NHS

Rachael Maskell Excerpts

Thursday 23rd May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

My goodness me. I thank my right hon. Friend. I have an inkling of the responsibilities and pressures that he bore during the pandemic. There will be many thoughts about how the Government and society handled the pandemic, but he devoted his absolute all to keeping people safe, and to moving our society out of the lockdowns. I thank him sincerely for all his work.

True to his character, my right hon. Friend wants to talk about the future. Outside the pandemic, he had a particular focus, when he was Health Secretary and in previous Cabinet positions, on the role that technology can play in our lives. Our NHS app now has three quarters of adults in England signed up to it. That is a testament to him and to those in the NHS who helped to deliver it. There are more subscribers to the NHS app than to Netflix. The most common users of the NHS app are those over the age of 65. We can see just how powerful the app can be, and the role that it will play in prevention, but we need to invest in the technology. I view the long-term workforce plan as critical to building the next 75 years of the NHS, as is the tech plan that the Chancellor announced in the spring Budget, which provides £3.45 billion for technology to drive forward progress in the NHS—a plan that the Opposition has not supported.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I take this opportunity to thank all NHS staff for their dedication, professionalism and care, which are really quite extraordinary in the light of the circumstances that they face? I spent 30 years working in and around the NHS, and I know that it was on its knees in 1996 and 1997, before the Labour Government made such a difference, but nothing compares to the state of it today. I am thinking particularly about NHS dentistry; my constituents are having to wait seven years for an appointment with an NHS dentist. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) will meet dentists on the first Monday after Labour come to office.

The Secretary of State has not adopted a plan that would have worked, the one produced by the Health and Social Care Committee. Can she tell us why she did not adopt that plan in full, and what she will say to my constituents, who will vote at the polls for a service that works, as opposed to one that is broken?

[Victoria Atkins]

I join the hon. Lady in thanking her local NHS staff, and, indeed, NHS staff throughout the country. The NHS employs more than 1.3 million people, and every single one of them contributes in their own way, from clinicians to nurses to hospital porters to administrative staff. All those people play a really important part in keeping us well and safe.

Notwithstanding the picture that the hon. Lady has sought to paint, I hope she will have the graciousness to acknowledge that we are diagnosing more cancer cases, and diagnosing them more quickly at stages 1 and 2. I hope she will acknowledge, for example, that some nine out of 10 cancer patients are treated within 31 days of a decision to treat them, and that the average waiting time in England—not Wales—is just under 15 weeks. Of course there is more to do, but we have plans in place.

I also urge the hon. Lady to look carefully at our dental recovery plan. We have seen more practices open up to provide more NHS appointments, and as the recovery plan is rolled out, we will see up to 2.5 million more appointments, roughly three times as many as will be seen under Labour’s dental recovery plans. Compare and contrast!