NHS Shared Business Services

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

Let me gently remind the hon. Gentleman that, because of the decisions this Government have taken, we are actually now investing more than the European average in the NHS, which would have been much more difficult to do if we had followed his party’s spending plans. He tries to characterise our approach as one of suggesting that the NHS does not have problems. We think the NHS has some very big problems—it is working very hard to tackle them—but we are providing more doctors, more nurses, more funding and more operations than ever before in its history.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

May I commend the Secretary of State for his response to the situation once he was told about it and welcome his pledge to provide constituency-wide data to the House? However, my constituents in Kettering will be amazed that, for five years, no one spotted that 700,000 records had gone missing. How was that discovered, and why in the three areas did such a large amount of data in effect disappear from public view?

[Mr Hunt]

I wish I could give my hon. Friend the answer to that question. I think it is completely extraordinary that for such a long period it was not noticed that the data had gone missing. It was discovered towards the end of the SPS contract. There are lessons for the NHS—this relates very closely to what other hon. Members have said—about the dangers of over-reliance on paper rather than electronic systems, with which it is much easier to keep track of what is happening. [Interruption.] Let me say to the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth), who continues to make comments from a sedentary position, that when it comes to making the NHS electronic, people will compare his Government’s records and ours and will say which is better.