Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Dowd Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

The right hon. Gentleman understands health extremely well, both from his ministerial position and from being on the Select Committee. If he looks at the hospitals going into special measures, he will see that we are beginning to succeed in moving hospitals out of special measures, but because we have an independent inspection regime, sometimes other ones go in. That is how it should be. That is what works very well in the education sector and is beginning to work well in driving up standards in health care as well.

To go back to my answer to the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), £1.3 billion more in the NHS this year compared with what would have been put into the NHS if Labour had won the last election means 30,000 nurses, 13,000 doctors or 200,000 hip replacements that we are able to do because of this Government’s funding of the NHS.

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

3. How much his Department spent on healthcare as a proportion of GDP in (a) 2009-10 and (b) 2015-16; and what estimate he has made of the amount that will be spent on healthcare as a proportion of GDP in 2020-21.

[The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt)]

Because of the 2008 financial crisis, all political parties committed to reducing the proportion of GDP spent on health in 2010, but because this Government chose to protect the NHS, the proportion fell from 6.4% to 6.2%, a drop of just 0.2% of GDP.

[Peter Dowd]

While welcome, that creative response does not answer the question. The fall in GDP spent on health is worrying. To mitigate that fall, when can my constituency expect its share of the Brexit NHS bonus to be injected into its health economy, which would bring in £30 million a year?

[Mr Hunt]

No one would be more delighted than the Health Secretary if we had a Brexit bonus for the NHS, which is why we are getting on with negotiating the best possible Brexit deal for this country, including by invoking article 50 as soon as possible.