NHS Winter Update

Richard Graham Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance site of her statement and wish her and the whole House a happy new year.

Unfortunately, the NHS is beginning 2024 the same way it ended 2022—on strike. This week’s industrial action by junior doctors is the longest strike in the history of the NHS at the worst possible time, because even before the strikes this week the NHS was struggling to stay afloat this winter. Hospitals were declaring critical incidents before the strikes. Patients were waiting dangerously long for ambulances and in A&E before the strikes. Ambulances were queueing up outside hospitals for hours to hand over patients before the strikes. The truth is, before the strikes, and before the pandemic, the NHS has been facing winter crisis after winter crisis as a direct result of the Conservatives’ failure—their failure to train enough staff, their failure to arm the health service with modern technology, and their failure to reform.

In January last year, the Prime Minister published an urgent and emergency care recovery plan, promising

“the largest and fastest-ever improvement in emergency waiting times in the NHS’s history”.

Instead, heart attack and stroke victims are waiting even longer for an ambulance, and A&E waiting times are the worst they have been all year. The Prime Minister promised 800 more ambulances, but the Government have now admitted that they are just replacing existing ambulances. He promised that 50,000 patients a month would be treated in virtual wards, but in reality it is fewer than 8,000 patients. Is not the truth that the Conservatives have once again sent the NHS naked into the winter, and patients are paying the price?

Given how ill-equipped the Government left the NHS, and given the desperate pleas from NHS leaders for the strikes to be resolved, why on earth did the Government choose to sit back and let this damaging strike action go ahead? Not only did the Health Secretary allow talks with the junior doctors to collapse and refuse to reopen negotiations until tomorrow, when the damage will have been done; at the 11th hour, as junior doctors stood on the edge of this strike action, she chose to push them straight into it. In what way was it helpful for the Secretary of State, in a series of broadcast interviews, to patronise junior doctors by rebranding them as “doctors in training”? A junior doctor can have 10 years’ experience under their belt; they do not expect to be trolled by Ministers who have been in office for barely 10 minutes.

In the Prime Minister’s interview on the BBC yesterday, we saw why he has allowed the strikes to go on for so long without intervening himself: he is using industrial action as an excuse for the state his party has left the NHS in after 14 years. He would rather blame NHS doctors and nurses than take a shred of responsibility himself. Meanwhile, patients cannot get an appointment, cannot get the surgery they need and cannot see a GP, NHS dentistry is decaying, and the NHS itself is on life support. While he was bragging about all the parts of the NHS that are not currently on strike—that is how low he now sets the bar—he seemed to have forgotten that nurses are still in formal dispute. Is he so uninterested in our nation’s health service that he did not know? Was he trying to pull the wool over the voters’ eyes? Or is he just another Tory Prime Minister asleep at the wheel as he drives the country off a cliff?

There was one thing that the Prime Minister got right in his interview with Laura Kuenssberg yesterday. Whether the question was on the NHS, immigration or the economy, his response was the same: ask the Leader of the Opposition. It seems that even this Conservative Prime Minister knows that if we want serious solutions to the problems facing the country today, there is only one place to look, and that is the Labour party.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. The hon. Gentleman has been here long enough to know that people do not give way during a statement.

--- Later in debate ---

[Victoria Atkins]

I think the hon. Lady was claiming that there was no winter under Labour, but perhaps that is yet another thing that does not quite stack up. I fully endorse her call for an end to blame culture, but point her to the real and practical measures that we have taken to improve urgent and emergency NHS care. I assume that she joins those on the Government side in condemning the unprecedented strike actions that the junior doctors committee has called at this particular time of year.

[Richard Graham]

Having chaired more than 150 meetings between Gloucestershire MPs and our NHS leaders, this week I am handing over the baton to my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson). My two thoughts are, first, to share the Secretary of State’s immense gratitude to everyone in the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital and our other services for all their continuing, amazing work; and secondly, to highlight that the biggest single impediment to reducing the elective surgery backlog—the hips, knees and much more of many of our constituents—is this continued strike by doctors in training. I am sorry, but the continued failure of the shadow Secretary of State to highlight whether he supports patients or strikers shows an absence of leadership. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that the doctors in training, the doctors on strike, have already received, in 2023, a pay rise of between 8.1% and 10.3%?

[Victoria Atkins]

I most certainly can confirm that—those doctors have already received the rise. As I said, I wanted to continue discussions on more fair and reasonable settlements for junior doctors, recognising as I do how tough their job is and the conditions under which they work. May I thank my hon. Friend for the leadership he has shown with his local trusts and clinicians? I agree with him that the one thing we have not heard from the Opposition is that they condemn the strikes. They seem to prioritise union harmony over patient safety.