helier.

Just before the election, I brought the Secretary of State for Health to St Helier. I was pleased that he took me up on my invitation to come to see the best and the worst of the hospital. He saw that we have the best A&E in London in terms of achieving its targets. He saw the fantastic work of the staff there, and the award-wining fracture unit. He also saw how the multi-disciplinary patient reviews are setting a really good example for other hospitals.

However, the Secretary of State also saw the hoarding around the back of the building, which is crumbling. The hoarding is there not because of construction work but because we cannot rely on bits of masonry not falling off. When a building has the ability to make people more ill, that is not a good thing. There is a fantastic renal unit at St Helier, but the area with the sickest patients is dysfunctional because the lifts do not work properly. A modern-day hospital bed does not fit inside the lifts, so the trust is paying something like £10,000 a week for ambulances to move people from the back of the hospital to the front. This is a building that predates antibiotics, and it will never be what most people would think of as a modern-day healthcare facility. We really need to find a solution to this.

I am delighted that a solution is starting to present itself. We have had review after review, but now, for the first time, the trust has been allowed to engage with the public on an option that does not include St George’s in Tooting. There are six MPs whose constituents are served by the St Helier and Epsom hospitals and they disagree on a lot of the detail, but they do agree that people needing A&E or maternity services should not have to go to Tooting. St George’s is already overloaded, and it is also incredibly difficult to get there in the rush hour as it involves heading into London. The option is to build a specialist acute unit on one of the three sites that the trust owns. It could be at St Helier or at Epsom, or it could be a co-located site involving the Royal Marsden, which could add extra benefits to the services provided there.

Apart from reacquainting myself with the family and trying to get a bit of rest, I will be spending the summer back out on the stump speaking to as many people as possible, because what we need at this stage is for people around Sutton to be asking the NHS to support the trust’s vision and saying, “Yes, we want that level of investment.” The work will cost between £300 million and £400 million. Trying to extract that sort of money is not easy, but we have to find the local will to start talking about where to locate the specialist acute facility and about how to get the money, which could come from the Treasury or from loans, or we could leverage money from pension funds. My local council’s pension fund invests in at least three shopping centres, so why not invest that money in local infrastructure? However expensive the project might be, I think we can all discount PFIs, which have been discredited over the past few years.

In engaging with the public, the trust has ruled little out, but what it has ruled out is really significant: it has ruled out closing St Helier hospital. We have had lots of campaigns to save St Helier, but its closure has been ruled out. The trust is spending £12 million on refurbishing the back of the building, and it has applied for grants to get more money. The trust has asked for about £80 million to cover costs, £40 million of which—if secured—will help to keep St Helier open for at least another 20 years. That has to be good news for the people of Sutton.

The trust has also ruled out doing nothing. I have said that the building is crumbling and that it cannot be turned into a modern facility, so I know that the trust will do what it can to make the hospital last, but we have to do something for my constituents, for the boroughs of Sutton and Merton and for the surrounding areas. The trust has also ruled out building on the land that it solely owns on the old Sutton hospital site in Belmont, because it is too small. That is why the trust is looking at co-locating with the Royal Marsden hospital, the benefit of which is that extra facilities will be added for the Royal Marsden, which does superb work in cancer treatment—having an acute facility right on the doorstep will be good news.

In conclusion, I will be going around speaking to as many people as I can, and I hope the constituents will look at my website, come and speak to me and really get involved. By the time we get back after the conferences, we will hopefully have completed the first stage of getting new healthcare facilities in Sutton. Mr Deputy Speaker, I wish you and everybody else a very restful summer break.