Hospitals

Perran Moon Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Fenton-Glynn (Calder Valley) (Lab)]

Today’s debate is a welcome chance to talk about the challenges of our health service. The Darzi report was a stark demonstration of the state in which the health service was left by the last Government. I know that part of the game today is for our colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches to say, slightly deceitfully, “Oh, the Labour MPs are supporting the delay.”, but Members across the House will know, if we are honest with ourselves, that we cannot delay something that was not going to happen.

What of our inheritance? It stretched far further than just the buildings; it included the staff and the patients in them, weakened by austerity and decimated by covid. Lord Darzi talked about £37 billion of under-investment in our hospital buildings in the 2010s. On top of that, what else did we inherit?

[Perran Moon (Camborne and Redruth) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend share my real discomfort at the gall of the hon. Member for Henley and Thame (Freddie van Mierlo) in suggesting that somehow this Government are making the same mistakes that the Conservative Government made, when it was in the 2010s—under a coalition Government—that the rot started, with the Liberal Democrats?

[Josh Fenton-Glynn]

I think if the hon. Member for Henley and Thame (Freddie van Mierlo) were to reflect on what he said, he would know that these things always go a lot deeper.

What have we inherited? We inherited 14,000 unnecessary deaths in A&E alone each year. NHS waiting lists peaked at 7.7 million. That is people waiting anxiously, needing treatment, tumours growing, their bodies getting further from being well, and every day 2,000 people were being sent to hospital who did not need to be there, because social care had been failed and forgotten by the previous Government and by the coalition Government. In my constituency, that means 20% of beds in our hospitals are taken up by people who do not need to be there.

We have work to do, and I am concerned that in this debate we will get caught up in a discussion about hospitals and will not fix the systems within them that we need to fix. That is why we have talked about three shifts. The first is from hospital to community. We have to stop people needing hospital care because they have been failed by care closer to home. That is why our revolution in GPs will make a real difference. The second is the shift from fitness to prevention. We can have the best buildings, but with less prevention they will still be full. Finally, there is the shift from analogue to digital; every week, the Health and Social Care Committee hears about people caught between systems and between computer systems.

Although I welcome this debate, we must not fetishise buildings over people. We need to think holistically about our system and deliver the decade of national renewal that the public voted for. We need to look at all of our health service, across parties and in good faith.